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by zbentley 96 days ago
I once worked on a computer for the US Government that felt slow. I counted nine (9) directly competitive and redundant endpoint protection products on it.

Not nine different/only somewhat overlapping pieces of software from companies that were competitors. Nine equivalent products. I guess defender made ten.

3 comments

In college I remember one room had some kind of all-in-one PCs built into the desks. It would have been useful.

Except they were unusably slow. Literally.

Log in when class starts, you may get control after 10+ minutes. Opening a web browser was a mistake you may not live to regret.

The network there was not fast. The various security stuff slowed every computer down a lot.

I suspect they were already older and maybe underspec. Probably had 4200 RPM disks or something.

But the combination meant they were 100% worthless.

Ten protection layers! This is the reverse of the seven proxies meme.
Can you elaborate?
How? I’m not going to name agencies or security products if that’s what you mean.

It was a US government owned/issued computer. It had 9 fully overlapping/redundant endpoint security products running. Opening websites took ages. Using specialized apps like IDEs was unlikely to fully or consistently work. As I understand it, this situation is not unusual in government/heavily regulated workstation environments elsewhere.