OPINION

Feeling Vulnerable?

By Doug Gale

(Terry Calhoun is off this week. His column will resume next week.)

When it comes to vulnerability scanners, know your tools, and clarify your goals—or be sorry later.

“You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places which are undefended. You can ensure the safety of your defense if you only hold positions that cannot be attacked.” —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

As a University of Nebraska Cornhusker football fan, I have always looked forward to the spring game that pits the team’s best offensive unit against the best defensive unit. For network security folks, vulnerability scanning is our version of that spring game. With it, we can attack our own network to find the weaknesses in our defenses. Then we can fix them before we play with a real-world opponent Read more

IT NEWS

E-textbook Demand Slow on College Campuses

Some students miss the days of highlighting and folding page corners. For most, however, the savings just are not enough. (CNN) Read more

Cyberstalking Law Opens Debate on What's Annoying

It's kind of hard to believe, but, yep, our government has passed a new law making it a crime to "annoy" someone over the Internet. (USA Today) Read more

Purdue Police Officers Train to Use Facebook as Tool

Online college student forum will be patrolled by campus cops in effort to reduce internet harassment. (The Purdue Exponent) Read more

Ohio University Might Remove Computers from Dorm Rooms

Don't get too excited. It's just that OU still provides a university-owned machine for residence hall students and kind of wants to get out of that business. (The Post, an independent student newspaper at Ohio University.) Read more

RESOURCES

The Plagiarism Plague

IT is the cause of plagiarism? Or not? The ease with which some kinds of plagiarism can be done using the Web, exposes the web of weak detection and inadequate consequences at many institutions. (Higher Education) Read more

DEALS, CONTRACTS, AWARDS

Oxford and Berkeley Partner for BBC's Climate Change Experiment

Distributed computing experient asks users to download software on their own computers to benefit scientific research. (BBC) Read more

U. Wisconsin Offers Faculty Free Email List Manager

The University of Wisconsin at Madison is offering faculty and staff free email list management software that will let set-up and interact with groups of students, colleagues, and other communities via email lists. The university is subsidizing the software, Lyris Technologies' ListManager, to make it available to faculty and staff at no cost. The school already uses the application to reach more than 900,000 subscribers on 25,000 different lists. Each day, 6,000 email campaigns are initiated by faculty, staff and students, generating more than 175,000 messages daily. "Faculty and staff asked for an easy solution that lets them handle email list development and management," said J'e Tarter, University of Wisconsin, Email List Services Manager.