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So we have this post from Nathan Hamblen, who is a "API/Platform Engineer for Meetup, creative programming advocate for all."

I can tell you what else Nathan is: Completely, totally, and utterly clueless about the requirements and environments of modern IT, yet, like so many people with no understanding of something, he is perfectly willing to tell everyone how IT is all fucked up, stupid, and doesn't know shit. (Personally, I'd like to put Nathan on a help desk for a company with 10,000 or more employees and then take bets on how soon before he cries or runs away screaming.)

Let us start on our journey of evisceration, hmm?

Young Master Hamblen Writes:

Let’s say you know someone who works in a fairly small company. He handles a good amount of off-hours office email but was never offered a Blackberry as these were doled out not according to need but status, for which they quickly became an important symbol. And anyway, this employee didn’t want a crappy Blackberry because he already carried a first-gen iPhone

Ah yes, the ever-popular "No company ever does anything intelligently" strawman, mixed with a light dusting of entitlement syndrome. Never mind the huge reasons for a company, that may have confidential data for other people, (Luddites know these "others" as "Customers"), no, no, all that matters is that our imaginary corporate serf has a much cooler device than the one that his company supports, and therefore, should encounter zero restrictions on how they are used.

At some point Apple added Exchange connectivity and all the cool kids in the company could finally get work email on their phones, just like the important old people. But within a week, the tin-pot dictators in IT discovered this unauthorized bypass of their status-distribution mechanism, googled “how to disable meddling kids’ iphone exchange access” and mashed the right buttons on their keyboards. The unapproved playtime/productivity-time was over.

By "some point", Nathan means "iPhone OS 2.0", which is of course, far farther back than someone like Nathan should be expected to remember. He's a modern lad, a millennial. He has no time for stuff so old it predates yesterday. (Before it starts, I'm going to use "millennial" as a shorter version of "Stupid Young Twat with no clue as to how the world works, and thinks he's entitled to whatever he wants for zero cost or work." This is me being lazy. I am aware, and indeed, both work and associate with many millennials who would happily kick young master Hamblen in the nads for being such a dickface. But, he is one of their 'tribe', so, millennial it is.) By "cool kids" he means people far too slick and smart to put up with the kind of crap their company issues them as part of their job. "Use something because it's part of my job? How quaint."

Of course, because Nathan's never had to deal with silly things like SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, or other even more onerous requirements, the only reason IT can possibly object is because they're "tin-pot dictators" only interested in preserving their status.

(We'll leave out that what Nathan evidently knows about how Blackberries work would fit in a baby's sock, and that using Exchange ActiveSync, the actual name for the "Exchange Connectivity" Nathan is talking about is not the same thing as talking to a BES, (Correct names. How droll) or even that EAS is not tied to Exchange in the least. Nathan doesn't seem to need facts, why burden him with them now. )

Yes, that's right, in IT all we care about is preserving our gatekeeper status. That's why we secure systems. Just to fuck with Nathan. But then, he's so fuckable.

Then one day, executives are observed reading their email on company iPads. Vom. But also, ah hah! The access point has apparently been re-enabled. And it has. It works. Hooray.

It was never disabled for actual, company devices you moron. It was disabled for personal devices that don't comply with the security and other policies of the company, violations of which carry penalties that can bankrupt the company, and put people in jail. (Nathan is scratching his head at these sentences, for the words, they make no sense in his world. "There are things...that aren't me...that can tell me...no?...unpossible!) But Nathan doesn't give a fuck about anything beyond his "right" to do what he wants, when he wants. Supporting anyone but himself or a few people he deigns to assist doesn't exist for him, so he has no idea about what a modern enterprise has to deal with. Nor does Nathan care, for Nathan only cares about that which directly affects Nathan. Nathan's kind of spoiled.

At the same time, our intrepid off-hours emailing employee is finally replacing that old iPhone. He gets a Samsung Fascinate the first day it’s available, and of course sets it up for Exchange. Nothing seems amiss. A few hours later, the phone—his personal phone—shuts off while in use. When he turns it back on, it’s back to factory defaults. All the settings, apps, and data have been erased. wtf?

"I bought my own phone, and without asking, or telling anyone, I plugged it into the same email system that carries confidential customer and company data, and none of the people responsible for securing that data knew about this. When they found out, it was inconvenient for me. Watch me cry like an oversugared four-year-old."

Here's a concept utterly foreign to dingbats like Nathan: Not everything is yours, and you don't have the right to do anything you want. Ponder that, you acephalic little guttersnipe.

