The NCAA rulebook prohibits college football coaches from telephoning recruits before September of their senior year of high school. But the rules don’t say anything about e-mail or cellphone text messages.

A growing number of coaches and recruiters, eager to gain any advantage in the competition for athletic talent, are inundating prize prospects with digital sales pitches. The tactic, some students say, can get out of hand. One coveted running back says he has received text messages on his cellphone as early as 6:30 in the morning and as late as 11:30 at night. (Los Angeles Times)

Careless behavior by students or staff members, not abuse by malicious hackers, is a frequent cause of computer problems on college campuses, according to a recent survey of computing officials at 36 four-year colleges around the country. (The Chronicle, subscription required)

For institutions that can’t afford to spend too much money on bandwidth, file swapping isn’t just an ethical problem. It’s an infrastructure issue, too. At Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, campus officials decided to install a firewall that blocks the use of peer-to-peer networks—not because they worried about record-industry lawsuits, but because file sharing had slowed the campus network to a crawl. (The Online Rocket)

Computing officers at the University of Wisconsin System are urging administrators to jettison an expensive payroll-management program before it takes an even bigger bite out of the budget.

Wisconsin has spent five years and $25-million trying to shift over to the payroll software, which was designed by Lawson Software, a Minnesota company. The program was scheduled to be up and running by April but still hasn’t made its debut, and the natives are getting restless. Chief information officers on all but one of Wisconsin’s 16 campuses have signed a letter recommending that the university system switch to another company’s software. Lawson, they argue, "has no significant presence in higher education." (The Capital Times)

The Darpa Grand Challenge it ain’t. But Tank Wars, a new competition for college technology whizzes, might produce some innovation nevertheless.

The contest—run by Electronic Arts, the popular video-game manufacturer—asks computer-science students to create the artificial intelligence for a program that pits two military tanks against each other in battle. For a game-making contest, Tank Wars is a pretty exclusive affair: Only students from a roster of research universities have been invited to participate. (BusinessWeek)

CBS announced on Thursday that it plans to purchase the College Sports Television Network, which operates both a cable channel available in 15 million homes and more than 250 official college-sports Web sites. (The Chronicle, subscription required)

Ithaca College is inviting high-school and college students to submit short films  for a festival with a catch: The movies must be filmed using only the small cameras that come in some cellphones. Films for "CellFlix," as the festival is called, can be only 30 seconds in duration, and winners have a chance at winning $5,000. Submissions are due January 10. More information is available at the CellFlix Website.

Little over a year ago, iMesh was one of the recording industry’s sworn enemies. But now industry officials are talking up the company whenever they get the chance.

That’s because iMesh, once an unregulated peer-to-peer file-swapping program, has gone legit. Users of the revamped service can scan a whole network’s worth of songs, as they did with Grokster or KaZaA, but they can download the tunes only if they are willing to pay.

Record companies, which have made iMesh a poster boy for legal song sharing, may be heartened by the company’s early returns: Over 150,000 people have downloaded the software since it was unveiled last week. But analysts say iMesh might still have a tough time competing with the likes of Napster and iTunes. (Wired News)

Digital-rights advocates are up in arms over a proposal, floated by TV and Internet broadcasters, that could restrict viewers’ rights to redistribute televised or Webcast material. The proposal would give broadcasters 50-year rights to any material they transmit, even if that material is not copyrighted.

If the World Intellectual Property Organization approves the recommendation, the advocates say, TV stations and Webcasting sites could keep people from distributing public-domain video recordings. And amateur Webcasters, critics argue, could be dragged into legal disputes by companies like Yahoo and America Online whenever they post widely available footage.

Representatives of the National Association of Broadcasters say that talk is alarmist: The proposal, they say, would restrict only rebroadcasting for commercial purposes. (The Washington Post)

Google has added the initial batch of scanned library books to a searchable index, the first fruits of the company’s controversial partnership with five major research libraries. The company has been scanning books for nearly a year. (The Chronicle, subscription required)