Yes. Precisely.

Software does only what people tell it to do.

Heh, you do know that it is indeed the politicians who trot out the old “nothing to hide” bullshit, don’t you? The POINT was to hold them to their own brainless ideology, and you totally missed it. We are simply applying exactly what they said to THEM, not to us. Why not? Seems fair to me, don’t you think? Or are you saying that they should be exempt?

You don’t really know what you’re saying do you? I think you completely got the wrong end of the stick there bud.

So yes. I stand by what I said.

You really think that will cost billions? Or even millions? I don’t think so.

Ah

Shocking.

Cool beans!

Lets put these American politicians (whose hands are in the cartels pockets, and vice-versa) in a re-education camp!

I like it!

Robert Rox!

Re-education is the key!

ok, so like who has a few billion to spare to beat the American propaganda machine?

Anyone?

That’s what my company did when I signed up, it specifically says no P2P or related, but you can install GVim or Firefox or GCC because those are work related.

As I have posted before, a police officer took sensitive information about upcoming cases home on a police notebook PC, which he then used to download files off a P2P network, got infected with a virus, and ended up sending the sensitive data over the network.

Similar occurrences like this happened several times in the same deportment, as well as on several SDF (Japan’s self defense force) and government notebook PCs (all of which were not allowed to be used outside of the office, or for personal use).

This prompted a knee-jerk response of the police attacking P2P as “evil” and government officials falling in line with the labels in creating laws against the “illegal” downloading of music/video/and software.

Boy it’s amazing on what some people will stoop to, just because people in their own organization do not know the first thing about security.

Just my two cents

I think you’re out to lunch on this one. You think you’re so clever but in reality, you’re suffering from a strawman fallacy. How exactly does keeping your credit card or income tax or real name private on a forum like this compare to covering your ass for human rights abuses or violations of foreign/domestic/international law?

When you have something to hide it is something YOU DID, not your Social Insurance/Security Number. Wake up man, if the government employees made a mistake and a bunch of social security numbers were shared on p2p networks, then they would not refer to it as “sensitive material.”

However, field manuals that explain how to torture someone, illegal in the US, WOULD be classified as “sensitive material” and thus politicians would certainly not want that out. Hence, covering their ass! Another example maybe? How about Bills that allow FBI and NSA to read your email, monitor your phone calls, scan your video/library rentals, financial records, etc.. WITHOUT WARRANT? Maybe that might be something to hide? Huh? Yeah, that’s really the same as someone’s address.

And the “something to hide” was EXACTLY what politicians say to citizens when they pass laws for “safety” that invade privacy. I guess you missed that sarcasm directed at politicians as well.

… low IQ thing

Government employees were installing file sharing software on government computers. They shouldn’t have been doing that in the first place, but they were. ”

Your absolutely right , and no we didn’t misunderstand the issue.
The problem is PEOPLE not p2p software, and the government is using this issue to further their desire to clamp down on, restrict,
or make illegal P2P software, when the problem isn’t the software at all, as you correctly pointed out.

It’s the buttheads that used it improperly, that THEY HIRED.

gotcha.

Government employees were installing file sharing software on government computers. They shouldn’t have been doing that in the first place, but they were. Some of that software, by default, automatically shared the entire My Documents directory. Or it searched out files of specific types to share. In some cases, this made confidential information available to the public.

And to those who would ask what they have to hide, let’s see you post your real name and address, your credit card details, your income tax information, your private email. What, you don’t want to post all that stuff? Why not? What are you hiding?

While I blame the employees for installing personal software on government computers, I also don’t think any file sharing program should share a single file unless you specifically tell it to.