Agreed.

"Linked to" does not only mean identifying accounts that used a school email account to register for the service.

It also can mean, Sally Student logged into their personal FB account (registered to a personal email account) while logged onto a school device with her school credentials. When doing full content inspection (like Gaggle, GoGuardian, Securly, LightSpeed, and others), these kinds of correlations are not just possible, but are being made and reported on to the school. If you're concerned about privacy for your children, the answer today is, do nothing personal on any school device. Period.

It begs the question as to what is a reasonable expectation of privacy for students, and to what extent is the school expected to monitor students. It seems to me the debate needs to include this more than it has to date.

Part of my $dayjob is to support K-12 state-wide in certain technology areas. What you say is certainly the case for what the business is advocating for in our environment - tools for monitoring student computer use, content, creation, and communication - all with a heavy emphasis on self-harm detection. Including filtering and full browsing inspection on 1:1 take home devices when offnet. Some districts have implemented tools similar to, and including Gaggle with results where they have intervened and linked up parents and students with counseling resources to help the student.

On the surface, it seems reasonable - everyone wants to give tools to school teachers and faculty to keep the environment focused on learning and to help kids having emotional problems, or to intervene in bullying situations.

However, it seems very Orwellian to me with so many parallels to 1984 that trouble me.

Yes, if the school funds services and devices, and has in place AUP's with the necessary language, they can do whatever they want in regards to monitoring. But as a parent, I don't want the school district to monitor my child when they are outside of the classroom. Because frankly, it's none of their business. Yes I understand that theoretically, if the district issues my child a device for takehome use, it's their device and they can do whatever they want, but as a parent, it's also my right to do whatever is in my power to ensure a reasonable level of privacy for my child, including (IMO) working to defeat any monitoring mechanisms when at home (via mechanisms outside the device), up to and including not allowing my child to use the device when not in school.

It's a difficult topic because "think of the children" (and rightly so), but on the other side are legitimate concerns for a reasonable expectation of privacy.

And this doesn't even delve into the nuances of risk accepted by the school system by embarking on monitoring in situations where potential ofr self-harm was detected, but a notification was missed and a child harmed themselves.

In my opinion (and that of lawyers in our environment), there is a significant and notable lack of case law covering this kind of surveillance and monitoring.

iOS 11.2.5 beta just dropped, so maybe, but I doubt it. Until it is, more hush and less drivel please.

Itâ(TM)s.

Itâ(TM)s actually kind of amazing. For a basic firewall, ScreenOS is so rock-solid stable and âoejust worksâ.
As nice as the Junos CLI is, itâ(TM)s a shame that Juniper killed ScreenOS.

Seriously. MS's strength was the OS? Ummm. OK.

However, I do agree with you. They have lost focus on what was working (not that it was a good product, ie Windows 9x and NT), and because they lost focus on what was working for them as a company, other's are now far ahead (Apple) or catching up (Linux) to the projected features of Vista. Oh, BTW, we know Vista will have the typical initial release issues that Windows releases have.

Microsoft dead? Nope. They will still be around for a long time - much like IBM, but we will see a shift to alternative operating systems and desktop software products within the next three years.