Librarians have a reputation for being flaming liberals. Left of Left. I’ve met more than one who wears the label “pinko” with pride.

So that makes one of the latest discussions to pop up on library listservs an interesting one. Yesterday, a subscriber to the American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table listserv posted links for YouTube archives of the speeches given at the Democratic National Convention. Immediately another subscriber reminded people that the listserv was not to be used for “partisan purposes” and warned against “pushing the envelope” — which, the subscriber said, could lead to the ALA’s losing its nonprofit status. Other subscribers responded by saying that they were merely passing around...

Two students at Carnegie Mellon University have developed free software that helps verify the authenticity of Web sites to avoid “man-in-the-middle” attacks, which reroute Web traffic to unauthorized computers, according to the Associated Press.

The software, designed by a computer-science senior and a third-year graduate student, works as a Firefox extension that is compatible with the latest version of the browser. The software can be downloaded free from the university’s Web site.

The program gives users extra help in verifying whether the Web site they’re about to visit is authentic or bogus. Although most browsers already warn users when a site displays a dubious security certificate, some users...

There is something to be said for simplicity in an ever-more-wired age. But it’s typically the old folks you hear saying something like: “I just want a cell phone that makes calls. I don’t need one that plays music, sends e-mail, takes pictures, surfs the Web, contains a map of Tokyo, unlocks car doors, plays a crafty game of poker, works like a credit card, and combs my hair.” (Somewhere in this wide world, technicians are no doubt working on the mobile beautician.)

Youngsters have been branded as gizmophiles, attached to their phones and their many uses. But a new survey from the University of New Hampshire suggests that students use their phones in limited ways — mainly for talking, texting, keeping track of time, and a handful of other basic functions.

Students in a...

The University of Michigan has developed a system that detects users who are swapping files on peer-to-peer networks and automatically e-mails them a notice of the activity. The system, called “Be Aware You’re Uploading,” doesn’t stop the file trading, which in many cases constitutes illegally swapping pirated music or movies. Instead the e-mail notice contains “educational information” about illegal file sharing, according to the program’s Web page.

Aside from delivering a daily dose of guilt to those who are pirating music intentionally, the system lets less tech-savvy students who are swapping music unintentionally know about it. Some software automatically dishes out a user’s music library without their knowledge.

Few colleges and universities have a handle on the comprehensive costs of their technology operations. In the latest installment of The Chronicle’s technology podcast, Tech Therapy, Scott Carlson, a Chronicle reporter, and Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant, discuss some of the things to tally.

Check out past episodes of Tech Therapy in the archive.

CourseSmart, which sells electronic versions of textbooks by major publishers, issued a statement this week defending its model, after a report by a student advocacy group said publishers were off track with their online offerings.

The report was released this week by the Student Public Interest Research Groups, a collection of independent statewide organizations representing college students. The report said that online textbooks generally cost about the same as printed ones, even though the CourseSmart Web site says that online textbooks save students up to 50 percent. In making the claim, the report’s authors figured that many students sell printed textbooks back to the bookstore after a semester, recouping some of the initial cost. Books bought through...

ACUTA, the Association for Information Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education, has released a survey of green attitudes in IT. Granted, the number of respondents to the survey was around 80, so this may not be a statistically robust tally of green attitudes in college IT departments, but it may give some hint at what gets valued, and what doesn’t.

We skipped right down to question 5, which asked what colleges had done to be more green. Three-quarters of respondents bought new equipment, while a little over half said they turned off power on machines whenever possible, and 20 percent reworked the network for simplicity and fewer devices. A vast majority said that they were recycling machines (what “recycling” in this case means is unclear) and that they were reducing printing.

The...

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected a request by Blackboard Inc. for a temporary halt in the office’s review of a software patent the company holds concerning course-management systems.

This year Blackboard won a lawsuit in federal court against a rival software company, Desire2Learn, for violating the patent, though Desire2Learn has appealed the decision. Meanwhile, Desire2Learn had formally challenged the validity of the patent with the patent office, arguing that it is overly broad and covers technology that other companies had developed before Blackboard filed its patent. The patent office issued an initial verdict in March that...

Proteopedia, a new collaborative Web site, is offering not only text descriptions of proteins and other biomacromolecules related to biological functions and disease, but also interactive 3-D images.

On the Web site, the 3-D images come with a descriptive text that contains hyperlinks. Clicking on the links changes the images to display what is being explained in the text. This format aims to make the complex structural information comprehensible to everybody.

Proteopedia’s seed material is the entries on each of the more than 50,000 records in the Protein Data Bank. Members of the scientific community are encouraged to register to be able to edit and expand existing pages, or create new ones.

The wiki Web resource was developed by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, the...

Updated August 27, 2008 at 6 p.m. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is crowing about a faculty and research coup: It has captured the Data Intensive Cyber Environments group, known as DICE, from the University of California at San Diego’s Supercomputer Center. The new East Coasters consist of 10 people, including a star computer scientist, Reagan Moore.

An additional four DICE members are remaining in San Diego, at the university’s Institute for Neural Computation, said Jose-Marie Grifffiths, dean of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, the group’s new home base. All 14 members, however, voted to make the switch, Ms. Griffiths said.

The DICE group has garnered a world-class reputation for open-source software that allows data sharing...