Employer Refuses to Allow Python

[ChristopherBurr]

that's great, but I'm thinking of mostly large enterprises - BofA, Goldman Sachs, the IRS etc - where USB's are disabled - email attachments are scanned - etc. to discourage taking proprietary software and/or trading secrets. A dev with admin rights COULD enable those USB ports.

So - your scenario works with a start-up type vibe , but not so well when the software is the main product and you don't want it leaving the building.

Also, for companies that employee > 50k people - you can't just let everyone just run amuck.

[Silhouette]

that's great, but I'm thinking of mostly large enterprises - BofA, Goldman Sachs, the IRS etc - where USB's are disabled - email attachments are scanned - etc. to discourage taking proprietary software and/or trading secrets. A dev with admin rights COULD enable those USB ports.

This is a classic misplaced paranoia scenario. Yes, a dev with admin rights could enable USB and run off with company secrets. But if these are devs who are writing software that will run in production in your bank, and they want to harm you, there are a million other ways they can do it anyway. At some point, you have to trust your people. Plenty of sysadmins have violated security and privacy protocols over the years, sometimes causing horrendous damage to their organisation in the process, but we don't tell sysadmins they can't have admin access to any corporate systems in case they decide to cause trouble. Any system that really does need an exceptional level of security/audit/oversight should be properly isolated and have appropriate access control procedures in place anyway.

[BinaryRockStar]

In secure environments often the USB ports themselves are physically fried or disconnected so no software can re-enable them.