Business computers exist to OFFLOAD WORK. You can't just say NO to OFFLOADING WORK. Instead of saying NO to this user, I offered AN ALTERNATIVE. If you don't KNOW THE ENVIRONMENT you CAN'T SECURE IT because you DON'T HAVE ALTERNATIVES.

Information Security is mostly just defensive administration.

It’s pretty weird how passionate I am about computer administration. This is weird.

Security is mysterious to people. People fear mysterious things. They blame problems they don’t understand on security. And that’s how unhealthy, poorly managed endpoints are the rocks in the gears of an enterprise. If they don’t work, IT security cannot be effective.

Addendum: (via @loydcase @SqueakyFoo) nitter.vloup.ch/loydcase/status/…

An often un-recognized historical note: Although Chrome was indeed very fast, a lot of user dissatisfaction with Firefox in 2008 was rooted in the number of extensions users had installed. Lots of issues and performance issues were self-inflicted. Many users ran 15+ extensions.

The problem of extensibility in general-purpose computers is a recurring theme. The majority of issues with user experience in Windows is rooted in how extensible it is by 3rd-party code. But users don’t see that, they literally can’t, and blame the entire operating system.

History repeats. You have to wonder how many people raving about the new Firefox is because they are experiencing a browser, for the first time in years, without any bloated extensions running. 10 years later, the same dynamic as 2008, in reverse.

A huge amount of work Microsoft has been performing since Windows 8 is to try to undo the damage to their ecosystem by unfettered application developers. Even in classical Win32, they are slowly squeezing out detrimentally-used featuresets where applications interfere with others

Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, have all discovered that in the end a customer issue may not be caused by your code, and it’s not your responsibility, but you still suffer the blame. Nobody really cares or understands. You have to be much more guarded about extensibility.