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0 pointsalpeb13y ago0 comments

A good solution nowadays is to ban everything that is not work-related and have people just use their cellphones with their own data plans for that.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

Ao7bei3s13y ago· 3 in thread

No, thats just stupid. A good solution would be a guest WLAN that is, for example, on a separate VLAN. There is no reason to force people to use the slow and expensive cellular network -- both your employees and the people who actually need to use the cellular network will thank you.

Also, the GP companies no-peer-to-peer-at-all policy seems... not well thought out, even thought it might be a pretty common policy. That an application is p2p has nothing to do with wether or not it can be trusted. (If the application wanted to steal data, wouldn't it be easier to just go for some central dump server?)

freehunter13y ago

We do indeed have a guest WLAN, going out a separate circuit with a different ISP and different IP block. The problem is, people want Skype and Spotify on the same laptops they're using for work, and we don't allow split tunneling with our VPN.

P2P applications have security risks associated with them, but they also have network constraints associated with them. It doesn't take many P2P users to choke legitimate users out of a network. When some of the network monitoring tools we use are licensed based on how much data is flowing through the network, P2P gets expensive real quick. Move that stuff to a network we're not monitoring as extensively.

mcculley13y ago

The P2P app could make itself more trustworthy. On OS X, it could opt into the App Sandbox such that it could not read files unrelated to what it has downloaded.

If you run fs_usage against Spotify on OS X, you will see that it is reading files in other places than where it downloads to.

csense13y ago

Isn't it the norm on UNIX-like OS'es for things to use tons of dynamic libraries and spew pieces of themselves all over different directories?

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