I seem to recall an anecdote from a colleague that interviewed with one of Apple's security teams. The actual room where the interview took place was locked from the outside and you had to use a badge reader on the inside to leave. I guess they didn't want folks wandering if someone needed to make a restroom break, but I can't help but wonder about issues like, say, a fire...
One wonders how well that is tested, as well as what happens if a fire goes detected, or if someone's badge stops working, or if there are technical difficulties with the badge reader or its infrastructure...
There are far too many things that can go wrong with such a setup.
I have personally worked in buildings that had a "badge readers all stopped working for a while" problem. Fortunately, the badge readers only affected ingress and not egress, and only controlled exterior doors and labs; that's easily solved with a doorstop and a person checking badges. I can very easily imagine what could have happened in those buildings if a badge was required to leave a conference room.
And if you want to make that scenario terrifying, imagine being there on a weekend or holiday.
> I can very easily imagine what could have happened in those buildings if a badge was required to leave a conference room.
The facilities team and fire marshal are also easily capable of imagining this, already have, and you can ask them about it.
In this case the doors would fail open, or are made of glass and can be broken down. It's not a /really/ secure location. It's just a tech company that likes to seem secure during work hours. After hours of course the janitors get to see everything.
You are utterly missing the point, to the point that you are analyzing this conversation through entirely the incorrect lens, in an effort to belittle.
In an effort to steelman your comment, you may have incorrectly interpreted the earlier "I wonder how well that is tested" as "this is unsafe and illegal" rather than "among the many things wrong with this, this has increased the number of things that can go wrong, and is less safe on an absolute scale, whether or not it's strictly legal and up to code", and then assumed everything else in subsequent comments was about fire safety, rather than being a series of points in support of locking people into a building is a bad idea.
You are asserting the competence of the fire marshal, as an argument in a conversation about locking employees and interviewees and visitors inside a company's office rooms.
What you may think was happening here: "heh, nerds think they're smarter than the fire marshal and nobody involved thought of this until they came along; of course there'd be a way for sufficiently capable humans to get out of a room if something went wrong, and of course this will have been made to pass fire code, which is the only thing being talked about here".
What was actually happening here: While with sufficient analysis (which has most likely been done) it is possible to provide a sufficient degree of fire safety to make it not against fire code to lock people into a building, that doesn't make it right or zero-cost or risk-free, nor does it alleviate the stress and potential problematic-but-non-fatal situations that could arise. At no point was the primary purpose of the comment "people might burn in a fire", even though the risk of that is not zero at any time and has likely been raised (within presumably-acceptable-to-fire-code levels) by such a setup.
When I said "I can very easily imagine what could have happened", I was not imagining a fire burning down the people with the building inside. I was imagining how few failures it would require to end up with people being trapped in a room for long enough to reach the level of stress required to physically break out of a room, compounded by having worked in labs where the air conditioning was sometimes woefully insufficient.
It takes a lot of stress to get normal people to the point that they're willing to break windows or doors or walls in order to escape a room, and nobody should be subjected to such things, because there's zero security justification for a company locking people inside at any time.
Grenfell Tower was fireproof as originally designed. The problem was renovations that compromised the original design, by adding highly flammable cladding panels to the exterior that allowed the fire to spread easily around the entire building.
More importantly, the HQ is built in California, which despite appearances isn't a capitalist dystopia but a local government dystopia.
Any random local government staffer is the most powerful person in the universe and obeying them is a religious edict. Apple has zero power to disobey anything in the fire code and they're probably not even capable of imagining doing so. That's why the random suburb they're in has the best public schools in the country and all the houses are like $5 million.
As an example there's currently a big empty lot next to said HQ where the mall used to be, because a random woman on the city council has blocked apartment construction for the last decade, because she thinks Apple employees will move in and molest local high school students.
