Filesharing banned in Antarctica

For fear of viruses and bandwidth concerns

19 August 2009 10:15 GMT / By Duncan Geere

The icy wastes of Antarctica, like Hull, are a little less free today, as employees of the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) have been banned from using any P2P filesharing programs.

There's only so much bandwidth available that goes to the South Pole, and USAP is worried that it'll get swamped by people trying to download the latest episode of The Wire, or by malicious software taking over computers and flooding the pipes.

Online gaming has also been banned, so inhabitants won't be able to hit World of Warcraft if they start getting lonely. You'd expect pings down there to be too poor for gaming anyway, though.

We've contacted the British Antarctic Survey to find out what its policy for filesharing is in its Halley, Sky-Blu, Fossil Bluff and Rothera bases on the continent. We'll update this post if they reply.

Via: sophos.com

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Software, Online, ISPs, Movie downloads, Music downloads