Oral Roberts University recently held a conference to persuade higher education institutions that it's time to get on board the blockchain train. Its recommendations: Learn about the technology's potential, test it out and collaborate.
To help community colleges make technology upgrades that will help them deliver cybersecurity education, the U.S. Department of Education has been allotted $1 million in an omnibus spending law, H.R. 1625, approved by Congress earlier this year. According to an explanatory document that accompanied the spending bill, the money is to be spent on a pilot grant program to help the schools make their programs "state of the art."
Nearly 50 students attended classes at the downtown campus of the university, where they learned about programming, computer architecture, careers in computer science and cybersecurity and how to do professional networking. Now they're expected to return to their schools and serve as "computer science and cybersecurity ambassadors" and recruit a team of classmates to compete in Cyber Security Awareness Week, NYU's annual cybersecurity competition.
A new center at Columbia University will focus on research and innovation in blockchain technology. The institution partnered with IBM to create the Columbia-IBM Center for Blockchain and Data Transparency, which will "combine cross-disciplinary teams from the academic, scientific, business and government communities to explore key issues related to the policy, trust, sharing and consumption of digital data when using blockchain and other privacy-preserving technologies," according to a news announcement.
UCLA's chief privacy officer talks about the differences between privacy and information security in higher education along with the need to consider opportunities as well as risks.
Rave Mobile Safety has released a major update to one of its messaging platforms, Rave Guardian.
New research from a team at Brigham Young University finds that people tend to tune out security warnings as they see them more often. Using a few variations can significantly increase users' adherence to the warnings, the study found.
With the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation looming, colleges and universities in the United States are working out how to achieve compliance.
In a paper appearing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, researchers from MIT and Stanford University have described a new system they've developed for protecting the privacy of people who contribute their genomic data to large-scale biomedical studies. These studies are intended to uncover links among genetic variations in identifying the causes for diseases. The protocol is intended to help make currently restricted data available to the scientific community, potentially enabling secure genome crowdsourcing while still making sure individuals can contribute their genomes to a study without compromising their privacy.
The mop-up work for Facebook in the wake of its privacy reform could take much longer than we might expect.
