Don't let your kids use your computer

The US Congress' oversight committee held hearings on the security of Peer to Peer networking recently. This raised an issue that's bugged me for sometime about programs like Limewire.

Programs like Limewire automatically share parts of your "my documents" folder. For many people there's some pretty confidential information in there.

For business users this can have some pretty serious ramifications. The CNET article on this story has an example.

..the Department of Transportation experienced an incident in which an employee's daughter installed LimeWire on the home computer that her mother occasionally uses for telework--and misconfigured it in such a way that documents from the department and the National Archives were open to others using the network..

That's a pretty typical scenario for a home office or small business: The kids get on mum or dad's work computer and Very Bad Things Happen.

The moral here is to keep work and play computers separate. Make the kids buy their own computer and stick Limewire on it.