I swear I think people in IT sit around with visions of Ming the Malevolent sitting back on his throne, trying to hack into a corporate network. I've spent about three hours trying to connect a simple Bluetooth mouse to a laptop. It was connected two days ago. It ain't now.

Why? Someone decided that Bluetooth was B-A-D. For whatever reason, Bluetooth, the standard on which all our wireless connectivity is based, has been disabled on corporate laptops. Are you kidding me?

I can only imagine that someone somewhere attacked a corporate empire through a Bluetooth connection, damaged or stole files, and wrote about it in some IT journal. Now, my IT gurus are hard at work preventing some hacker from doing something to us.

If you are going to reduce my productivity by three hours today (clock time, not actual time), please just tell me that you have disabled Bluetooth. Don't do it silently by group policy one day when I walk in. Don't make me try my mouse on three different machines. Don't make me download the drivers. Don't make me ask you all to install the drivers since we have User Access Control and aren't allowed to do ANYTHING to our laptops. Don't bother to tell your support desk staff that we don't support Bluetooth devices, and thereby waste their time installing those drivers. Just tell me. Tell me you are afraid of the boogey man and are shutting all Bluetooth access down.

I don't question that people are attacking networks. I question why a department would not communicate a decision to its customers.

Dilbert has featured Mordac numerous times.

Now if you are running Windows, and can get to the BIOS or Policy Editor...

My thing is passwords. Fucking passwords that have to be 16 digets, no words, a special carrictor, but not the first 3 you try, and a number. AND THE DAMN THING CHANGES EVERY 60 DAYS

One of my clients, who's office I work out of several days a month has the IT dept from hell!

I asked to be connected to a network printer, sure but first we have to install super invasive things on your computer so we can look inside it...Nope, I will bring my own printer and charge you for ink!

quote:

Originally posted by sjp:
My thing is passwords. Fucking passwords that have to be 16 digets, no words, a special carrictor, but not the first 3 you try, and a number. AND THE DAMN THING CHANGES EVERY 60 DAYS

Requiring complex passwords: Good. Forcing users to change them every time they turn around: Stupid.

quote:

Originally posted by Kevmo:
One of my clients, who's office I work out of several days a month has the IT dept from hell!

I asked to be connected to a network printer, ...

I'd have told you the same.

I wouldn't even let employees from sister companies on our secure corporate network. We had a "guest" network that had an AIO on it they could use if they wished.

And, as IT received many complaints about Bluetooth connectivity, they actually went to the internet and found how to change something in the services deep within the machine code. Like magic, the mouse connects again.

I swear, I think people cannot think more than one step ahead. Let's see, this article says BT is bad. I will turn it off. That's one step. I done good. I made BT not bad. At the same time, they don't think about the second step. What happens to users? What happens to necessary machine functions? How do I retain these while improving security. How do I communicate to users? How do I roll back my change if it does not help? All obvious possible next steps to take. No thought.

Yeah and having a laptop with a mouse pad so big that it makes it a real chore to type without hitting the overly sensitive mouse pad.

Just got a new company HP laptop, the speakers work a few days then quit working. Oh and HP just sent out a recall that the battery randomly overheats and causes fires.

I work in IT in a major organization and we also disable blue tooth, and disable USB ports for downloading any data.

Group Policy dictates a lot of this...easier to maintain and support.