Government workers now allowed to clear browser history
By John Lister
A White House department has issued advice to help government agencies meet federal guidelines on security in both XP and Vista. Surprisingly, though, the guidelines seem to have been relaxed this year.
The whole affair is something of an alphabet soup, but the heart of it is the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the largest Presidential department, which oversees all federal agencies.
Among the OMB’s activities is enforcing the Federal Desktop Core Configuration, which gives all agencies certain settings which must be applied to all their desktop and laptop computers (it doesn’t affect servers). There are currently more than 500 designated settings in Vista and XP, 233 of them relating to security.
Computer security’s clearly a major issue for the government: the guidelines have not only been worked out with the help of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, but both the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security have been involved. Agencies not only have to meet the guidelines, but they must use a designated system for verifying this.
This week’s advice (PDF link) is based on agencies running Vista Service Pack 1 and XP Service Pack 2, though the OMB doesn’t forsee any major issues arising from XP Service Pack 3. The OMB has also announced it will now allow different settings depending on the particular type of machine and the way it is used; each machine now falls into one of five separate categories.
Among the changes in the new guidelines (Excel spreadsheet link) are the removal of requirements that computers be set up to block users delete their browsing history, and to disable Java on Intranets, both of which are now optional. Agencies will also now be allowed to let users create desktop shortcuts and have the Windows startup sound play, both of which were previously banned.
The changes could be portrayed as a dangerous relaxation of security measures. However, given the understandable but immense bureaucracy involved in the scheme, it’s likely the changes were negotiated as a nod to the need for individual systems administrators to exercise more judgment over their particular set-up.
Of course, how closely the guidelines are followed is open to question anyway. It’s pretty tough to imagine that in the past nobody operating a government computer ever heard the Windows start-up sound or created a shortcut.
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