Carnegie Mellon University is fast becoming the national leader in a very specific video-gaming niche: the computer-security instructional genre.

Early this year the university released a game that asked children to serve as “cyber cadets” protecting the Web. Now the institution has followed that title up with a game that helps teach Web users to sniff out “phishing” scams.

Anti-Phishing Phil is pretty simple, but it’s cute and addictive: Players maneuver a little fish through an ocean setting, eating worms that name banks’ real Web addresses and rejecting worms that recite false URL’s. The game is actually a bit tougher than one might think, and Carnegie Mellon researchers say there’s evidence that Anti-Phishing Phil works better than bland anti-phishing tutorials. —Brock Read

Bring up the continuing battle over online piracy among college students, and most campus officials will talk about the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, the two trade groups that have most vocally and aggressively fought peer-to-peer downloading.

But other organizations, too, are deeply concerned about the issue, and one of them, the Business Software Alliance, is stepping out a bit. The alliance — which represents Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft, among other companies — has followed the lead of the RIAA and the MPAA, creating a Web site to preach the antipiracy gospel to college students.

On the site, B4UCopy,a video warns students that they may be fined, expelled from college, or even sent to prison if they get pirating online material. Like the recording industry, the software alliance makes sure to include a testimonial from a student...

Today The Arizona Republic notes an interesting rumor: Google is reportedly working to create a virtual world that will rival Second Life, and the company may be testing the project at Arizona State University.

So far, details are scant. But the university is now soliciting students with video-gaming experience for an unspecified software-testing project. And since the questionnaire Arizona State is sending to student applicants asks if they have Gmail accounts, speculation is rampant.

Tech bloggers and Arizona State students might be excited about the project, but skeptics are already lining up: The Motley Fool has weighed in with a column titled “Don’t Do It, Google.” —Brock Read

A Florida judge this week quashed subpoenas filed by the recording industry against two file-sharing suspects at the University of South Florida. But college officials hoping for a precedent-setting ruling may be disappointed: The decision was made on “narrow technical grounds,” as Ars Technica points out.

This summer the Recording Industry Association of America sent a batch of “John Doe” subpoenas to South Florida, asking campus officials to turn over the names of 40 students identified only by their Internet-protocol numbers. Students cited in those subpoenas are supposed to be notified once the subpoenas are granted. But many South Florida students had already left the campus for the summer, and the university wasn’t able to locate some of them in time to tell them they were about to be sued.

In striking down two of the 40 subpoenas, Judge Thomas G. Wilson ruled that the notification...

Veterans of the campus file-sharing wars, and folks interested in copyright and fair-use doctrine, should be familiar with the work of Wendy Seltzer, a visiting assistant professor at Northeastern University who has argued strongly for copyright reform. Tomorrow Ms. Seltzer will deliver two lectures at Cornell University, and the institution will offer streaming video of both talks on its Web site.

The first session, “Protecting the University From Copyright Bullies,” at 3 p.m., will explore whether colleges can meet their own principles of academic freedom while enforcing current copyright laws. The second talk, “Righting the Copyright Balance,” at 7:30 p.m., will propose changes to existing copyright law and to the entertainment industry’s distribution models.

Both lectures should offer plenty of food for thought, and some pointed perspectives. Ms. Seltzer was formerly a...

Facebook officials can’t be thrilled to have drawn the attention of Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York State attorney general. But it’s worth remembering that the social-networking site also has a pair of more attractive suitors: Microsoft and Google.

As The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, both of those companies seem awfully interested in acquiring a piece of Facebook. Microsoft recently proposed to buy a 5-percent stake the social network, according to the newspaper, and its offer estimated Facebook’s overall value to be more than $10-billion.

Microsoft’s bid makes Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive officer, look smart for turning down a $1-billion offer that Yahoo reportedly made last fall. The social network’s year-old open-registration policy may have stoked Mr. Cuomo’s concerns about sexual predators, but it has also made Facebook an even hotter commodity for companies...

Google’s famous motto — “Don’t be evil” — has long been cited as a sign that the company isn’t your typical corporate hegemon. But now that its search engine has “utterly infiltrated our culture,” writes Siva Vaidhyanathan, it’s time to start asking questions about Google-as-monolith.

“If Google becomes the dominant way we navigate the Internet, and thus the primary lens through which we experience both the local and the global, then it will have remarkable power to set agendas and alter perceptions,” writes Mr. Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. “Its biases are built into its algorithms. It knows more about us every day. We know almost nothing about it.”

The scholar will take on the search engine in a forthcoming book, The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce, and Community—and Why We Should ...

“The music industry’s lawsuit crusade against defenseless college students and housewives appears to have hit the skids lately,” Anders Bylund wrote yesterday in a blog post at the Motley Fool.

That might come as news to the Recording Industry Association of America. Sure, the trade group’s “John Doe” subpoenas have been knocked around a bit in court lately. But the industry is still moving forward with its campaign of sending pre-litigation notices to college students: Just last week, 403 settlement letters were sent to 22 universities. Officials at those institutions will now have to decide between passing the notices on to students and waiting for the trade group to come calling with “John Doe” subpoenas.

The institutions receiving letters this month are Arizona State, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Michigan State, and North Dakota State Universities; the Massachusetts Institute of...

Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child has already confounded some skeptical expectations: The nonprofit project is churning out plenty of machines, and it has managed to keep production costs down. But despite reaching a number of handshake agreements, Mr. Negroponte hasn’t managed to get many developing nations to actually pay for his products.

“I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written,” he told The New York Times. Mr. Negroponte isn’t about to stop chatting up foreign heads of state, but now he’s also appealing to a group that seems more willing to sign on the dotted line: American and Canadian consumers.

Today One Laptop Per Child unveiled a new marketing effort, called “Give 1 Get 1,” that will let people purchase the computers as individual charitable donations. A $399 order will buy two machines — ...

The Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro filed an interesting dispatch from the Future of Music Coalition’s annual policy summit, held this week at George Washington University. The meeting offers musicians, industry analysts, and fans a chance to chew on many of the issues that matter to college music listeners — like copyright law, the rise of satellite radio, and the impact of technology on the music industry.

The recent flap over Internet-radio royalties — which caused a good deal of consternation among college-radio Webcasters — was a hot topic at this year’s summit. SoundExchange, the group that collects royalty payments, “has burned up a lot of credibility,” according to Mr. Pegoraro, “by pushing so consistently for high royalty rates for Webcast radio.”

Also on the docket was net neutrality, an issue that seems to have faded from view lately. Tim Wu, a professor of law at...