I’ve gotta turn it off a lot for various client projects
As a web dev I'm running into a lot of security products dorking up web projects and processes these days. It seems to be increasing.
I've got customers with security software or other privacy related tools that are constantly 'trying' to do the right thing ... but just become support ticket overhead for me.
It's ULTRA frustrating at this point.
I've run into several customers now whose email scanners not just block emails arbitrary, but also follow links (fine by me) ... and even SUBMIT A FORM (NOT ok). Presumably to avoid some malware delivery, but now they've submitted something to us on a one time use form...
So just sending them an email means their software submits accept or decline options on a form (with our without the email reaching them) and we get a ton of "but I didn't get the email and I didn't decline anything".
Meanwhile the end customer is too technically behind the ball to entirely understand what is going on, and some ultra aggressive IT admin just keeps doing it. If you have a lot of customers it just seems to never end.
I kinda want to abandon email because of it but there's not a lot of good options.
Other issues include some unknown software installed by someone's kid (their IT guy) that blocks rando boring API calls ... the list never seems to end.
I support these privacy / security initiatives 100%, we don't do any insidious tracking or anything like that, but it is starting to hit entirely innocuous stuff.
Read this and replace "web" with "desktop" and large parts are still spot on, wrt virus scanners and the likes. We work on a product of which the installation is a bit complicated because it needs to install a bunch of other things. 95% of the time that fails the reason is some overly active security tool which messes up (the other 5% mainly machines which haven't been updated for years) To the point that we've started wondering if we wouldn't just start requiring dedicated machines or at least without any of that software, or even just ship PCs with the application pre-installed as it would likely turn out cheaper. Unfortunately that is not really an option as a web dev, so that situation is even worse..
I develop desktop apps that are run exclusively virtualized, and don't really have to deal with either set of problems. From a developer perspective I'd say it's a pretty sweet spot, as you get the best of both worlds to some extent.
Granted, communicating with any type of hardware on the users machine is a major challenge. We've had to spend significant effort just troubleshooting printer issues. If you need low latency, virtualization is likely a non-starter.
The upshot is that the latency between our apps and the application server/database (hosted in the same domain) is much lower than for a conventional web app.
Comments
As a web dev I'm running into a lot of security products dorking up web projects and processes these days. It seems to be increasing.
I've got customers with security software or other privacy related tools that are constantly 'trying' to do the right thing ... but just become support ticket overhead for me.
It's ULTRA frustrating at this point.
I've run into several customers now whose email scanners not just block emails arbitrary, but also follow links (fine by me) ... and even SUBMIT A FORM (NOT ok). Presumably to avoid some malware delivery, but now they've submitted something to us on a one time use form...
So just sending them an email means their software submits accept or decline options on a form (with our without the email reaching them) and we get a ton of "but I didn't get the email and I didn't decline anything".
Meanwhile the end customer is too technically behind the ball to entirely understand what is going on, and some ultra aggressive IT admin just keeps doing it. If you have a lot of customers it just seems to never end.
I kinda want to abandon email because of it but there's not a lot of good options.
Other issues include some unknown software installed by someone's kid (their IT guy) that blocks rando boring API calls ... the list never seems to end.
I support these privacy / security initiatives 100%, we don't do any insidious tracking or anything like that, but it is starting to hit entirely innocuous stuff.
Read this and replace "web" with "desktop" and large parts are still spot on, wrt virus scanners and the likes. We work on a product of which the installation is a bit complicated because it needs to install a bunch of other things. 95% of the time that fails the reason is some overly active security tool which messes up (the other 5% mainly machines which haven't been updated for years) To the point that we've started wondering if we wouldn't just start requiring dedicated machines or at least without any of that software, or even just ship PCs with the application pre-installed as it would likely turn out cheaper. Unfortunately that is not really an option as a web dev, so that situation is even worse..
I develop desktop apps that are run exclusively virtualized, and don't really have to deal with either set of problems. From a developer perspective I'd say it's a pretty sweet spot, as you get the best of both worlds to some extent.
That's an interesting point, but I'm not sure how well this works for e.g. communication with low latency harware?
Granted, communicating with any type of hardware on the users machine is a major challenge. We've had to spend significant effort just troubleshooting printer issues. If you need low latency, virtualization is likely a non-starter.
The upshot is that the latency between our apps and the application server/database (hosted in the same domain) is much lower than for a conventional web app.
What crazy-tier security software automatically SUBMITS A FORM on incoming emails? Please tell me so I know to avoid it at all costs.
How does this not break large parts of the existing web, ex. 80+% of password reset mechanisms?