Yep, coffee has very little to do with actual "coffee" as a product.
Coffee is a ritual, and often, a social activity. You go somewhere sooth your mind on some coffee sipping, people watching, chatting with others, or just daydreaming, and then get on with your day.
I think the underlying problem here is the expectation that you, the user, should be able to find stuff by looking "in" particular places. This is perfectly reasonable if you're dealing with a fairly limited set of files or executables, but that era has been slipping away for the last 5 years or more.
It is no surprise that the question comes from 2011. I believe that was near when Unity came out and Ubuntu did away with mouse menus to find "Programs" in favor of just searching for what you have. A lot of folks did not like it at first but I think its no longer an issue.
>A lot of folks did not like it at first but I think its no longer an issue.
The sudden popularity of Mint and ElementaryOS at the time of Unity tells me its still an issue. Those who care just left. Personally, I couldn't use Unity on a daily basis for this and other reasons.
OK, but even now Windows folks have largely given up on pressing <windows>/<All Programs> and looking for what they want.
There's simply too much stuff on a typical computer these days for a user to pick out what they want from a dropdown, yes, even if nested.
It is the same problem that Yahoo once had back in the day when it tried to "Categorize" the internet. At some point such attempts at categorization break down and you gotta look at more sophisticated strategies for search.
Well, I think this is sort of where Spotlight on OS X came from. Spotlight was pushed pretty hard when it came out as the new way to interact with your files, and for the most part it has lived up to its claims, allowing you to search concepts or text within a file and get nigh instant results, and it has only gotten better with SSDs now being default in so many Macs.
Of the users I've worked with over the last 10 years, many older users still hang on to rigid folder hierarchies, but I have noticed some users who are used to Spotlight and the faster Windows searches doing away with these strict hierarchies in favor of just a really well indexed search.
I hear this as "blanket advice" all the time, but very rarely is there a discussion about what is reasonable to expect from a "normal" employer who isn't draconian or looking to find an excuse to fire someone.
Actually, the chill employer is the most dangerous.
Even if your employer is fine with personal use, courts will rule that it's all in scope during a discovery phase. I've been involved in litigation scenarios where people's personal email ended up being sifted through by the other litigant because opposing counsel convinced the judge that business was being conducted there, and there was evidence of frequent access on a corporate device.
All of your protections from a legal point of view are really defined by custody and scope of control. Data stored on your device in your home is the most protected. Data stored on your employer's PC or file server on your employer premises is the least protected.
OK, but what about email read/composed on my personal gmail account using a work computer? When you say "personal email" do you mean @company.com email-- or do you mean _any_ personal email as long as it is read/composed on a company machine?
Is it safe to assume that the only way that that (or any https content) can be captured is by keylogging or some kind of desktop capture?
> Is it safe to assume that the only way that that (or any https content) can be captured is by keylogging or some kind of desktop capture?
No, plenty of corporate firewalls provide HTTPS MITM by installing their own root certificate and making client machines trust it. HTTPS certificate pinning as it's implemented in most browsers specifically allows this behavior by not checking pinned certificates if the root certificate is in the computer's private keystore (vs. system keystore) because it's assumed the private keystore is full of only certificates the user or machine owner wants to always trust.
Any forensic analysis of a PC/Laptop or look at proxy logs will show your connectivity to an personal email account. In a discovery scenario, all that needs to be done is to present a pattern where personal mail was used for business in the company. (I guarantee that is happening somewhere)
It's one of these scenarios where it isn't a problem, until it is
Thanks guys, that helps me to understand. This stuff is usually explained either as utterly vague blanket advice or in technical shorthand terms. I think it is really important for people who might barely even know what https is to understand how and why the security of it is limited.
It's one of those pieces of advice that is hard to say it's wrong exactly. However, for many professional employees at a great many companies, it's pretty extreme as practical advice. There are some sensible practices like keeping work email and personal email separate and, for both your own and work devices, following whatever infosec policies there are around encryption, VPNs, and so forth.
But, in general, never do X advice can be actively harmful because it advises people against doing things that very many do without repercussions and causes people to ignore advice that it's important to follow.
It's not really a question of what is reasonable to expect. Even a company that chooses now not to do things like what the article describes, they always can.
They can read your emails, and chat logs and whatever else is sitting on your work machine. The only way of dealing with that is never have personal information on them in the first place.
OK, that is what is "legally possible" in a worst-case scenario.
But IN PRACTICE, what is normal?
Your statement seems to indicate that IT staff can just browse personal communications, desktop displays, keypresses. I am sure that they can if necessary, but what kinds of scale and automation are we talking about? Doing such surveillance ad-hoc or without a very small number of targets seems like it would easily become intractable for any org with thousands of people.
