IT Trends :: Thursday, September 28, 2006

IT News

Students Rebel Against Database Designed to Thwart Plagiarists

Hmm, it takes some high schoolers to rebel against Turnitin.com. The for-profit service checks student work against a database of more than 22 million papers written by students around the world, as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. The students argue that they do not want to let Turnitin automatically add their work product to its massive database. It d'es seem to be an infringement of their intellectual properties. Worth watching…

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Net Neutrality Fight Moves to Pennsylvania Legislature

Woo hoo! We’re winning the Net Neutrality fight at the federal level. Oops, where there’s money to be made, there’s cash to push the fight into state houses now. What a nightmare. This time around, video franchising, or letting telecom companies sell cable, is the big prize…

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Lessons from the Facebook Riots

Facebook takes available data from all users, aggregates it, and then lets others see an aggregation of everything a user d'es on the site. Response: A revolution by users who saw their privacy threatened. Of course, it’s hard to imagine a reasonable expectation of privacy in a social space like Facebook, so what gives?...

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Spam + Blogs = Trouble

So, you set up a blog and create an algorithm to populate it with the same kind of nonsense we see in some of our e-mail spam. The words draw people in on searches, and enough visit and then click through on the commercial ads at the side, that the “splog” (that’s “Spam Blog”) is making you money…

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