Red alert! Red alert! iPods can destroy your business if you let your employees so much as set foot onto the premises while carrying one! Worse yet, they can spread SARS, diphtheria, and the Ebola virus, thus sending your employee health costs through the roof, and extended use can turn your personnel into mindless zombie slaves bereft of reason and humanity that unquestioningly serve only the dark whims of Steve Jobs himself-- and we're told that sort of thing can be really bad for morale! Run! RUN NOW!!!

Whew. We just blew our entire quarter's exclamation point budget on a single paragraph. Here's hoping nothing exciting happens until October, because otherwise we're going to seem a lot less interested than we really are.

Anyway, here's what we're on about: faithful viewer Andy Van Buren noted the existence of a new Gartner report which warns businesses that "the unauthorized and uncontrolled use of portable storage devices" including "disk-based MP3 players, such as Apple's iPod" can lead to all sort of havoc-- such as employees inadvertently bringing viruses in by sneakernet, which the corporate firewall and mailserver can't do a thing about. Gartner also raises the possibility that evil employees can use these devices to swipe massive amounts of "sensitive and valuable data," presumably for the subsequent sale to the highest-bidding competitor. And even if non-evil employees are carrying sensitive info home on an iPod, said iPod might even get lost or stolen.

These are all valid (and, we would have thought, blindingly obvious) points, but even though we can understand Gartner's suggestion that businesses "should forbid the use of uncontrolled, privately owned devices with corporate PCs," we're a little concerned with the possibility that paranoid middle managers who are far too important and "busy" to do anything but skim might simply see "iPods are security risks" and ban their use outright. For most people, having a day job is only about three degrees from intolerable as it is; imagine if you couldn't even bring your iPod into the office. (We'd scream here for effect, but, you know, the exclamation point thing.)

Indeed, the "skimming middle manager" is scads more likely to overreact with a sweeping policy decision now that news services everywhere are reporting on the Gartner thingy with big, scary headlines like "Analyst: iPods a network security risk" and "Does Your IPod Pose a Security Risk? Businesses should consider banning the devices, new study suggests." What's particularly irksome is that Gartner never specifically targets the iPod in its report, since the firm also warns that "any kind of pocket-sized portable FireWire hard drive," USB hard drive or keychain drive," or "digital cameras with smart media cards, memory sticks, compact flash, and other memory media" are equally dangerous.

But hey, stick "iPod" in an article title, especially a title that implies that iPods are anything less than the perfect and divine creations they are, and you just know people are going to come read. Unless they only skim. But either way, it's ratings gold, baby.

Not that we'd ever stoop to such a thing, of course.