People have been occasionally caught for years leaving Silicon Valley/SFO to return across the Pacific with briefcases full of CD-ROM's. Most workers are honest but the few make for spectacular security failures in a business environment.. Now that affordable SD cards in the gigabyte range are so available it would seem that few will be caught in the future. Most Silicon Valley companies probably have little private IP these days. Not running fast - generating more - because of the recession will cost a lot, IMHO.

Years ago Sun workstations/Unix separated eecute and read file permissions making copying, say, CAD packages more difficult. Windows, of course, doesn't do that and still doesn't do a lot of what a commercial system would be expected to do. IT does have blade PC's available of course but the crucial uses in engineering usually demand a local PC and often administrative permissions and operation with the covers off.

Several units are not waiting for the IT people to fix this. A common low tech solution involves a tube of epoxy being used to fill the USB ports. This fix is instantaneous and actually fool proof.

getting rid of windows instead?

Any sort of removeable usb flash storage device. USB drives, external hard drives, media cards, you name it. Anything that can store data and hooks up via USB.

The major issue for us is that there was zero warning, no advanced notice. So now there are piles of people who pictures, documents or other job realted data made inaccessiable.

If only there were a fair selction of programs that they could buy made to look for exaclty what they are worried about. It would have been even nicer if these programs have been on the market for years and have proven themself reliable.

Oh wait ...

...until the carrier pigeons get Bird Flu. Then we're back to smoke signals, until second hand smoke catches up.

I tunes in itself is a virus.

What wasn't reported: Some people in the Army have to use digital cameras to do their job... and digital cameras are "removable media", too... Ooops!

Are you sure about the ipod and such being included? They after all are not running in file mode and need itunes to transfer songs, making it a bit unlikely that a virus would land on them and then would crawl back onto another computer