Is cyber bullying an issue among young people?

Cyber bullying is a form of harrassment commonly in young pepole of the school going age using computers. Due to a more stricter educational environments "bullies" have resorted to use computers as a weapon other than guns and other weapons that were used in the 20th century. These bullies may be students or other people with an intention of toturing innocent victims for reasons bets known to them.

Effects of cyber-bullying on the victims:
i-Safe America has conducted a survey to find the effects and causes of cyber-bullying. They came up with the following results:

• 57% of the students said they had something hurtful said to them on line and 13% said it was quite often
• 53% had said something hurtful online,
• 35% have been threatned on line with 5% saying it happens quite often,
• 42% have been bullied on line with 7% quite often,
• 20% have recieved mean e-mails and,
• 58% have not told their parents.(National i-Safe America,2004)

These results prove that cyber-bullying is indeed a pressing issue among young people. It is sad that most schools fail to control cyber-bullying.

Some of the effects of cyber-bullying( common in school children) are:

• Low self esteem
• Low grades average
• stress and fear that can lead to cases like suicide and running away from home.

This is indeed a major issue that has to be dealt with.

Some of the solutions that can make this situation better are:

• Establishing councelling groups that can encourage victims to come out in the open and share their fears. At least this will give them a sense of being cared for.

So much can be done to reduce these cases and help these innocent souls. The bullies can also be helped because they may be sufffering from social problems and aggresion and they take it out on these innocent victims. So it is not only the victims that need help but the bullies also need help.

If anyone has comments or contributions to reduce this creeping disease please feel free to post your contributions on my site and make a difference.

Acknowledgements: Young, S.K.,Bennett,L.L,Yung-Joo,K., Alan,H.(2006)School bullying and Youth violence:Causes of Psychopathologic behavior.2006:63;1035-1041

Is cloud storage a safe way to store data?

Cloud storage is the storing of data using web facilities. Google docs is an example of cloud storage facility used to store documents. However these facilities have drawn questions as to whether they are safe to store data without any manipulation by outside intruders.

Some of the questions are :

• Should Government be allowed to access these storage facilities without permission of the onwer of the data?
• What type of data should be stored using cloud storage?
• Is this data safe from felony computer crimes?

All these questions are in the minds of potential cloud storage users.

I will start with the advantages of cloud storage:

• Workers can access business documents anytime ans anywhere.
• The users can increase or decrease the use of the computing resources and services easily and flexibley.

But are these advantages enough to trust cloud storage? Take a look at these cases that took place in 2008:

In February 2008 Amazon S3 suffered two outages. In August of that same year G-mail was not available twice for two hours, RIM's blackberry service was out for 18 hours. From my point of view cloud storage can not give a perfect service but it is by far better than on site storage.

No storage facility can guarantee 100% perfection because one way or another way computer hackers are going to find a way around.

Let me know what you think by posting you comments on my site.

Acknowledgements:Kim, W.(n.d.).Cloud Computing: Today and Tomorrow. South korea: Sungkyunkwan University.