The military, in an effort to stop the spread of a destructive worm, has banned the use of flash drives, CDs and other media by its personnel. The ban applies to computers connected two Department of Defense networks, the non-secure NIPRNet and the secure SIPRNet.

The worm, Agent.biz, is spread by the use of flash drives and the like. Once a computer has been infected, the worm fetches code from some Evil location. What concerns the military’s IT guys is that this code could be anything—harmless JPEGs of monkeys in funny hats or the equivalent of “rm -rf.”

Now regular folk in the military, if they want to send a photo to their family, have to go to approved labs to get on with their computing rather than their own laptop, which must be a huge pain in the neck.