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US House Passes P2P Ban On Federal Networks
An anonymous reader writes "Recently, the US House of Representatives passed a bill in an attempt to ban peer-to-peer file-sharing applications on federal computers and networks. Similar bills have been proposed before, apparently in response to confidential government documents being found on LimeWire. The text of the bill, however, provides a very broad definition of 'peer-to-peer file sharing software,' and may extend to more than they intend (SMB? LDAP?)."
The US Air Force has this and it is a major pain.
It use to be that a base could keep its own list and the local people could control it, however a few years ago that was removed and now there is a central office that does all approvals. This office takes an average around 1 year to approve major software releases,aka Microsoft, and if it not then it takes longer.
However even then it is a people problem, the local base level admin and security people total ignore this and install almost anything they want.
Nah, the government will just contract that stuff out to the likes of Halliburton and Xe (formerly Blackwater).
Ron
Technically, there are a few Defense Department regs that are supposed to require Ada. "Special" exemptions are granted as a matter of course though.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Government contractors are covered by this bill as well.