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Comment by snapetom | Hacker News Reader

Good lord. Smart people doing the dumbest things with their work equipment.

I have a former coworker who was the VP of Finance at my company. He suddenly got fired out of the blue. The company was in the midst of trying to find a buyer (this was announced) so this was extra surprising. Turns out, he knew a lot of bad news about the company, and they caught him looking for a job. They fired him because he was too much of a liability.

How did they catch him? He was putting resumes and cover letters on OneDrive. "Yeah, in retrospect, that's one of the dumber things I've ever done," he said to me later.

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I worked at a pharmaceutical start-up years ago.

* one of our medicinal chemists had studied nights to become a patent agent (this isn't the bad part).

* he landed a pretty nice job at an IP firm with a considerable raise in his salary.

* we were _in the middle of his farewell party_ when the IT guy told the CEO that during the previous few days the chemist had printed our company's entire library of novel chemical structures and their associated biological activity data.

* in the moment, i had no idea what was happening, but i've never seen someone go from looking happy to absolutely miserable at their own farewell party.

* i do remember that my boss later said she wanted him frog-marched out of the building in handcuffs.

I am constantly dumb founded at the people who conduct deeply personal business on a company laptop. Some individuals do not even own their own computer. Has every job hunt they have pursued has been done on their previous employers equipment?

>Has every job hunt they have pursued has been done on their previous employers equipment?

Yes. And the resume was updated and the applications filed while on the clock.

https://youtu.be/WcyNWbx8kAo?t=4

(the timestamp is important)

If you're salaried, every moment of time in your life is on the clock.

That depends on jurisdiction

Certainly not in European countries, although probably irrelevant in this case.

I have more personally owned computers than is reasonable, but I can understand people who get issued a company laptop and use it for everything.

It’s a couple hundred bucks a year to keep a personal laptop and if you’re mostly accessing cloud services, I can easily understand the temptation to use a company laptop for it all.

Also, when you travel or even commute using public transport, you don't always want to carry two laptops around.

I fly around the world for work. I have two laptops, plus a triple screen setup. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GTQZWG77/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_bdcrb...

1. You leave the company laptop at work(in my case, at site).

2. Get a lightweight laptop for yourself.

3. Get a proper travel laptop bag. I have this one from Brics

https://www.bricsmilano.com/en-gb/products/underseat-backpac...

A tablet with Samsung Dex has replaced my travel netbook.

I never worked on a job that company policy allowed for personal use.

Naturally there are enough to try to flex the rules, while hoping not to get caught.

Lots of workplaces allow reasonable personal use.

The problem from IT security point of view is what is "reasonable" and how it impacts internal systems if the laptop gets used as attack vector.

But when I said the exact same thing [0], people were talking about how it's their "culture" to use corporate laptops for personal usage, and I even got downvoted and flagged if you read the thread (turn showdead on in your HN settings). It's baffling indeed, but I guess people will learn the hard way, that companies can see everything you store and even type on there.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851948#47854312

Off the bat, you said that there shouldn't be expectations of privacy, not just that there currently isn't, which is not the exact same thing.

I've never used company equipment for anything personal beyond a quick Google search, but I'd still like there to be some degree of privacy in case I ever feel pressured to do so, e.g. by a deadline to fill a form.

Really depends if company has some spyware installed. My work MacBook was just given me as plain new MacBook that I installed everything myself. Personal iCloud, work OneDrive, no corporate spyware

It’s always good at the beginning. What happens when you leave? Is the laptop yours? Theirs? Is this documented?

I have worked in 3 companies and none of them had installed anything on the work laptop. One IT department tried to, but I ignored all their messages. I would probably be pissed if I have to give up the right to work with privacy.

I had formatted the laptop both while getting it and returning it. I had filevault on and I wouldn't have shared my password.

Modern MDM solutions use Apple Business Manager to automatically deploy the MDM after a system wipe. If you have a company owned Apple device, and the company has it enrolled in ABM, then you can wipe and filevault all you want, but the agent will still be reinstalled, and the file vault key escrowed.

