This sort of thing is completely normal. Sure, some enlightened companies may have laxer policies such as allowing Macs.
But of your list what would you remove? XP is now becoming a hardened OS for enterprises because of the effort that has gone into making it secure. Instant Messaging outside of the companies control can cause immense reputational damage, Skype cannot be controlled and centrally recorded, lost hard drives that are unencrypted can also cause reputational damage. A lot of people now carry around iPhones and Netbooks so that they are outside the company network and can get access to stuff they want at their own risk. I have a feeling that companies will try and restrict use of these on company time at some stage. The average IT user at a company does not understand a lot of this stuff and needs to be protected. I remember when the Internet was first allowed at a company I worked at; the first thing some people did was download porn and games. There are regularly tales in the UK press of people still doing this stuff and get fired for it. Their IT departments are the ones that should be fired! There are so many attack vectors these days that the basic stuff above needs to be done. Look at the fuss that went on a few weeks ago when Google were seen to have used IE6 and someone tried to hack them! Google seem to mostly build their own stuff; partly because they are engineers and partly (I suspect) because they are ultra-paranoid. MS will almost certainly be using Win7 internally, Skype and iTunes will be banned for obvious reasons! On Feb 27, 9:24 pm, "phil.swen...@gmail.com" <phil.swen...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am curious... I work for a large software vendor and our policies > are: > > -windows only (XP) > -outside IM is banned (we have internal jabber server) > -mandatory software that tracks every piece of software installed on > your machine > -manual proxy that tracks every outgoing web url (no banned urls tho) > -skype is strictly forbidden > -no use of SaaS software for company information > -virus checker on every machine, including servers (kills performance > on builds) > -encrypted harddrives > -itunes is banned > -VPN policy forces all traffic to be routed over internet > > The reasons behind this are supposedly that the company must track all > information for legal purposes. > > So I'm curious - do companies like Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Intel > have policies like this? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javapo...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
