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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

Always request a separate laptop and phone for work, and always create a separate set of accounts.

Why does it even need to be "request"? Are they that cheap these days that they won't pay unless asked (begged)? If the company needs you to use a computer, it needs to provide you one. I am sure not letting my personal and work machines mix, both for this and IP reasons, and on the other side, if I was in control of such things, using personal machines would be an exception.

Good employers already give you your own laptop and might offer to give you a phone. But good employers are few and far between, especially in recession-esque periods where everyone that doesn't have an extremely resilient IT staff (or isn't a public company) will have bean counters cutting costs in many areas, either downsizing new laptop purchases (making doing work harder) or cutting them all-together.

My company would rather have me waste several days shuffling data around partitions rather than pay for the cloud disk that I actually need (3T, nothing insane).

Honestly it's so much better for work life balance and mental health to not have your work device present after the work day ends or on weekends.

I won't go back as long as I'm able.

Can you expand on this at all? Is it consciously better, or was the presence of work devices subconsciously affecting you? Did you notice particular improvements, or ...

Run it on a separate VLAN or on separate network hardware, as well.

Also pick it up with tongs and keep it in a faraday cage when not using

So like, how does that work. I've got a pair of Asus routers with one acting as an access point (AI mesh). Would I need to buy new routers? Do I daisy chain the routers or can I reuse the wifi ap? Or put Merlin on my existing ones?

I'm in tech but these network suggestions are all quite opaque to me.

My solution: Guest WiFi. My router has an isolated guest WiFi mode.

Most new routers have guest network, and internal network. Put your work laptop on guest network and that should do the trick.

The point is just that you shouldn’t trust work issued devices. They are never going to be as secure as your private network, unless you have a big family or are a high profile target.

Depends on the hardware, even consumer networking hardware often support VLANs. Sometimes it's hidden behind settings, other times you'll have to use something like OpenWRT. Some hardware lets you run multiple APs at once, and you can have an AP for your VLAN.

Sometimes it's cheaper/easier to just buy a shitty router to use for your untrusted devices.

https://www.asus.com/support/FAQ/1049415/

Im amazed people work from their personal PCs

How is that allowed lol

From the company side, they dont know whats on my machine. I might have pirated everything and keyloggers out the wazoo, thats my choice.

People working from their personal PCs is what fucked lastpass in their last hack.

I run a small consultancy and from employee one we've always purchased devices for our employees to work from. No excuse for a company not to do this.

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