From the title of this post you can guess what happened. But if you didn’t know that such a disaster of a “feature” existed, whereby unknown persons can fully erase all data on a computing device once you log into your email account, you’re sure you’ve got a bad phone. It must be some early manufacturing glitch in these new models, and even Verizon agrees. The phone has a “hard reset” feature, but if that’s been activated without prompting, confirming, and double-confirming then something must be sorely wrong with the device. So he goes through the multi-hour hassle of exchanging the phone for a new one.

Next day, new device, same thing. This time the words “remote wipe” are observed in the startup sequence.

Those sons of bitches.

Waaaah. Waaaah. Waaah. Come crybaby, cry. Come on, squirt a few for me. I have negative pity for people doing this and crying about it. Stupid fuckers, there is a difference between things that are not yours and things that are yours. If it's not yours, keep your fucking hands off, or ask. Do they teach nothing to kids in kindergarten other than self-esteem lessons anymore?

Nathan then points to a true crime against humanity: the remote wipe screen. I've no Exchange server, but here, the Kerio Connect version for my own personal iPhone:

Yep, remote wipe in all its glory. Do you feel the evil? I do. But then, I'm a troglodyte sadistic tin-pot dictator IT dolt.

That’s the interface that Microsoft gives troglodyte IT departments to control/destroy their turf, which has silently expanded to include your personal property. Maybe there is also a screen to simply block unapproved devices, which would be the sane way of enforcing the same silly control. But for whatever reason, destroying all data on unknown devices if they show up in the logs is a popular choice among the sadists that most companies employ to keep their computers running terribly:

My Pre works great with my corporate email but my IT dept won’t approve it for use. Thus every month they send down a remote wipe to all non-approved devices, deleting everything.

Funny how it's okay to keep connecting non-approved, non-company owned devices to systems Nathan and his little pack of moronic friends don't own, but doing something about it, well, that's not kosher. Nathan is also, incorrectly, (duh. I think Nathan is lucky digestion is largely autonomic. Given what I see here, he'd be dead in a week were it not), making assumptions about EAS. Not all implementations are the same. But Nathan doesn't need to know a fucking thing about EAS, he's crusading for the rights of the downtrodden!

As well, if you're going to hook your shit up to someone else's server without their permission or knowledge, you pretty much deserve whatever happens to you. Again, if it's not yours, don't fuck with it. Why did no one teach this to Nathan?

There will always be sadistic dolts in IT. There will aways be even more sadistic but less doltish hackers who will gain unauthorized access to company servers and wipe everyone’s phones for fun, because stupid companies have given them this new toy. The companies do not know or care that the same purportedly sensitive data is trivially available from everyone’s laptops, and that laptops are stolen all the time. They’ve replaced one of many attack scenarios with a more destructive one, and they’re too proud to see that their internal memos are not that interesting to anyone else in the first place. (If there is anything incriminating in any email archives, they’ve got bigger problems.)

Ah, Nathan tries a strawman, but alas, his ignorance makes it a stupid one. Actually, laptop security is a major issue for IT. Hence the popularity of things like Full Disk Encryption, backup encryption, multi-factor authentication, biometrics, etc. But, Nathan's an ignoramus with no interest in learning. That's also why he's a fucking dumbass. He assumes that if he doesn't know about it, it's both unimportant and easy.

Since we can’t make other people stop being stupid, we can at least demand that our operating systems tell us when giving them write-only, root access to our computing devices. It’s incredible that none of the mobile platforms—not WebOS, Android, or iOS—bother to clue their users in to the ridiculous privilege they are granting by logging into Exchange. (The inventor of this abomination of a feature, Blackberry, was never meant to be configured by mere users. Who knows, or cares, what it does.) It would be trivially easy to implement a warning dialog, or three, explaining the extreme privilege that you are exchanging to be able to respond to your boss’s email on the weekend.

Or, you could, you know, not hook your client up to a server you don't run or own without asking first. But that would limit what Nathan can do, and so we all know that will never happen. Because Nathan's a whiny little entitlement queen who has confused his desires with all of reality.

There’s no shortage of trivial and irrelevant “I Agree” buttons we have to click to use ordinary software, but mobile OSes presume to open a software self-destruct backdoor without any notification.

Un-effing-believable.

Only if you're a stupid, over-entitled jackass like Nathan.

