Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

An awful lot of people work in a corporate desktop environment where the machines are bolted down. They don't go home with you. You don't have admin privileges, you can't install software, and there's probably corporate spyware installed.

Customer service. Tech support. Inbound sales. Outbound sales.

The company doesn't trust you. If you take a machine home, you're probably going to lose it or break it or sell it, so that's a hard no.

View on HN

It's also a security risk. They may generally trust you, but may not trust you 100% in the little detail of never ever getting malware on your laptop, which then would invade their internal network. I'm actually astonished that so many companies allow you having a laptop that you take home and that also connects to the company network.

Being “in the network” doesn’t matter anymore because everything has moved from unsecured intranet services to Internet exposed stuff authenticated with SAML. One user having malware is as much of a threat as someone else at the cafe having malware. No longer an issue.

If you were correct in this assertion, then there would not be a malware epidemic.

Ipso facto...

The world isn’t uniform. Quite a lot of companies continue to self-host and take care to not expose their data to the cloud.

Those companies have to continue using bolted down PCs without admin access then. For the rest, take home laptops with full access work fine.

Admin access is fine, you only need to block the USB ports and secure your network and domain policies heavily enough. The alternative to desktop PCs are VMs in the company's data center accessed either remotely or from local thin clients via remote desktop.

I can't imagine how unproductive people would be working under all these restrictions. You walk in to the meeting room but can't plug your laptop in to the TV because it's using a usb c cable. Can't visit the websites you need to get your job done because they might contain software you can install on them. Have to wait for IT to approve everything and just sit around being unproductive.

Just so the company can continue to have insecure internal services.

Actually most of the time with companies that still self-host I see take home laptops with VPN since work-from-home is a must. So not only does the risk still exist, the malware doesn't even have to wait for you to go back into the office.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com