August, 2009

Privacy for cyberbullies?

“If a parent comes to you… and says that their child is being anonymously cyberbullied by someone from school, and their child is being affected at school because of it - and you do your investigation and find out the identity of the bully… do you have to keep the identity of that bully private because of FERPA?”

There’s a discussion of this issue on the Cyberbullying Prevention Website.

How to send a private message on Twitter

File this under “Lessons learned through pain”: When I first started playing online Scrabble, I frequently tried to look a word up in the dictionary and didn’t realize until too late that I’d been in the chat function instead. Leaving my friends to ponder what I meant by “kraqi,” for example. And then I’d have to cleverly cover my tracks by following up with “is not a word, apparently.” Slick.

So now I’m terrified of doing something similar on Twitter and looking like an idiot not just to my nearest and dearest but to the hordes of people that might, potentially, see my message.

The only way to send a private message on Twitter, as it turns out, is to DM — direct message. Not reply or retweet, both of which will make your message public.

So, um, that said — I probably wasn’t talking to you, per se, when I asked you to pick up a bottle of wine on the way home. Then again, could it hurt?

HP upgrading storage line to 6 Gbps SAS drives

Beth Pariseau reported on HP’s plans to upgrade its storage line:

Hewlett-Packard has pledged to upgrade its entire storage line to 6 Gbps small form factor (2.5-inch) Serial-Attached SCSI drives, and many expect the whole data storage industry to follow by offering 6-gig SAS as an alternative to Fibre Channel (FC) in enterprise data storage systems.