I am not in an IT department, so I have no idea what goes on.
It seems the standard advice is always to take the most extreme precautions and to follow the corporate rules to the letter... but here I am typing this into a work computer on a chrome browser without a care in the world.
So I work in information security and I'll tell you i haven't seen good standards around this. In some places IT people regularly look at emails or web traffic, which i think is wrong.
When I go into a company I make sure we put a policy in place that to review an employees emails / web traffic / devices we need to have Legal and HR sign off on it unless the person being investigated is part of one of those groups then it is one group and an executive.
This covers me from legal/HR fallout and it covers the employees because they know we aren't just sneaking around looking at their stuff, it creates trust.
So here is an example of a school administrator spying on students via their provided laptops. It's not the only one. This was 'normal' for the school system until they got called on it.
Blanket collection and searching of data by a company is very possible, in just the same way as you search through mass of logs from applications. They aren't going to have someone watching these logs all the time though, so you don't have to have a huge staff to handle it. They may spot check, they may only go thought the data when something suspicious occurs. They may automatically troll through the data looking for keywords which escalate to a real person for further analysis.
Its easy to conclude that but suppose you're a white high-income professional who is looking for a home in Baltimore city. You have your pick of any neighborhood. Would you choose....
A) A rowhome in a squalid neighborhood beset with heroin dealing, unsupervised youth, poor upkeep, and median household income of 10K, a main street of furniture rental shops, cellphone stores and liquor stores that sell mostly "40's".
or
B) A gorgeous house in a neighborhood of other professionals with meticulously maintained and upgraded houses, a mainstreet with a wine bar and coffee house that makes cappuccino's with the fancy swirly foam.
Whether you're black or white, you WILL choose B if you can at all afford it. The sad truth is there aren't enough African americans who can choose B enough to change the optics of this situation.
The pattern persists partly because large cities in the united states consist of the poor or the wealthy with very little inbetween. Middle income folks go to the exburbs because they can't afford the nice parts of the cities and can't afford private school for their kids (sending your kids to public schools in the cities is completely out of the question for any family that values education).
Having lived in Baltimore for 10 years, I can say that there are multiple causes for continuing segregation. There is no satisfying way to explain it and no end in sight.
You are right that this about far more than realtors steering people one place or another.
The MAD doctrine seems to have worked with binary superpowers up through the 80's.
But, I think its an open (and rather scary) question as to whether MAD will continue to work with multiple parties some of whom are batshit crazy and have demonstrated utter disregard for the safety and well-being of their populace.
Is their leadership insane enough to sit in a well-stocked bunker while setting off an H-Bomb in South Korea or elsewhere.... umm yeah, I think so.
Let's hope. The world did survive the breakup of the soviet union, which left nuclear weapons and material all over the former soviet block without a major incident. If they do set off their one bomb (under the slim chance they could even deliver it), it would be utterly terrible. End of a major city? Probably. But not the end of the world. Japan, South Korea and the US would wipe NK out so fast they wouldn't even know what hit them. The end of North Korea regime? For sure.
> South Korea and the US would wipe NK out so fast they wouldn't even know what hit them. The end of North Korea regime? For sure.
Let's not forget about the millions North Koreans who would die as a result. They're people, and the number of them who are culpable for their regime's madness is a rounding error.
Yes. Although MAD doesn't necessarily require the end of the world (eg nuclear winter), or even the end of a regime. It just depends on consequences which are "unbearable" for either nation.
I've always felt that the best strategy against NK is to simply wait for the regime to collapse on its own (along with sanctions that isolate them, FWIW). This is fine as long as they don't try to invade South Korea, leading to swift US-backed retaliation. But perhaps now as they continue to develop and "show off" their nukes, they'll feel emboldened to "try something" before their time runs out?
I think discussions about sobriety tend to ignore the vast middle-ground between "stone-cold-sober" and "shit-faced".
It is totally possible to enjoy one or two alcoholic drinks on a weekly night out without ruining finances, making a fool of one's self, and blowing-out the next day from a hangover. You don't have to choose one extreme or another.
Agree, although properly positioned monitor speakers which have been equalized by the listener for a particular spot in the room can sound really, REALLY nice (if you don't leave your listening chair !).
I agree that in terms of sound, digital is superior. But as the article describes there is very much a collectable "object appeal" to old media. Now that even CD's and their annoying jewel cases are becoming obsolete, there remains an attractiveness to vinyl for some folks that is unrelated to any technical characteristics (real or imagined).
Coffee is a ritual, and often, a social activity. You go somewhere sooth your mind on some coffee sipping, people watching, chatting with others, or just daydreaming, and then get on with your day.