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Comment by nirui | Hacker News Reader

> Those who choose to participate will have their general internet access removed along with root privileges on their individual boxes if they had that

Is it just a software thing? For example IP blocking via iptables? 0-days in OS kernels are not something super surprising in these days, not really sure a software lock would really help that much.

Maybe they should just give their employees two computers, one air-gapped for accessing internal systems and must be kept in the company facility issued the computer, and another one fully online for accessing Stack Overflow and must not store any company information.

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Looks like so:

> Google's tools and office software accessed via the web will still be accessible to those cut off from the internet generally. Workers in the program who require internet access for their jobs will be able to get exceptions.

The headline twists the definition of "air gap".

Eh from their perspective google services are in prod, not on the internet.

Unless your production is some really sensitive also air-gapped setup, perspective doesn't change what's going on.

I think we’ve already established that the term air-gap has been misused in the article.

It's almost certainly a network-based firewall, not a host-based one. And if you use multiple firewalls from multiple vendors with different OSes running on the firewalls, theoretically, an attacker could have zero days on all of them, but it's statistically much less likely than an attacker having a zero day on only one popular consumer/server OS.

/> Maybe they should just give their employees two computers, one air-gapped for accessing internal systems

And why do you think that may not already be the case? Even other big tech companies already give out two computers.

It is the case at Google and none of them are actually air gapped in the real meaning of "air gapped".

Maybe the StackOverflow bit could be replaced with a local LLM assistant?

Or a local copy of SO, there are torrents.

It's conceivable that the Google index has a copy of SO

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