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Comment Re:This is really simple... (Score 1) 267

Exactly, if you block things then employees will find ways round it...
I went to a company that blocked "software download sites", so the users couldn't download things like firefox from mozilla.com etc, so they found alternative sites where they could download firefox - and these sites contained malware infested versions instead of legitimate firefox.

Comment Re:Reasonable Access (Score 4, Interesting) 267

People these days have portable devices, you can allow them to take breaks using an isolated wifi network and their own portable devices...

The average corporate desktop is extremely vulnerable to attacks from websites (against the browser, the plugins, other applications etc), and trying to defend against such attacks is a huge pain and/or huge cost.

Comment Re:morbid story is morbid (Score 5, Insightful) 79

It's actually less of a concern than it is with small vendor closed source...
There have been a few small software vendors where the company owner or core developer was killed, which then resulted not only in the ceasing of development, but also in the source code either being lost or tied up in legal disputes for years.

For something that's open and has user interest, it can be forked and development can be continued by someone else...

Comment Re:Ask (Score 1) 318

If still no, and the job's a keeper, try moving closer to work.

This is often a big problem... A lot of businesses want to have offices in certain areas, which are generally the areas where other businesses are based... You end up with dense commercial zones, where residential properties are very scarce, very expensive and very small usually with no gardens.
You also end up with massive congestion on all travel routes at specific times (i.e. travel conditions that would be illegal for transporting livestock), and wasteful over capacity at other times.

Moving closer to work may then be impractically expensive, or result in a significantly inferior residence. The alternative being a long, uncomfortable and expensive commute.

Home working is part of the answer, but spreading out locations and working hours would go a long way to improving conditions and efficiency.

Comment Re:Tried it and hated it (Score 1) 318

Well your example shows that working environment matters a whole lot, and it's different for everyone.

A small apartment is not good, you really need a separate room with somewhere comfortable to sit. Then there should be very few or no distractions at home, but you also have the convenience of somewhere to go and relax when you need a break, and an ample supply of food/drink etc.

If you want a lack of distractions, a typical open plan office is a terrible environment because there are usually many distractions. For some tasks, being able to go into a room alone and close the door is very helpful.

Depending on what you're doing, having people around you to collaborate with may be beneficial, or may be a distraction.

A comfortable environment is an absolute must, if you are feeling uncomfortable you will be irritable and not work well. You need somewhere comfortable to sit and a tolerable climate.

It's all down to the individual, the job and the company... What works well for one person doing a particular job may be terrible for someone else or a different job. Similarly if your office environment is nicer than the working environment you can provide for yourself at home then home working is a poor choice, but the same can also be true in reverse.

Comment Re:Generally? You don't. (Score 3, Insightful) 318

The same thing applies in an office environment, only instead of one wife you now have 50 colleagues who want help with this and that (often not work related), or just want to chat about the weather...

Many people are single, or have wives/girlfriends who also work and aren't at home during the day.

The other thing is being able to prioritise distractions... If someone sends you an email asking for something, you can wait until you're finished whatever you're currently concentrating on, but if they walk up to your desk or call you then it forces you to immediately stop what your doing to respond to them... This can be very troublesome if you're trying to concentrate.

My job has a mix of home working, office working, and working in client's offices... I find i get a LOT less done if i'm working in our office, partly because of the distractions and partly because it's just a terrible office with bad seating, bad desks, broken climate control etc.

Client offices are a different story, as most of the people there don't know you there are usually much fewer distractions, although the actual conditions can vary... If it's quiet and comfortable then i can get a lot more done there, if it's noisy and/or uncomfortable then a lot less gets done.

That said i still think home working is better overall at least for me, if only because of the time and inconvenience saved on travel... There are more and more businesses being crammed into a small area in most cities and expecting people to all work at the same time, this creates massive congestion on all travel routes at certain hours, and results in inefficient over capacity at other times. I find it utterly ridiculous how they insist on so many people travelling to the same area at the same time, things should be far more spread out.

Comment Re:obligatory Good Luck With That (Score 4, Insightful) 140

People will crack streamed DRM if there is content that's either only available there, or is available there first... If you look at most torrent sites these days you will see all kinds of content that has been ripped from streaming media sites, all of which used DRM and yet still got cracked and made available in a more convenient form via torrents.

Comment Re: Umm... their DRM code works quite well... (Score 1) 140

When people started doing that it was the current generation console, and it's not a lot of effort to install an xk3y (which costs about the price of a single game) and then copy downloaded iso files to a usb hdd... In fact, being able to hook up a large portable hdd containing hundreds of games is far more convenient than sorting through a pile of dvd media.

Comment Re:Ummmm... (Score 1) 251

If the password can be retrieved in an automated fashion then even if its encrypted, everything necessary (i.e. the key) is present, so if the host is compromised the passwords effectively are plaintext as the attacker can simply run the same process to decrypt the password.

And even if you use SSL to check your mail, that doesn't change how the email has been transmitted from one mail server to another, which is often done without using SSL, and most mail servers will fall back to plain text even if they do support SSL because so many out there don't support SSL at all.

Comment Re:Security (Score 1) 251

Not necessarily in these days of social media... A lot of people have Facebook accounts and will have added relatives or people they went to school with...
For your example, you already know the school, so you find out a list of their teachers (often published online) and try them all, and if the attacker knows your age they can narrow it down further... Either way there's a relatively small number of possible answers.

Comment Re:Security and IPv6 (Score 3, Interesting) 307

Good luck trying to scan an ipv6 range...
The smallest subnet is a /64, even scanning every host there for a single port would take a LONG time.

IPv6 works fine with VPN software, even ipsec was originally a part of ipv6 and cruftily backported to ipv4... Infact, you can use ipsec properly (ie end to end without kludges like l2tp) with ipv6. The problems published recently were due to short sighted vpn providers who completely ignore the existence of ipv6. If they provided dual stack connectivity over their vpn then there wouldn't have been a problem.

Bugs could still be found in ipv4 stacks too (and are still being found), on the other hand ipv6 is much newer and addresses some of the weaknesses of ipv4.

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