Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

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I work in finance. Most web sites you could download an exe from are blocked, downloading exes is disabled and running installers is restricted to admin accounts by group policy. If you do get round all that and do it anyway and you're caught, theres a good chance you'll be fired.

One issue is that some classes of users and locations (e.g. Trading floors) are restricted by law concerning the communications systems they can use for work because all communications regarding financial transactions has to be auditable.

On the other hand most of the banks have their own internal software libraries you can install stuff from and you get a bunch of useful utilities by default such as Irfanview, notepad++, Greenshot or similar. Machines for devs are often less locked down.

> running installers is restricted to admin accounts by group policy.

Hence the popularity of portable apps which don't use installers. The just unzip to any folder and run.

Any company can install a reporting agent on their desktops and that will collect basic information like what .exe files have been executed.

Once a portable app shows up in the reports you are simply fired by blatant disregard for the rules and procedures you agreed to when signing your contract.

Finance is a heavily regulated environment and you can't get away with things that would be excusable in other places.

> Once a portable app shows up in the reports you are simply fired by blatant disregard for the rules and procedures you agreed to when signing your contract.

That seems to be a rather extreme clause; I doubt that a bank would care if a developer installed something that was not whitelisted. It would be a different story if the developer linked against code whose source was not easily attributable.

Why do you doubt that? Is it unreasonable? Students are subject to the same restrictions now.

Bloomberg chat, the Slack of LIBOR fixing.

With a handy built-in evidence trail complete with time stamps?

Yes. http://uk.businessinsider.com/read-the-bloomberg-chats-that-...

Glorious. Best part of the article is he switches to using the phone at the end, which was apparently recorded or transcripted as well anyway.

Have a look at The Spider Network by David Enrich. Real eye opener.

But a long way from MS Paint.

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