Beginning this fall, all incoming students in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania will keep blogs of their academic interests and development. Unlike typical blogs, the Penn blogs will not be public. Access is limited to the student, the student’s advisor, and, under certain circumstances, authorized university officials. Penn has […]

A new initiative aims to change the perception of computer professionals as a bunch of guys who lack social skills by encouraging a broader range of students to pursue degrees and careers in computer science. The Stars Alliance is an organization currently representing 10 colleges and universities, though officials said they hope to attract […]

Microsoft has announced that the libraries of the University of California and the University of Toronto will participate in its book-scanning project, known as Windows Live Book Search. The two libraries joining Microsoft’s program, which is being run together with the Open Content Alliance, will allow the project to scan their public-domain materials. Unlike Google’s […]

A federal appeals court has ruled against a challenge to an expansion of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) to cover network traffic. CALEA requires providers of telecommunications services to make their systems available to law enforcement for authorized wiretapping. The FCC has sought to expand CALEA to cover Internet networks also. The […]

Government regulators in several European countries are taking Apple to court over the way its iTunes music service functions. Norwegian officials have said that Apple’s user agreement violates the country’s law and that the inability to play iTunes songs on non-Apple devices likely also is illegal in Norway. Specifically at issue are parts of Apple’s […]

Project Gutenberg is organizing a book fair featuring online texts from its own digital library as well as that of the World eBook Library Consortia. During the World eBook Fair, which will take place from July 4 to August 4, users can download free copies of books from Project Gutenberg’s collection of 18,000 texts, which […]

According to a report from Reporters Without Borders, Chinese authorities have blocked access to the Google.com Web page following the introduction in January of the Google.cn domain that meets the country’s strict filtering requirements. Google was criticized by some for conceding to demands that it offer a version of its search service that excludes material […]

For only the second time in ten years, drinking beer has been relegated to second on Student Monitor’s biannual survey of what is “in” on campus, with iPods slotting in at number one. The only other thing to unseat beer: the Internet, in 1997. Eric Weil of Student Monitor said of the latest results of […]

A new study conducted by Forrester Research for e-mail security firm Proofpoint indicates that more than one-third of U.S. and British companies read employees’ outgoing e-mail. A similar proportion of U.S. companies also said that inappropriate disclosure of information had damaged their businesses within the past 12 months. Exposure of financial or other personal data […]

Sam Palmisano, chairman and chief executive of IBM, announced this week that the company would invest $6 billion over the next three years in its operations in India. IBM has invested $2 billion over the past three years in the country, increasing its workforce there from 9,000 to 43,000, to compete with other companies taking […]