Computerworld, Dan Verton, Lucas Mearian

When Matt Goldstein entered medical school at Stanford, his instructors warned him about keeping Facebook or Twitter pages, saying that social media activity could lead to violations of HIPAA patient privacy rules.

As he prepares to begin his residency, Goldstein has once again received the now familiar warning. "I actually just got an email from my residency program, and they cautioned us strongly about social media and about using it judiciously."

True privacy can be hard to come by in the socially enabled online world, but Twitter on Thursday announced that it has joined Firefox maker Mozilla in taking a big step forward for users.

Specifically, the popular microblogging site has signed onto enabling Firefox's Do Not Track feature, making it possible for Firefox users on Twitter to opt out of third-party tracking cookies used for advertising and other purposes.

The upcoming shift from Double Data Rate 3 (DDR3) RAM to its successor, DDR4, will herald in a significant boost in both memory performance and capacity for data center hardware and consumer products alike.

Cloud service provider Pogoplug today unveiled Pogoplug Team, which allows home offices and small businesses to turn file servers or spare PCs into pools of storage accessible from the Web.

Pogoplug Team basically creates a private cloud for businesses, allowing them to store information within their own firewalls rather than on third-party services such as Google Drive, Dropbox or Box.net.

Seagate said it will demonstrate a 12Gbps SAS solid-state drive (SSD) at the SCSI Trade Association Technology Showcase this week.

Seagate's announcement comes on the heels of Western Digital's release of the industry's first 12Gbps SSD, which doubles the hardware interconnect throughput over the SAS interface currently used by most products. Seagate, however, did not say when the drive would ship.

An illustration of how the diamond-tipped tools were used to compress GSTJohns Hopkins University engineers are using diamonds to change the properties of an alloy used in phase-change memory, a change that could lead to the development higher capacity storage systems that retain data more quickly and last longer than current media.

The process, explained this month in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), focused on changes to the inexpensive GST phase-change memory alloy that's composed of germanium, antimony and tellurium.

An example of cellular images that game players are given to chooseResearchers at UCLA have created an online crowdsourcing game designed to let players help doctors in key areas of the world speed the lengthy process of distinguishing malaria-infected red blood cells from healthy ones.

For instance, the researchers hope that users of the game can help in areas like sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria accounts for some 20 percent of all childhood deaths, The disease, which affects about 210 million people annually worldwide, accounts for almost 40 percent of all hospitalizations throughout Africa.

Privacy advocates have been voicing strong concerns over how data stored on Google Drive may be used during and after customers are actively engaged in using the cloud service.

Hands on with Google Drive

Leveraging the power of 5000 stores, Wal-Mart plans to expand its Vudu cloud video service from U.S. shores to as many as 30 countries beginning in June, including European, Asian, and Central and South American nations, according to reports.

The new cloud movie service, officially launched earlier this month, is expected to give Netflix a run for its money.

The 800-pound gorilla has landed and is leveraging its existing relationship with hundreds of millions of users to port them to their cloud storage and file sharing service Google Drive. Can smaller cloud storage players survive this assault?

"When the 800-pound gorilla jumps in the pool it usually makes a splash. It doesn't mean it can swim well. There is room in the market for multiple players, but Google's entry puts pressure on the competition, especially smaller players," said Gartner Research Director Michael Gartenberg.

Just as with an Apple product launch, Google has had to do next to nothing to create buzz around its long-awaited Google Drive cloud storage service. The latest: Google Drive will launch next week.

Of course, prognosticators have predicted much the same thing numerous times in the past, predictions that turned out to be wrong.

DALLAS -- David Richter, vice president of Kimberly-Clark's infrastructure solutions group, knows creating a culture of innovation can be messy, but it's still rewarding.

David Richter. Source: http://www.eiseverywhere.comBy encouraging his employees to come to him with innovative ideas, and rewarding them whether the ideas succeed or fail, he's been able to increase efficiency, reduce costs and boost morale.