Power failure is a best case. I've observed firsthand cases of "badge access system went down, none of the doors open". That's less of a problem for external doors that allow people out but not in, because it can be solved by propping the door and posting a guard who checks badges. It's a massive problem when conference rooms and offices lock people in.
there is also the earthquake issue where interior doors (badge access or no) can become jammed. thus god invented the crowbar. my Big Company emergency response team folks all had one. also good for head crabs.
A few times in my life I really had to get through a locked door and asked myself "What would Kojak do?" and always got through with at most three kicks.
That was incredibly petty. If those animals did indeed have rabies, they likely would have been rabid long before. You have to question how downright evil some people are to what amounts to animal cruelty (avoidable euthanasia).
One headache I've had with internal LE certs is bots abusing the CT logs to attempt probing internal names. As a result, I started requesting wildcard certs from LE. Somehow that feels less secure, because even though I'd probably recognize abuse of the cert - friends and family wouldn't. It's the same reason I don't want less technically adept friends and family having to deal with my own CA. Install one arbitrary cert ... what's the problem with this random, sketch one I downloaded?
The problem with Tesla's "self-driving" is people assume they have to provide no oversight or inputs beyond engaging the system. It's a recipe for disaster. Couple it with the rapid acceleration and speeds the Tesla is capable of and you exponentially increase that risk. I have seen people shave / apply makeup, be on laptops, and even sleep while these cars were "driving." Conversely, I have seen people accelerate rapidly and unsafe, taking their previously gas-driven aggressive behaviors to a whole new level.
The cars need governors to keep other motorists safe and I hesitate to say "other motorists," since I think most find their driver's license as the toy in a Happy Meal.
This is the one big downside to certificate transparency. Allowing anyone to ascertain private host names is far from ideal. The immediate counter is to, “run your own CA,” but that comes with its own headaches for small use cases.
No surprise. When she tweeted that they wanted an extremely short notice meeting about a “serious issue,” I knew she was done. This is how most of the big companies do their firings these days.
Definitely not sympathizing with her, though. She brought this on herself, 100%. Constantly campaigning against your employer, in a very public forum to boot, is eventually going to draw their ire. She had a very generous title and salary for what looked like limited experience in the field and it seemed they were paying for her to obtain an unrelated J.D. Very generous, I’d say.
If you keep biting the hand that feeds you, eventually the hand - and the food - gets withdrawn.
A bit tangential, but I’ve never understood why people stay in jobs they can’t stand to the point where they self implode like this. I’m sure there were other teams, other roles at Apple in which she could have found herself.
She might have been looking for new job and proudly posting here social media presence. The people recruiting would have checked that and immediately went nope. You don't leave until you have next job joined up unless you really really hate it.
They have programs at Apple that allow you to work temporarily for 6 months in another department. Why wouldn't she have applied for one in the Legal department? Something weird here.
You can turn on multipoint and switch sources in the app, but it's clumsy. AFAIK, there's no way to do it on the device itself (and that's disappointing). I loathe having to disconnect one source to connect another.
That price is ... insane. I think the only saving grace will be spatial audio and if it's waterproof. They also seem a bit, well, ugly for an Apple product.
I was patiently waiting for these. I bought (and loved) the original AirPods. I really wanted noise cancellation for flights, but the AirPods Pro hurt my ears no matter what I tried. I waited through each Apple "one more thing," hoping these would surface. I eventually went with Sony's WH-1000XM4s. The Bluetooth is a little slow, but they're pretty stellar otherwise.
Deplaning always feels slower to me. You usually get an announcement about twenty minutes before touchdown that you're inbound. I notice virtually nobody prepares during or after this announcement. If I took anything out of the overhead, I re-stow it and get the small items I have together. When we land, I turn off airplane mode, put my phone in my pocket, grab my backpack and am ready to go. Others like to eat a snack, make a phone call, examine every possible object in their bag, and do just about everything but exit the plane. Like seriously, do that in the terminal when you're not a blocker on others exiting the aircraft.
As a bigger guy, I scowl at people wanting to remove overhead bins. I'd rather put my bag there and have the space under the seat for my legs. Airlines need to understand the more uncomfortable they make the flights, the more likely I am to take a train.