Yeah I know. It's not like Apple is trying to hide it or most companies try to hide spyware, and I know how to check for Apple business manager or spywares.

especially in the tech industry, where you get paid more than enough to buy your own personal laptop

In many countries it is a plain office job like everyone else with high education.

Last year, I was recruiting a data scientist for a side project. I was referred to two DSes, albeit from academia, to help.

Neither had their own personal laptop. One kept his laptop in the office all the time and just used an iPad at home. The other just plain didn't have a personal one. Work was the only one she had and she had to return it when she got laid off.

A coworker of mine once answered the wrong cell phone and said the wrong company name. (He was working for a competitor as well as our company.)

Another turned his computer that “wouldn’t behave” into IT, full of porn.

> Another turned his computer that “wouldn’t behave” into IT, full of porn.

Every tech support worker has seen this countless times. So many people are completely blind to the idea that turning your device over to support means support can actually see what’s on your device…

It’s wild. It’s one of those “Do we have to tell you people to not do this?!?!?”

A professor at a vocational training degree shared us a VM for a class project. Filled with dozens of porn bookmarks. He eventually realised and stayed after class to delete the VM from every class computer, deleting all the work of classmates who didn't take a backup home.

This prompted the people who lost their work to actually report the porn in revenge.

We have a plague here in NZ of top-level Police officers using work-issued devices to access and store CSAM material.

Wow that got dark real quick, mind sharing any links/evidence? Never would have thought NZ has a CSAM problem.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-police-officer-matthe...

Here’s one. There are more. Don’t be so naïve as to think any single country is free from these kinds of issues.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/crime-and-justice/1101088/aucklan...

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/second-auckland-police-officer...

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/crime-and-justice/567348/revealed...

It's not all sunshine and rainbows in our little country

It's rarely sunshine, but there are a lot of rainbows!

I mean, the headline says "second". Anything greater than 0 is bad but seems a little short of a "plague".

Anything greater than 0, in leadership roles of the organization that should be one the most highly trusted in the country, is a plague.

It’s horrible, it deserves severe legal punishment, but “plague” to me implies a broad pattern.

so you would call it a "plague" if it was just one guy? hopefully you can see how ridiculous that would work out in practice.

From the sysadmin PoV it's never "one guy" or even "just two"; what is common, however, is just one or two policemen, one or two soldiers, or one two judges make the news and the limelight of public prosecutions.

It's good to be seen to be tackling this kind of behaviour, rarely ever good (apparently) to fully rip the band aid off and report just how wide spread such behaviour can go.

The first link appears to say 22 cases. 12 have faced sanction.

1. 22 "investigated" as part of a wide scope review, ie, it could mean an entire department was investigated 2. review was for "staff internet usage" so those sanctions could be for anything from regular internet porn or gambling sites or whatever else violates their employment conditions 3. OP said the plague was among "top-level police officers"

I can't find the stat, but if memory serves me correctly, NZ over-indexes in CSAM-related crime. It's unfortunate, but it's not always good news down on our little islands.

Why not? It’s the same as everywhere else, it has men. Just knowing that places like Kiwi Farms exists is enough evidence of good number of garbage people

being dodgy is hard work. it takes effort to maintain and the longer you maintain it the cumulatively harder it is to get away with.

To paraphrase the sage Jimmy McMillan: the number of people who interview on their work laptops is too damn high. I'm always flabbergasted when they admit this and not once has somebody who did so passed. IME there's a strong correlation between good judgment and technical prowess in this regard but I suppose stories like this prove me wrong.

Who cares? A modern worker is on Zoom meetings for multiple hours a day, if one of those hours happens to be talking to a recruiter or hiring manager, so what? People also sometimes talk to their kids school or their dentist or the plumber at their house during the work day.

I'm a people manager, and I wouldn't bat an eye at a candidate I was interviewing joining the zoom from their work laptop and I wouldn't care if someone on my team used their work laptop rather than their personal device if they were interviewing elsewhere.

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