Comments

So we have this post from Nathan Hamblen, who is a \"API/Platform Engineer for Meetup, creative programming advocate for all.\"\n\nI can tell you what else Nathan is: Completely, totally, and utterly clueless about the requirements and environments of modern IT, yet, like so many people with no understanding of something, he is perfectly willing to tell everyone how IT is all fucked up, stupid, and doesn't know shit. (Personally, I'd like to put Nathan on a help desk for a company with 10,000 or more employees and then take bets on how soon before he cries or runs away screaming.)\n\nLet us start on our journey of evisceration, hmm?\n\nYoung Master Hamblen Writes:\n\n

Let’s say you know someone who works in a fairly small company. He handles a good amount of off-hours office email but was never offered a Blackberry as these were doled out not according to need but status, for which they quickly became an important symbol. And anyway, this employee didn’t want a crappy Blackberry because he already carried a first-gen iPhone

\n\nAh yes, the ever-popular \"No company ever does anything intelligently\" strawman, mixed with a light dusting of entitlement syndrome. Never mind the huge reasons for a company, that may have confidential data for other people, (Luddites know these \"others\" as \"Customers\"), no, no, all that matters is that our imaginary corporate serf has a much cooler device than the one that his company supports, and therefore, should encounter zero restrictions on how they are used.\n\n

At some point Apple added Exchange connectivity and all the cool kids in the company could finally get work email on their phones, just like the important old people. But within a week, the tin-pot dictators in IT discovered this unauthorized bypass of their status-distribution mechanism, googled “how to disable meddling kids’ iphone exchange access” and mashed the right buttons on their keyboards. The unapproved playtime/productivity-time was over.

\n\nBy \"some point\", Nathan means \"iPhone OS 2.0\", which is of course, far farther back than someone like Nathan should be expected to remember. He's a modern lad, a millennial. He has no time for stuff so old it predates yesterday. (Before it starts, I'm going to use \"millennial\" as a shorter version of \"Stupid Young Twat with no clue as to how the world works, and thinks he's entitled to whatever he wants for zero cost or work.\" This is me being lazy. I am aware, and indeed, both work and associate with many millennials who would happily kick young master Hamblen in the nads for being such a dickface. But, he is one of their 'tribe', so, millennial it is.) By \"cool kids\" he means people far too slick and smart to put up with the kind of crap their company issues them as part of their job. \"Use something because it's part of my job? How quaint.\"\n\nOf course, because Nathan's never had to deal with silly things like SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, or other even more onerous requirements, the only reason IT can possibly object is because they're \"tin-pot dictators\" only interested in preserving their status. \n\n(We'll leave out that what Nathan evidently knows about how Blackberries work would fit in a baby's sock, and that using Exchange ActiveSync, the actual name for the \"Exchange Connectivity\" Nathan is talking about is not the same thing as talking to a BES, (Correct names. How droll) or even that EAS is not tied to Exchange in the least. Nathan doesn't seem to need facts, why burden him with them now. )\n\nYes, that's right, in IT all we care about is preserving our gatekeeper status. That's why we secure systems. Just to fuck with Nathan. But then, he's so fuckable.\n\n

Then one day, executives are observed reading their email on company iPads. Vom. But also, ah hah! The access point has apparently been re-enabled. And it has. It works. Hooray.

\n\nIt was never disabled for actual, company devices you moron. It was disabled for personal devices that don't comply with the security and other policies of the company, violations of which carry penalties that can bankrupt the company, and put people in jail. (Nathan is scratching his head at these sentences, for the words, they make no sense in his world. \"There are things...that aren't me...that can tell me...no?...unpossible!) But Nathan doesn't give a fuck about anything beyond his \"right\" to do what he wants, when he wants. Supporting anyone but himself or a few people he deigns to assist doesn't exist for him, so he has no idea about what a modern enterprise has to deal with. Nor does Nathan care, for Nathan only cares about that which directly affects Nathan. Nathan's kind of spoiled.\n\n

At the same time, our intrepid off-hours emailing employee is finally replacing that old iPhone. He gets a Samsung Fascinate the first day it’s available, and of course sets it up for Exchange. Nothing seems amiss. A few hours later, the phone—his personal phone—shuts off while in use. When he turns it back on, it’s back to factory defaults. All the settings, apps, and data have been erased. wtf?

