Most of these measures have to do with the amount of risk that a company is willing to put up with. Having worked for pharmaceutical companies and defense contractors, I can attest to the fact that they have a certain degree of justifiable paranoia when it comes to security.
Most of these types of companies have their own IM services (like Microsoft Communicator) and have them configured not to keep logs of conversations. The main reason for this is that (like email) IM conversations can be used in court cases (as Microsoft has seen). Similarly, companies will sometimes block investor sites, and rumor sites to prevent proprietary information from leaking out. The standard procedure is that if someone asks you for information about the company, or provides misinformation about the company, it's not your job to correct that information, or supply information about the company. The public relations person is usually responsible for dealing with the public. The usual policy is that you don't discuss business outside of company offices, or on non-company hardware. As far as banning cell phones, most companies will ban these for two reasons: you can take pictures with them, and if they have an SD card in them, you could walk out the door with proprietary information in the SD card. Many companies will also block USB ports, SD card readers, and CD writers on computers for similar reasons. Some companies will allow cell phones as long as they do not have cameras, but there are also companies that have "secure areas" where you place your phone on a shelf before entering the room. ITunes is often banned because you can easily fill up a hard drive with your tunes/podcasts, and it eats up bandwidth when your downloading songs and podcasts, or sharing your tunes with your co-workers. Encrypted harddrives are used because some types of databases use Social Security numbers as identifiers for patients, or employees. There have been numerous cases where this type of personal identifier information was on an unencrypted hard drive on a laptop that was stolen while going through airport security, or waiting in a hotel lobby for a client. Hope this helps explain a few things. Mark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javapo...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
