As The Boston Globe reports, several local colleges are preparing for the fall by stepping up their efforts to prevent illegal music and movie downloading. But officials at those institutions don’t seem terribly optimistic that their next wave of antipiracy programs will actually work.

“I thought we were pretty strenuous before, but it hasn’t worked,” said John Dubach, chief information officer at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which placed high on a recent list of colleges that had received the most copyright complaints from the recording industry. The university has urged students to use Ruckus, a free download service, and campus officials are putting antipiracy posters in residence halls.

But so far, nothing has worked. “This whole system has got to change somehow,” Mr. Dubach told The Globe.

Nearby Brandeis is trying a different tactic: The institution is hosting a series ...

If you’ve opened up an account on Facebook or MySpace, you’ve probably received at least a few unsolicited e-mail messages from complete strangers begging to be befriended. And you’ve probably deleted those messages straightaway.

But some Facebook users don’t send those messages right to the trash, as the computer-security company Sophos found out. Sophos created a profile for a fake Facebook user named Freddi Staur (that’s “ID Fraudster,” anagrammed) and sent friend requests to 200 other randomly chosen Facebookers. In the end, 87 people made Freddi a friend, and nearly all of them shared some personal information — like their e-mail addresses or dates of birth — with the stranger.

And about one-quarter of Freddi’s new friends made their phone numbers accessible to him, CNET reports.

Sophos’s study may seem like a bit of a publicity stunt, but it makes an important point: While it’s been...

After receiving an anonymous threat that four pipe bombs had been left on the campus Monday, officials at the University of Iowa rushed to warn students, faculty, and employees. Unfortunately, the e-mail system didn’t rush along with them.

Mass e-mail messages about the threat, which were sent to about 45,000 people affiliated with the institution, took between 90 minutes and two hours to arrive, university officials told the Iowa City Press-Citizen. That’s clearly “not ideal,” as an Iowa spokesman put it, so the university is working to start a rapid-alert system that would send emergency messages to people’s cellphones, home phones, and e-mail accounts.

So far, nothing has come of the bomb scare. But campus investigators are now trying to figure out who sent the threatening e-mail message that kept the university on edge. —Brock Read

Supercomputers have taken on the world’s most pressing and complex scientific quandaries — global warming, genetics, even the formation of the universe. Now a high-speed machine at Northeastern University has taken on a more colorful question: How quickly can one solve a Rubik’s Cube?

After reducing the 43 quintillion possible configurations to a more manageable 80 million, the supercomputer proved that any of the cubes — no matter how hopeless-looking — can be properly aligned within just 26 moves. So take heart, you who have spent hours twisting your own stubborn Rubik’s. —Brock Read

State attorneys general are doing their best to make sure that online diploma mills are not long for this world, but plenty of folks have already secured degrees from ersatz institutions like “the University of Berkeley” and “Columbia State.” Should those people face more aggressive prosecution?

Lawmakers haven’t come to a consensus on that question. As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette notes, several states have passed laws that make it a crime to use fake diplomas. But most states still treat that kind of résumé padding as standard-issue fraud. And a measure introduced in the House of Representatives, which would increase the chance of prison time for federal employees who use fake degrees, has yet to make it out of committee. —Brock Read

When word spread last year that Congressional staff members were feverishly editing their bosses’ Wikipedia entries, Virgil Griffith asked himself a sensible question: How many company spokesmen and campus officials were doing the same thing?

The answer, as it turns out, is quite a lot. And the proof is in Mr. Griffith’s Wikipedia Scanner, a searchable database that links anonymous Wikipedia edits with the businesses and organizations from which those markups came.

Mr. Griffith, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, built the database largely from public information: He scoured Wikipedia’s own records for the Internet-protocol addresses of anonymous editors, and he then identified the owners of those addresses using a combination of public and private services.

The result is a pretty entertaining Web site — and a useful tool for students looking for insight into the ...

Chalk yet another title up to the University of Florida. Fresh off its victory in a robot-submarine design contest (and those football and basketball championships, too), the institution has earned a piece of first place in one of the world’s most prestigious hacking competitions.

Jordan Wiens and John H. Sawyer, both network-security engineers at Florida, were part of a nine-person team that took top honors at Capture the Flag, a fast-paced battle in which eight teams attempt to defend their own computer servers while compromising the machines of their opponents. The game — which is one of the highlights of Defcon, an annual convention for hackers — is an Olympic decathlon of sorts for computer coders and security experts.

And Mr. Wiens and Mr. Sawyer are building quite a reputation for themselves. Their team — known, appropriately enough, as 1@stplace — won the event in 2006, and this...

If Shakespeare had a hard drive, would we look differently upon the playwright? Matthew Kirschenbaum asks that question in The Chronicle Review, and his thumbnail answer is hard to dispute: “Details of his writing process and his life currently a mystery might be pitilessly exposed.”

If Shakespeare had had a hard drive, if the plays had been written with a word processor on a computer that had somehow survived, we still might not know anything definitive about Shakespeare’s original or final intentions — these are human, not technological, questions — but we might be able to know some rather different things. We might be able to know, for example, the precise date on which he began composing Hamlet indeed the precise minute and hour, time-stamped to the second. We would be able to know how long he had spent working on it, or at least how long the file containing the play had remained open...

At the start of the last academic year, housing and admissions officials found themselves wrestling with a new squadron of “helicopter parents” — people who use Facebook to check up on their sons’ or daughters’ future roommates, don’t like what they see, and call to complain.

Now that Facebook is open to everyone, those calls are coming all too frequently, USA Today reports. In many instances, parents want their children separated from roommates whose profiles show them drinking or partying. But sometimes the complaints are more troubling: According to one housing official, parents’ chief concerns are potential roommates’ race, religion, and sexual orientation.

Few colleges defer to helicopter parents, of course, but the calls still sound like a nuisance. How many complaints has your institution received? Can anything be done to calm parents’ Facebook-related fears? —Brock Read

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has winnowed down the list of competitors in its upcoming Urban Challenge to 36 teams. And it’s no surprise that many of those squads hail from universities that performed well in 2005’s Grand Challenge, Darpa’s pioneering robot race.

Stanford University took top honors in the 2005 competition, edging out two self-driving vehicles from Carnegie Mellon University in a tense trek through the Mojave Desert. Those two institutions could be on track to square off again: Both have had vehicles selected as semifinalists in this year’s race, which will take place in November on a decommissioned Air Force base in California.

Darpa officials chose the semifinalists after visiting more than 50 teams from across the country. The squads that made the cut — which also include robotics groups from Cornell University, the University of Louisiana at...