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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30618 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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It's not clear any company running this sort of thing can seriously prevent leaks over a long enough time for it to be relevant.

With sufficient will, they could do just this. This is a choice they actively make one way or another.

Not if you want to keep highly skilled researchers and programmers working for you as it would mean locking down the systems so hard that it makes daily work a chore and the sorts of people you need for that level of work hate working under such restrictions.

Yeah, I have a friend who works in a very sensitive area of banking and it’s a nightmare:

  • Four layers of security before he can get to his desk
  • Everything on the computer is absolutely locked down and the software is rubbish as is the authentication system
  • Constant surveillance from cameras absolutely everywhere

I think other stuff too but I forget the details.

Let’s just say that I used to work as a developer for a large German company. Note past tense.

For the first year I could only install new software or drivers by making an official request and having the Indian IT support do it via remote access. You can imagine how well this worked for embedded systems development where you regularly need to use some new piece of external hardware or random IC manufacturer’s legacy software tool.

The best part? All of the daily work could have been done on a rando, burner laptop as email, team chat, source repositories and build system were all in external cloud services. Literally the only things I actually needed intranet access was to put my hours into the SAP system once per month.

Even in finance the logic is that it’s always impossible to prevent a willing employee from committing crime and leaking sensitive information, monitoring systems are just set up so that if and when it happens (1) they can trace it to source and (2) convince the regulator they did everything they could and reported it as soon as possible.

And also to minimise the scale of the breach, right? It's bad if an employee tells me that BigCorp and BiggerCorp are expected to finalise their merger by May, but it's worse if they give me 2000 pages of detail on the subject including all the due diligence on both parties.

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