Work Rants

Here at work, we have to change our enterprise passwords every 90 days. I am sure this is similar to many institutions. We get three warnings: one at ten days, one at six days, and a final warning at three days. That gives us two days to forget about the impending doom. Sounds like a recipe for success. Changing our password means all saved passwords have to change; otherwise our account gets locked and we cannot log into anything. For me, locked accounts means no workie. Sounds promising, except I like to do my work and hate being frustrated with inane minutia that stretches out for hours. Here is the list of what I have to change. I have 5.5 devices to work with: work iMac - with virtual Windows 7 machine, Macbook Pro, iPhone, iPad, home iMac. Work iMac Initial logon Email Lync Safari web signon password Firefox web signon password Windows 7 Virtual Initial signon - thankfully this is used for other programs Email Internet Explorer web signon password  Mac...

Security is necessary, I get that. Security is a pain in the butt, I get that. Security enforcers are very black and white, I don't get that. We have a group of security enforcers who scans the local network with scanning software. The scanning software hacks up a report. The security enforcers then send the report to those responsible for a particular site and tell those people to cram it immediately into their schedule. I didn't tell them, but I really wanted to cram it somewhere else ... in the schedule ... uh, yeah. I had this opinion because the whole process is very disruptive and security enforcers are not reasonable in terms of schedule. Also, I believe the process is flawed and way to black and white. Any item identified as "high" needs IMMEDIATE attention. Regardless of the fact that it might have been in production for 5 years on a low-traffic site which uses a protected account to expose data that by its very nature is public information. It ...