Most of the hardest problems I’ve worked weren’t technical. They were standoffs between people who all wanted something reasonable and couldn’t get out of each other’s way. A corporate standard lands in a business unit. The business unit pushes back. Corporate digs in. From the outside it looks like a fight. It almost never is. The parties in that standoff are not opposed. Their interests are misaligned — which is a different thing, and a far more workable one.
In security, being correct is the floor, not the finish line. A finding can be technically right, fully defensible, and backed by the published rules — and still be the wrong thing to act on the way you acted on it. That gap is where a lot of hard-won credibility quietly drains away. I want to give that gap a name: the goodwill budget. It’s the standing willingness of everyone around you — engineers, customers, executives, partners — to keep saying yes to security when you ask.
As reported by Wired and other outlets, on June 8th, 2021 many Alexa-enabled devices such as select Ring cameras and smart devices will automatically create a shared network across the United States for authorized devices by carving out a little bandwidth from their host networks. The only way to prevent your devices from participating is to opt out. Maybe you are not interested in sharing even a small amount of bandwidth with other devices, perhaps you are wary of the types of security issues which may come along with new communication protocols, or maybe the opt-out model does not sit well with you.