Anyway the contract employees were not allowed to bring them on site. Digital cameras, even laptops unless you specificly neede one for your job, all banned.

from the "duh" department.

so you are saying that people who bring in virtually unlimited storage devices in their pockets are a risk for data theft? say it ain't so.

we can't bring any recordable media, cameras, or even have cassette recorders (or cell phones).

blah blah, nothing to see here.

When I worked a short job last year for the IRS, I was careful to ask before bringing my iPod in to listen to. They didn't care, and I wasn't near a computer anyway, but this was the sort of place with about every square foot of floor space was under camera surveillance.

Let's see...they make USB drives that look like pens and watches and have a significant download (or upload) capacity, and they are picking on the iPod (by name, btw.)....

If employees are going to steal information from a company, banning iPods isn't going to stop it, or even slow it down. There is the floppy disk, burning CDs, or just printing the stuff or photocopying. Or, if you want to go really hi-tech, attaching a collar to the monitor cable and transmitting the screen to be received elsewhere (and it doesn't take much to do that, btw. Anybody remember TEMPEST?)

Malicious attacks at the hardware level are very difficult to stop. The methods suggested by Gartner will also cause a great deal of heartburn with most corporate users. It is treating them all like criminals, which doesn't generally go over well. And it is nigh impossible with laptop users.

I work for a very large media company as a PHP and ASP developer. A few months after they hired me I purchase a brand new laptop. Without even asking or thinking twice I started bringing it to work and connecting it right into the network. My boss didn't say a word other than "hey, that's a damn fine laptop you have there!" Over the next few months, to make things easy for me, I had copied 100% of the content of the internal servers as well as making complete duplicates of the databases - over 50 Gig's in all - directly onto my laptop hard drive (it is an 80 gig drive). I do all my work on my laptop and then upload it to the server and database at work and untill recently hearing all this stuff about theft of code, etc, I never thought about what I was doing as being "bad." Now I'm left very uneasy as the realization hits that I have 100% of the intellectual property of my employer on my laptop. I think I'd better have a conference with my boss over this and figure out a way to resolve this before it becomes an issue of concern among upper management, all of whom obviously never thought about this as thumb drives and laptops are pretty commonplace at work.

Nice way to make copy and grab a headline. A greater security risk than a bored employee surfing the 'Net and visiting questionable site loaded with spyware, trojan horses, etc.? I don't think so.

How many organizations provide employees with a CD burner on their PC and a USB port that will handle a flash memory backup device?

Just another way to grab a headline.

Knowing human nature, banning iPods from the workplace will only increase the attraction and consumer demand.