\n\n\"I bought my own phone, and without asking, or telling anyone, I plugged it into the same email system that carries confidential customer and company data, and none of the people responsible for securing that data knew about this. When they found out, it was inconvenient for me. Watch me cry like an oversugared four-year-old.\"\n\nHere's a concept utterly foreign to dingbats like Nathan: Not everything is yours, and you don't have the right to do anything you want. Ponder that, you acephalic little guttersnipe.\n\n

From the title of this post you can guess what happened. But if you didn’t know that such a disaster of a “feature” existed, whereby unknown persons can fully erase all data on a computing device once you log into your email account, you’re sure you’ve got a bad phone. It must be some early manufacturing glitch in these new models, and even Verizon agrees. The phone has a “hard reset” feature, but if that’s been activated without prompting, confirming, and double-confirming then something must be sorely wrong with the device. So he goes through the multi-hour hassle of exchanging the phone for a new one.\n\nNext day, new device, same thing. This time the words “remote wipe” are observed in the startup sequence.\n\nThose sons of bitches.

\n\nWaaaah. Waaaah. Waaah. Come crybaby, cry. Come on, squirt a few for me. I have negative pity for people doing this and crying about it. Stupid fuckers, there is a difference between things that are not yours and things that are yours. If it's not yours, keep your fucking hands off, or ask. Do they teach nothing to kids in kindergarten other than self-esteem lessons anymore?\n\nNathan then points to a true crime against humanity: the remote wipe screen. I've no Exchange server, but here, the Kerio Connect version for my own personal iPhone:\n\n\n\nYep, remote wipe in all its glory. Do you feel the evil? I do. But then, I'm a troglodyte sadistic tin-pot dictator IT dolt.\n\n

That’s the interface that Microsoft gives troglodyte IT departments to control/destroy their turf, which has silently expanded to include your personal property. Maybe there is also a screen to simply block unapproved devices, which would be the sane way of enforcing the same silly control. But for whatever reason, destroying all data on unknown devices if they show up in the logs is a popular choice among the sadists that most companies employ to keep their computers running terribly:\n\nMy Pre works great with my corporate email but my IT dept won’t approve it for use. Thus every month they send down a remote wipe to all non-approved devices, deleting everything.

\n\nFunny how it's okay to keep connecting non-approved, non-company owned devices to systems Nathan and his little pack of moronic friends don't own, but doing something about it, well, that's not kosher. Nathan is also, incorrectly, (duh. I think Nathan is lucky digestion is largely autonomic. Given what I see here, he'd be dead in a week were it not), making assumptions about EAS. Not all implementations are the same. But Nathan doesn't need to know a fucking thing about EAS, he's crusading for the rights of the downtrodden!\n\nAs well, if you're going to hook your shit up to someone else's server without their permission or knowledge, you pretty much deserve whatever happens to you. Again, if it's not yours, don't fuck with it. Why did no one teach this to Nathan?\n\n

There will always be sadistic dolts in IT. There will aways be even more sadistic but less doltish hackers who will gain unauthorized access to company servers and wipe everyone’s phones for fun, because stupid companies have given them this new toy. The companies do not know or care that the same purportedly sensitive data is trivially available from everyone’s laptops, and that laptops are stolen all the time. They’ve replaced one of many attack scenarios with a more destructive one, and they’re too proud to see that their internal memos are not that interesting to anyone else in the first place. (If there is anything incriminating in any email archives, they’ve got bigger problems.)

\n\nAh, Nathan tries a strawman, but alas, his ignorance makes it a stupid one. Actually, laptop security is a major issue for IT. Hence the popularity of things like Full Disk Encryption, backup encryption, multi-factor authentication, biometrics, etc. But, Nathan's an ignoramus with no interest in learning. That's also why he's a fucking dumbass. He assumes that if he doesn't know about it, it's both unimportant and easy. \n\n

Since we can’t make other people stop being stupid, we can at least demand that our operating systems tell us when giving them write-only, root access to our computing devices. It’s incredible that none of the mobile platforms—not WebOS, Android, or iOS—bother to clue their users in to the ridiculous privilege they are granting by logging into Exchange. (The inventor of this abomination of a feature, Blackberry, was never meant to be configured by mere users. Who knows, or cares, what it does.) It would be trivially easy to implement a warning dialog, or three, explaining the extreme privilege that you are exchanging to be able to respond to your boss’s email on the weekend.

\n\nOr, you could, you know, not hook your client up to a server you don't run or own without asking first. But that would limit what Nathan can do, and so we all know that will never happen. Because Nathan's a whiny little entitlement queen who has confused his desires with all of reality. \n\n

There’s no shortage of trivial and irrelevant “I Agree” buttons we have to click to use ordinary software, but mobile OSes presume to open a software self-destruct backdoor without any notification.\n\nUn-effing-believable.

\n\nOnly if you're a stupid, over-entitled jackass like Nathan.