simondedalus

You would have a point if the exploit were more serious, and looked harder to fix than it does.

As is, this is a phishing type variant that it’s not at all clear gatekeeper was even designed to stop. However, the default behavior described (especially making symlinks to NFS shares without any sort of warning or special graphic when following them in Finder) seems sufficient for forceful language when complaining about it to Apple / giving a disclosure deadline then publishing.

Good thing, since America has had a variety of socialist policies in place since before anyone currently alive was born and continues to.

Maybe your experience is “another interesting perspective worth writing about or considering” and not a refutation of the author’s experience and her conclusions about what it meant.

Socrates “knows that he knows nothing” and spends his time trying to refute that. He looks for knowledge earnestly but usually doesn’t find it. Socrates is less devil’s advocate, more “how can we be sure of X when Y? If not Y because Z, doesn’t Z also make X problematic because of (blablabla)?”

Sure, he gets people RAGEing like a great troll, but at least ostensibly he’s doing more the 2nd type of argument described in the article, but with kind of a backdrop that precise intellectual beliefs are really hard to specify or maintain. It’s like dialectic but it’s not Hegelian; he wants to return to some central question and doesn’t necessarily see that thesis/antithesis climb as crucial, he just finds problems with the premises and wants to find better ones (Hegel’s whole thing was a bit more nuanced than that).

Re: article, trolling initially meant trying to get a rise out of people. It’s not so much you won’t admit you’re wrong or you’re eristically tearing everything down, it’s that you’re pretending to play the argument game (or some other game, like “art criticism” or “testimonial”) but in fact you’re fucking with people of varying levels of specificity.

we grit our teeth and "believe" that anyone traceably affected got an email directly from the company or something :D

(that said, google main page vulnerable to xss is kind of like... what, we're afraid someone will take over google and put some cryptominers on the google.com main page?)

as i replied in the comment below, the goal isn't "absolute porn free paradise," it's "keep our current control working." sound shortsighted to you? it is. it's also the easiest thing, and frees everyone up to do other, more important work than impressing people who are aghast that an organization would uninstall 1 of 2 browsers b/c it bypasses some control of theirs.

as for once chrome implements DOH, they'd cross that bridge when they came to it. it's an uphill battle, because really content filtering, of course, should not be done through browser settings (remotely managed or otherwise), nor solely through DNS. if whoever tells IT what to do in that school district is hellbent on it being impossible to browse to pornhub, they'll ultimately need a layer 7 firewall. but again, when you're on the budget, you do fastest / cheapest / most effective.

(and if we return to pure hypothetical, i would argue that dns filtering really is the best way in their case, because anyone who could bypass that--besides just using firefox--will be able to bypass better chrome config, or your firefox config change, etc, since they can just edit host file, etc etc etc)

this is getting really boring and repetitive, but you didn't give a "cheaper" solution, you gave an administratively more expensive solution (change files on machines rather than bulk remove an app which is out of the box functionality for many products IT like this would use), along with moving the goal posts; the goal is "keep my DNS filtering working," not "make sure no one ever gets to the porn site."

of course, you would need to do more in chrome (and windows/osx/ubuntu generally) to stop traffic to a site if a student knows what they're doing. that's not the point. the point is: we have this control in place. we've agreed it's working well enough. people can bypass the control simply by using firefox. to avoid adding overhead, we ditch firefox (for now). it's that simple.

as for future-proofing, that's a luxury. ...and part of why it's a luxury is that some goals ("make all traffic to any porn sites impossible on our school network") just aren't going to be met by budget IT.

re: BYOD, for that i go over to the armchair tech purist side i'm afraid, and just say "well, you allow that, so you need to get over that they can use VPNs and stuff. you're not DOJ or some wealthy corporation with important IP assets and equally 'important' VIP execs that insist on bringing their OSX 10.6 MBP to work. you don't get to have all the cool controls that might allow BYOD. sorry."

the DNS filtering works on chrome. yes, people can bypass it, but it doesn't even work on firefox, so they remove firefox. this isn't rocket science, and you're being foolishly contrarian instead of trying to understand what the original commenter's actual situation is. this leads me to believe that you are hypothesizing about work you don't do, but feel perfectly qualified to talk about "half assing" things.

of course it's possible to do so. but DNS filtering works for most users, and is much easier to centrally manage on a budget (in terms of time / people / money) than browser settings.

i'm belaboring this point now, but people who actually do this stuff know that you can't just throw up a GPO to fiddle with chrome settings and expect everything to work. this culture of "power users" thinking they know the best course of action for every situation in IT (and it's always "that thing i Put In The Work to do when i was tailoring my own system") is really silly.

firefox messes up their DNS filtering, chrome doesn't. so they remove firefox and enforce chrome. if you see that as a slippery slope, you're imagining it. they probably 1) have a decent app like ninite to remove and install apps, 2) don't have anything but their production environment, 3) don't have a homogenous environment in terms of patching (maybe they do), 4) don't have people to go around and make sure the config changes they push (however they would push them) took, worked, etc. so they block the app. maybe eventually they reinstall it. welcome to IT.

...which reinforces my point about how people actually doing this and people speculating about it tend to respond to issues like this.

amusingly, putting enough safeguards in place that kids would do this would actually be providing some good education for kids on the path to hacking.

yeah, they're saying just route to the porn site through the custom hosts file.

no, using the nuclear option of removing the browser outright when others work is the smart, efficient option that someone who actually works in IT with limited resources would (and should) use.

this stuff about finding all the right config files during "basic hardening" and having it just work is the stuff of armchair commenters and people who do IT/security on a well funded, sufficiently redundant team. assuming the latter would be the people in charge of school IT is hopelessly naive.

"Don't do that. A job interview is a structured process designed to let you consistently evaluate multiple candidates. If you are asking each candidate different questions, that's not a fair test."

if this is the thing you're responding to, you're misunderstanding the post entirely. "fair test" here is not about morals, it's about results. if i want to evaluate 2 candidates, i want the test to be as "fair" as possible so that i have the most relevant, fine grained information as possible. i want to render the candidates commensurable so i can make a better decision for my own purposes.

"life's not fair" in this context sounds like some kind of systems pessimism. it sounds like you're saying "stuff doesn't work." but of course it does. of course asking this question and not that question gives me more relevant hiring information. it's totally insane to think otherwise.