The Department of Defense bans YouTube, MySpace, Pandora.com and other sites, saying they may compromise the security of unclassified military networks. They sure do eat up the bandwidth, too!!! Serving abroad in the military can be a real hardship. Even if you’re not in daily danger of losing life and limb, there are the months away from home, separation from family and loved ones and the monotony of military life. In recent years, of course, the Internet has made that a bit easier — with everything from Skype to social networking sites making it easier to communicate with your friends and family, and let the world know what you’re doing, even from thousands of miles away.But now it looks like the U.S. Department of Defense is going to make that a bit harder for soldiers: blocking DoD access to popular media, content sharing and social networking sites. In a memo sent out to US forces in Korea, U.S. Army General B.B. Bell said that the DoD has a “growing concern” about its unclassfied network, known as NIPRNET and that military personnel’s use of “recreational Internet sites” is limiting DoD network bandwidth and “posing a significant operational security challenge.” Accordingly, DoD is limitng access to a grab bag of popular sites including social networking behemouth myspace.com, video sharing site youtube.com and ifilm.com, Internet radio stations pandora.com, live365.com and 1.fm, as well as mtv.com, photo sharing site photobucket.com and more.The ban is effective beginning Monday, May 14. However, members of the military will still be allowed to use the sites from home computers and over non-DoD ISPs. Security seems to be the primary motivation for the crackdown. U.S. military members are reminded to be careful about forwarding links or files from personal – to DoD computers and to be mindful of threats like identity theft on the sites. Of course, sites like MySpace are a sword that cuts both ways for the military. The Marines, among others, have found MySpace a fruitful recruiting tool. However, the Military, like the rest of the U.S. Government, has also faced criticism from Congress over lax cybersecurity practices that have led to whopper breaches of unclassified networks. Security