This system is worthless because there are no actions associated with the different levels. Strange that DHS has always been at yellow or orange but the military's FPCON has always been at Alpha+ or Bravo. What we really need to do is replace the system with DoDs FPCON and be done with it.

Ding Ding Ding. This is taking what we already have in the DSN military phone system and applying it to the tactical and strategic networks. This is more of an issue on the tactical Joint Network Node (JNN) networks as the military continues to expand with the entire BCS suite. CPOF alone demands priority networks to work well between sites. As everything gets digitized the network is getting saturated and it cant grow like this without some sort of traffic control. A JNN can take a good amount of load but the associated Command Post Nodes (CPN) max out real quick.

In a DoD environment I Tunes, Amazon Downloader, and other legal forms of downloading music are prohibited from being on the systems as being outside the baseline. I can only speak for the Army but the regulation does not consider music in general stealing. Quoting from AR 25-2 page 27...
 
 

In short DISA wrote bad flash training on this one scenario. DoD 8500 series and agency specific regulations DO NOT refer to it as stealing.

While is might be OK to say FU to MS, saying FU to IT departments ensures that it wont be installed per company policy. Anything that you want business to adopt on a serious scale has to be something they can manage across the company with ease. For Windows that means being able to mange settings and restrictions through group policy and having an MSI installer. Without that company policy will not really change because IE's management cost is already accepted as part of the enterprise while you have to have a separate process for Firefox. If your running MS on the desktop, the plan is built in for IE making any other cost extra. I realize that both are available for Firefox BUT they come from organizations other than Mozilla. While IT might be fine with getting it from an outside source, management defiantly balks on this.

The FederalGgovernment uses Linux as well and there are published security standards for it. The NSA and DISA both publish security guides and implementation guidelines for Linux. NSA Secure Configuration Guides DISA STIGS . This will require training for your typical enforcement droid but is not out of reach. To say that regulation would require Microsoft only is ignoring the fact that *nix is very much in use in the Federal Government

The multiple computer problem in a domain is solved by setting up a PKI through certificate services. This combined with a logon script to encrypt the profile directory takes care of those problems. If you are doing EFS on a large scale in a domain you would be crazy not to use a PKI. Another advantage to this is should the certificate get lost you can set recovery keys that a admin can use to decrypt the data.

This can also in a windows domain be used to create bitlocker keys as well which encrypts the entire system.

There's a good chance this has nothing at all to do with Dell. Laptops are extremely notorious for going "missing" in the APO system and since that same system uses quite a few local nationals there's really no recourse. The problem is so wide spread that some downrange units were forbidding military members from having laptops shipped to them. There's nothing Dell can do about it since the product leaves their hands when it's shipped. The Post Office just hands it off to the APO center in New York and all tracking stops at that point. Because of the way APO is set up, anyone at anytime in any point between New York and Afghanistan can essentially pick up your laptop and walk off with it. When that happens the best you can hope for is that you had the laptop insured and the Post Office isn't going to squirm around too much in getting the insurance back to you.