“If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.”
The phrase has its uses, but shit like this is what happens when it’s taken to the extreme.
Often times when you pay for the product, you are still the product.
I’m the product in the sense that poo is the product of the intestines.
That is just a fact at this point
The simple exception is free software (free as in freedom). It’s really not that complicated.
Digital security education in schools actually give people brain tumour ffs
Oh my god. My colleagues were making fun of postgres users. They didn’t bother doing a Google search.
Everyday my misnathropy is justified
I majored in Anthropology in college. I should have done Misanthropology.
You did; just need to apply it.
I’ll try that. Fuck you.
They grow up so fast sheds tear
Print the fucking t-shirt man. I’ll buy one for every day of the week.
Honestly, a policy of “no free-of-charge software installed on workstations except FOSS” might improve security a bit and probably without doing all that much damage to the day-to-day workings of the company.
For that matter, if my employer instituted a policy of “no software except FOSS”, my own particular job probably would be a surprisingly small adjustment. As long as they were willing to do the work to set up infrastructure and/or let us switch to FOSS alternatives that require third-party server providers as necessary. About all I can think of that’s installed on my work machine that’s proprietary is:
- Zoom
- A paid corporate VPN client
- A random program that I use to authenticate to Kubernetes clusters in use where I work (so I can use Kubectl)
- Chrome
- The Client Management software my company uses (the software they use to remotely administrate the company-provided machines – force install shit without telling you, spy on you, nag people who have computers that aren’t actually used to return them, wipe your computer if you report it stolen, etc)
- And, of course, bios, proprietary firmware blobs, etc
Beyond that, I honestly can’t think specifically of anything else proprietary installed on my work machine. My personal computers have far less proprietary software installed than the above list.
Not related, but did you ever use k9s? Quite nifty CLI tool to control Kube, albeit not on a very advanced level, it helped me a lot to not get drowned in Kube commands.
This pisses me off
It’s not more secure, it’s so they can offload blame and have people to sue if/when something ugly happens. Liability control, essentially.
We had to pay for fucking Docker container licenses at my last job because we needed an escalation to the vendor in case our SMEs couldnt handle things (they could), and so we had a vendor to blame if something out of our control happened. And that happened: we sued Mirantis when shit broke.
Ever hear how the suit turned out, generally?
Hey PS: search engines do return a result for a suit against that company so potential self-doxxing territory (but maybe you’re open in your comment history IDK)
(Don’t have a PACER login so couldn’t tell what was up with the suit that came back when I checked this morn, also could’ve been an unrelated suit)
Had that discussion before. Was attacked because I use a f&os lib from GitHub instead of a paid and licensed one, the latter somehow meaning it’s error free. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. Or at least their usage wasn’t.
Every day I wake up I thank God I’m not an MBA 🙏
MBAs would just buy an LLM software subscription to fix it
Sometimes I wish I was a piece of shit so I didn’t need to worry about money.
“This fucking paycheck! What am I going to do with all this money?”
My org told me “you can’t install open source software”
Everyone uses Firefox
I just want OpenShell
Vim? Oh wow. I’d be looking into a USB Keyboard that types the entire source code of vim into the machine, assuming there isn’t an easier option.
Fork vim, rename it, sell it back to your company
Donate cost back to vim
That sounds like a vim-vim situation for everybody, to me
Nice. My response is my 2-week’s notice.
Funny, if one shares a screenshot of a 4chan post that says the word ‘retard’, it gets upvoted, but if you post a comment that says Google AI is retarded, you get downvoted into oblivion.
I’ll never fully understand the modern internet, seems like double standards to me.
That’s some cool kind of psychosis you got there champ
Because one is purposefully using the word while the other is just a consequence of sharing the post?
If you use slurs, I will look down on you.
If anon uses slurs, I will look down on anon, but I also won’t assume the person reposting it here is the same anon.
There is an entire sub-industry and probably thousands of jobs being propped up by this stupid way of thinking about software. I can’t be mad at it because it pays the bills for a few of my friends…
I could really see companies just fork open source and give it a tweak like UI or new switches…
Terrible.
I could really see companies just fork open source and give it a tweak like UI or new switches…
They should not be able to do that if it comes under non commercial licence
Won’t stop some people.
There is famously little money in open source those projects can spend on legal battles
At one point my company made us buy Eclipse from a vendor because free software was not allowed. It had no tweaks or support, just out of date Eclipse that I had to wait for purchasing to get
Whenever I hear about shit like this I wonder if I should just start a company and package free software lol. Could like donate a bunch of the profit to the actual projects.
The issue here is you’d be selling it to morons who, when shit inevitably happens, would sue your pants off. So that means having lawyers that can protect you, probably on staff. Not sure it’s worth it. You’d need to do the maths I guess
Now I wonder if one could pull a scam by selling some packaged software and closing the company the next month, simultaneously announcing End of Support
New wealth redistribution method?
This has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with liability.
You can’t really sue an open source project using a proper license, they disclaim any liability or warranty, meaning the buck stops with you.
If you hire a software development firm and pay for them to build software for you, you will have a different license, the software company can just repackage open source software into their own UI and branding, take the money and declare bankruptcy if their customers try to sue them.
The customers are mostly happy, they get to tick the box that they have a support contract for the software and a company is liable if shit hits the fan. The software development company is happy, they get money for doing very little actual work.
The open source project probably doesn’t know about the abuse of the license and thus mostly doesn’t care.
At one place I worked we couldn’t use eclipse licensed things because the license mentioned indemnification or something. I don’t really understand what that meant because I think some other licenses mentioned it too. Plus literally all of us used Eclipse IDE.
I’ve been in these meetings and you’re on the money. Insurance (the concept, not necessarily the product) is almost always the reason any time you see some stupid policy.
When I was young and naive I thought the technologically correct way to do things was the best. In the business world that’s seldom the case, though.
My previous employer was bought by a huge company. I liked it in the small company, because I had freedom to do it what was needed without much questions, and I was trusted to make the relevant decisions.
When we came under the big corpo, we got an email of all the software we used/needed, so that it could be added to the whitelist that big corpo worked with. Anything not in the whitelist simply couldn’t run.
I gave them the list, but spoke to my on-shore It guy that out in the field we often needed to install something that we didn’t need before on short notice, and waiting for a ticket to be resolved for an administrative matter had the potential to stop production.
They found it easier just to make an exception for my work PC. I just had the promise not to VPN in to the office while running “weird” stuff, otherwise the higher ups would get upset.
That’s fine. I had my own VPN for only the stuff I needed anyway.
“we need this NOW”
> Package I install is immediately black listed by IT, I submit a high priority ticket and I don’t hear from them for days, maybe weeks
Like what the fuck can I do
“Yes, but does one of the existing whitelisted executables fulfill the same function?”
“Have you tried usibg MS Excel instead?”
*Looks at industrial robotics with a proprietary TPU that needs a firmware update.*
“Yes”
