Management agents

Management agents

I went to buy some lunch today to eat at my desk, because it’s a short week and I’m busy and shut up don’t judge me. I got back from my 15’ trip to find my MacBook Air fairly propelling itself off the desk with its fan, uncomfortably hot to the touch, and minus 30% of the battery life expectancy that it was showing when I left. 

This is why people hate those management agents that corporate IT departments foist on them.

I have this unkillable process (running as root, natch), which creates its own undeletable user account and does Cthulhu only knows what horrible things to the filesystem. Now I don’t have a problem with my employer keeping tabs on their machine that is currently assigned to me. Even if you assume all users are honest, someone might make an honest mistake that winds up endangering corporate data. What I do object to is when that process of keeping an eye on things gets intrusive. 

This is why I first did the BYOD thing, after all. Unfortunately as Macs went from niche to ubiquitous, the Security Solutions came to the Mac too. 

Maybe it’s time to go back to doing the VM dance, with the clunky corporate environment sandboxed safely away in a VM that can be shut down when I don’t want to deal with its overhead?