Counter point. I would wager people are more productive scrolling 5 minutes through a Facebook post then taking a 30 minute coffee break talking to various coworkers. I would hate this. Also if you’re a developer how would you research something? No stack overflow? No access to forums to solve particular problems? Not sure this is sustainable.
Losing access to language reference docs would be huge. What are they gonna do, save them all locally? Maintain copies of those sites on the company intranet, at the company’s expense? What happens when the next version of Python is released?
This is a real cut the nose the spite the face move. Google would hemorrhage developers.
I mean, Google does index and cache most webpages internally already. So yeah, maybe. But after reading the article it doesn’t sound like they’re doing that.
I mean let’s say they solve that part, sure. Let’s go back to Google’s original intent for this maneuver: they want to beef up “security.”
Ars Technica’s sub-title line says “You can’t get hacked if you aren’t on the Internet.” That is utter nonsense. I’ll take “What is E-Mail?” for 500 Alex. Surely they wouldn’t block EMAIL right? How would they communicate with vendors, partners, governments, etc? Does Google think phishing emails, ransomware, etc don’t work if you don’t have internet access?
Actually, most email malware is staged now, so it wouldn’t work. PDFs with the malware embedded get flagged, so PDFs with a link to the malware replaced them. Even most ransomware is via an external link.
Why not? They already do for the vast majority of this stuff. It’s not that much and releases of these things are structured and indexed everywhere anyway.
Storing local copies of docs is a thing some companies do. I’ve worked at a couple of places that did that. And when the next version of $foo is released, and the devs get the go-ahead to use it,
wgetgets executed to make a new copy. Sucks, but that’s the threat model in some places.If I had access to a good LLM, that’d be enough for 99% of my research. And the other 1% I could probably do on a phone.
Prepare for productivity to tumble lol switching tabs and keeping working is much more efficient than switching between your phone and your computer screen if you’re at a desk job. I guess I can understand why they want to do this but they better get a lot more lax with people being on phones, which I’m not gonna hold my breath on. Just more ways to shit on employees for other companies to emulate, love this capitalist innovation!
I hope organisations invest in qubes os and other container/virtualization tools to make them more practical.
Taking radical steps like cutting off internet would hurt productivity as much as it improve security.
Seems rather bizarre to me, though it could make sense for some non-technical roles. For developers, seems a bit impractical; much of language documentation is online and odd errors, common and esoteric, are frequently completely absent from docs. This seems likely to require devs to either use unauthorized devices or waste time digging through source (possibly for the programming language itself) to figure things out.
However, the remark about root access makes me hope that there are not people logging into systems at Google as root. A sudoer, sure, but root is a big no-no.
su root
rm -rf /SteveHuffmanData/SearchHistory/RealStuff
mv HorseNPigPorn.jpg LemonParty.html TubGirl.png SteveHuffmanData/SearchHistory
sudo cat bleach | /dev/eyes
Social Credit Systems, here we come!
Can’t organize forming Unions if all you can use is corporate services.
Ars Technica just parroting a CNBC report third hand, when they could add some useful context by sharing traffic numbers to their site from Google-owned IP addresses and user agents.
