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0 pointsjameshart1y ago0 comments

Literally?

I would just like to point out that most of us who have ever had a job at an office, attended an academic institution, or lived in rented accommodation have kept stuff in someone else’s desk drawer from time to time. Often a leased desk in a building rented from a random landlord.

Keeping things in someone else’s desk drawer can be convenient and offer a sufficient level of privacy for many purposes.

And your proposed alternative to using ‘someone else’s desk drawer’ is, what, make your own desk?

I guess, since I’m not a carpenter, I can buy a flatpack desk from ikea and assemble it and keep my stuff in that. I’m not sure that’s an improvement to my privacy posture in any meaningful sense though.

0 comments

j451y ago

It doesn’t have to be entirely literal, or not literal at all.

A single point of managed/shared access to a drawer doesn’t fit all levels of data sensitivity and security.

I understand this kind of wording and analogy might be triggering for the drive by down voters.

A comment like the above though allows both people to openly consider viewpoints that may not be theirs.

For me it shed light on something simpler.

Shared access to shared infrastructure is not always secure as we want to tell ourselves. It’s important to be aware when it might be security through abstraction.

The dual security and convenience of self-hosting IaaS and PaaS even at a dev, staging or small scale production has improved dramatically, and allows for things to be built in a cloud agnostic way to allow switching clouds to be much easier. It can also easily build a business case to lower cloud costs. Still, it doesn’t have to be for everyone either, where the cloud turns to be everything.

A small example? For a stable homeland - their a couple of usff small servers running proxmox or something residential fibre behind a tailscale or cloudflare funnel and compare the cost for uptime. It’s surprising how much time servers and apps spend idling.

Life and the real world is more than binary. Be it all cloud or no cloud.

MadnessASAP1y ago

> Keeping things in someone else’s desk drawer can be convenient and offer a sufficient level of privacy for many purposes.

Too torture a metaphor to death, are you going to keep your bank passwords in somebody else's desk drawer? Are you going to keep 100 million people's bank passwords in that drawer?

> I guess, since I’m not a carpenter, I can buy a flatpack desk from ikea and assemble it and keep my stuff in that. I’m not sure that’s an improvement to my privacy posture in any meaningful sense though.

If you're not a carpenter I would recommend you stay out of the business of building safe desk drawers all together. Although you should probably still be able to recognize that the desk drawer you own, that is inside your own locked house is a safer option then the one at the office accessible by any number of people.

jameshartOP1y ago

If you have something physical of equivalent value to 100 million people's bank passwords, you may well not want to risk keeping it in a desk drawer at all, and instead want to look into renting a nice secure drawer from someone else to keep it in. That would be a safety deposit box.

Which I would argue is rather more like what cloud providers offer than 'someone else's desk drawer' is.

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