Three MIT students can now talk, but not because of their right to free speech. For the past 10 days, the trio has been restrained by a judge’s order from describing their now-celebrated exposure of a flaw in the Boston transit system’s fare card. Yesterday a U.S. District Court judge in Boston lifted the gag order because he did not believe the students had violated a federal law against transmitting malicious computer software, CNET reports. Many had expected the matter to be decided along First Amendment interpretations, but instead the decision turned on the issue of what counted as “transmission” of software and what did not.

The three, as

Large classrooms with frequent absences: Those are the environments where students seem most likely to benefit from computer-assisted instruction, according to a working paper released last week by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The paper reports on an experiment in three urban school districts in the United States. In the study, 152 pre-algebra and algebra classes were randomly assigned to use either traditional “chalk-and-talk” instruction or a commonly used computer package known as I Can Learn.

The students in the computer-aided classes had significantly better (0.17 of a standard deviation) scores on end-of-semester tests than did the students in traditional classes. Those positive effects were strongest in classes with high levels of absenteeism, in classes where students had relatively heterogeneous levels of math skills, and in large classes. (Among classes with 15...

Updated at 6:30 p.m., August 19, 2008.

“Beat the test,” brags the Princeton Review on its home page. But this week tens of thousand of Florida students may instead want to beat — or at least slap— the Princeton Review, after the test-preparation company’s Web site revealed their names and their scores on tests such as the SAT and LSAT. The New York Times reported today that the firm accidentally published the names and scores online and left them up for anyone to see for seven weeks.

In the peer-pressured worlds of high school and college, scores on standardized tests are usually only revealed by high-performing students who want to brag — and who are then teased by their fellows anyway. Most students like to keep their test scores private, since it’s bad enough being compared with others on class rank, fashion sense, popularity, parents’ income, and any other measure one can...

A college, a flash drive, Social Security numbers, and a contractor … all the familiar ingredients for a security fiasco. And yes, the blog Educational Security Incidents is reporting that Arapahoe Community College has put 15,000 current and former students at risk for identity theft because a flash drive with their names, addresses, credit-card information, and Social Security numbers was lost in early August. The records on the drive came from the college’s Corporate Learning Division, and some went as far back as 1997. A contractor had taken the flash drive for a little R&R at the Copper Mountain Resort, and it went missing. The college has cautioned those affected to watch their credit reports and asks anyone with questions to call them at (303) 797-5091. It also notes that taking the drive for a drive is against college policy. —Josh Fischman

First, they were told to be quiet. Now, they are being ordered to squeal. Zack Anderson, Alessandro Chiesa, and R.J. Ryan, three MIT students, were ordered yesterday by a U.S. District Court judge to turn over a paper they wrote for a class in which they described how to hack the Boston subway system. Last week another judge stopped the students from presenting their results at Defcon 16, a hacker’s convention in Las Vegas, the Boston Globe reports.

The trio exploited some vulnerabilities in the computer-chip and magnetic-strip systems used to pay fares on the Boston subway and showed how to get a free ride, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is providing a lawyer for the students. The students and the EFF say the work was done to show the flaws in the system so they could be fixed before a malicious attacker used them. (The paper got an “A” in an MIT...

WebJunction, an online learning community for librarians and library staff, has launched new social and learning applications for the site. The site, first started with money and backing from the Online Computer Library Center and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, had 30,000 individual members even before the revamp.

There are three new items of note:

A report on Blogjunction, the site’s blog, says that since the new tools launched last week, the library...

Graduate students have a problem, no matter what field they are in. And the problem, says Daniel M. Colgate, is that they can’t find others who share their academic interests. So he and a fellow student started the Graduate Junction. The Junction “does not aim to be a social-networking site,” says Mr Colgate, a graduate student himself, in chemistry, at the University of Durham in Britain. The networking is intended to be academic, and specific to early-career researchers. Mr. Colgate recently told The Chronicle a few things about the site.

Q. So what’s wrong with Facebook? Can’t academics use its groups?

A. It is already so big, and nobody I know would consider putting a technical keyword into the groups search there. I have discussed using Facebook groups with many friends and contacts, and they agree with me: It is just too big to be useful. They would prefer a more focused ...

More colleges are bucking back against the music industry’s anti-piracy campaign. Central Michigan University last week filed a complaint against the industry’s investigators, charging that they were acting as unlicensed private eyes in violation of Michigan state laws, according to the Saginaw News.

As The Chronicle reports this week, other colleges have tried different tactics recently in attempts to resist identifying students for the industry, which then threatens to sue the students. The software used by the industry reports only the numerical Internet address of an alleged music pirate, not the name of the person assigned that address by a college or other Internet-service provider.

Central Michigan’s complaint, filed with the state Department of Labor and Economic Growth by the office of the university counsel, is against MediaSentry, the company used by the Recording...

We ripped that headline off from The Advertiser, a newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia, which is touting the country’s National Science Week. (It begins on August 16, but taking into account the international dateline and the Coriolis effect on the deflection of moving objects in the Southern hemisphere… um, the paper is still quite early.)

The idea is to promote careers in science and information technology; student enrollments in majors leading to those careers have dropped in Australia.

“The popular image of scientists is partly to blame for the decline in science studies. Sure, the stereotypical mad professor – elderly male in a white coat hovering over test tubes – does exist,” an Advertiser columnist writes. “But there are plenty of young, groovy scientists breaking the mold. These scientists can just as easily be found on fishing boats, wrestling huge fish in the name of...

Bad news for technology workers trying to block student-visa extensions this week. A U.S. district court judge in New Jersey rejected an attempt by the Programmers Guild and other groups to stop the government from extending the visas from one year to 29 months.

Computerworld reports that the guild and fellow litigants had asked for an injunction, arguing that the extension would hurt U.S. workers because it would lead to more foreign students getting H-1B visas and competing for technology jobs.

But U.S. District Judge Faith Hochberg denied the request, saying that opponents could not show they had been directly hurt by the visa extension, which was approved earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Instead of alleging concrete injury, plaintiffs assert a generalized grievance with a particular government policy,” the judge wrote.

The Programmers Guild had...