Wired’s Danger Room has the story:

The U.S. Marine Corps has banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks, effective immediately.

“These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” reads a Marine Corps order, issued Monday. “The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”

The Marines’ ban will last a year. It was drawn up in response to a late July warning from U.S. Strategic Command, which told the rest of the military it was considering a Defense Department-wide ban on the Web 2.0 sites, due to network security concerns. Scams, worms, and Trojans often spread unchecked throughout social media sites, passed along from one online friend to the next. “The mechanisms for social networking were never designed for security and filtering. They make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users,” a Stratcom source told Danger Room.

Yet many within the Pentagon’s highest ranks find value in the Web 2.0 tools. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has 4,000 followers on Twitter. The Department of Defense is getting ready to unveil a new home page, packed with social media tools. The Army recently ordered all U.S. bases to provide access to Facebook. Top generals now blog from the battlefield.

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Rex Hammock writes:

Yes, Virginia, there is a Web 2.0: I got this email from a young rexblog reader this morning, and I thought I should share it, knowing there are lots of children out there who this year are wondering the same thing:

Dear Rexblog:

I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Web 2.0.
Papa says, ‘If you see it on the rexblog, it’s so.’
Please tell me the truth; is there a Web 2.0?

VIRGINIA O’HANLON.
vohanlon@nospam.com.
Here is my response:

Dear Virginia,

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see….

Not believe in Web 2.0! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire Tim O’Reilly to come over to your house and explain Web 2.0 to you, but even if Tim O’Reilly showed up and you didn’t understand what the heck he was talking about, what would that prove? So what if nobody can actually explain Web 2.0 without using techno babble and business buzzwords? That is no sign that there is no Web 2.0. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see — and that’s why they develop buzzwords. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

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Web 2.0 defined for the non-courant.