Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on May 19, 2006 02:18 AM
I'm not surprised to see this. The US military, like all militaries, has to be particularly concerned with its systems getting "0wn3d", because certain information that a DoD member might have, while not worthy of being classified, still shouldn't be disseminated willy-nilly. Examples are locations of battleships, standard configurations of servers, and passwords.
Now, that said, I don't believe that sites like NewsForge and www.linux.org should be banned. On the contrary, if more DoD personnel read such sites, they might be inspired to lobby from within for more widespread usage of Free Software, just for the security benefits alone. NewsForge, from what I can tell, provides *links* to Free Software, not the Free Software itself. Tucows, I can understand. Cult of the Dead Cow, I understand. "System cracker" sites, I certainly can understand.
I can even understand the general ban on "freeware/shareware" sites. Why? Simple; most people, certainly to include DoD employees, do not understand what they're doing when they install software, be it Free Software or not. You can create a nice, big vector for attack if you install something like VNC on your box and misconfigure it "to let my colleagues share data with me." Oops.
This applies to any organization, not just the US military. Whenever I build a network, I do *NOT* give users root/Administrator access to their boxes by default. I grant such access only when directly ordered to by the boss, and then only to the VIP's for which the boss specifically makes me do this. Of course, VIP's are typically uber-clueless with computers and are often quickly "owned" as a result, thus compromising the network as a whole. AARGH!
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Posted by: Anonymous Coward on May 19, 2006 02:18 AMNow, that said, I don't believe that sites like NewsForge and www.linux.org should be banned. On the contrary, if more DoD personnel read such sites, they might be inspired to lobby from within for more widespread usage of Free Software, just for the security benefits alone. NewsForge, from what I can tell, provides *links* to Free Software, not the Free Software itself. Tucows, I can understand. Cult of the Dead Cow, I understand. "System cracker" sites, I certainly can understand.
I can even understand the general ban on "freeware/shareware" sites. Why? Simple; most people, certainly to include DoD employees, do not understand what they're doing when they install software, be it Free Software or not. You can create a nice, big vector for attack if you install something like VNC on your box and misconfigure it "to let my colleagues share data with me." Oops.
This applies to any organization, not just the US military. Whenever I build a network, I do *NOT* give users root/Administrator access to their boxes by default. I grant such access only when directly ordered to by the boss, and then only to the VIP's for which the boss specifically makes me do this. Of course, VIP's are typically uber-clueless with computers and are often quickly "owned" as a result, thus compromising the network as a whole. AARGH!
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