We reported earlier this week that Microsoft and Intel will give $20-million to two universities to boost research into parallel computing. But maybe that’s not enough.

The money given to the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a drop in the bucket when compared to the money for advanced computing that used to flow to universities from the Department of Defense, the Computing Research Policy Blog recently noted.

The blog post notes that grants from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency have been going, more and more, to classified and military research, and away from computing research done at universities. “In fact, between FY 2001 and FY 2004 (the last year for which we have good data), the amount of funding from Darpa to U.S. universities fell by half,” the blog post says.

“The Microsoft-Intel...

Parallel awards to two research universities will help push parallel computing to the next level, executives at the Microsoft Corporation and the Intel Corporation said today. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California at Berkeley will share $20-million in corporate dollars over the next five years for a project that researchers say could produce pocket-sized intelligent devices that recognize people and tell you all about your past interactions with them.

That vision of a personal digital assistant with a visual memory “and that can whisper in your ear” was conjured up by David Patterson, a Berkeley professor of computer science. But it depends on parallel computing, or multiple computer processors working together on a single task divided up into many parts. Mr. Patterson will direct the new Universal Parallel Computing Research Center at...

When colleges drop the ball on computer security, it’s not only their own students and staff members who suffer. At Framingham State College, a security hole allowed interlopers to gain control of college e-mail system accounts and send threatening messages all over the country.

The messages were “essentially threatening someone in exchange for money,” Patrick Laughran, the college’s chief information technology officer, told the MetroWest Daily News this weekend. He did not give further details about the messages.

The breach was discovered on March 8 and promptly repaired, he said. Additional layers of security have been added to campus servers and students have been asked to strengthen their passwords—this usually means making them more complex—to reduce vulnerability.

Mr. Laughran said he did not know how many of the threatening messages were sent, but the college got at...

When hackers broke into a Harvard University Web server last month, administrators first thought they were being taunted about their vulnerability. Now the university is reporting that the intruders may have done far worse, and accessed records of 10,000 people. Some of those records included Social Security numbers.

A Web server containing data on applicants to the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “was hacked by an outsider and compromised in a way that the data on the server could have been viewed or copied,” administrators said in a statement yesterday. More than 6,000 applicant records listed a name, Social Security number, date of birth, address, e-mail address, phone numbers, test scores, previous school attended, and school records.

The university said that its initial investigation into the incident, in late February, did not reveal the extent of the...

The University of North Texas is calling it a “crime-prevention program,” but the new Facebook application they are touting is more focused on what happens after a crime. The Trace-Facebook program, endorsed by the university’s police department, allows students to send lists of stolen or lost goods out to all Facebook members.

The hope is that someone will check Facebook before buying that used laptop or bicycle, see that it belonged to someone else, and call the police or the person who’s missing the goods.

The application also allows Facebook users to store descriptions of their valuables before they go missing. That’s going to either save time when reporting a loss or theft — or give some thief able to hack the Trace program a really good list of what a student has in his or her dorm room. —Josh Fischman

Blackboard Inc., the course-management company, clearly wants to be more than a course-management company. Today it announced a video surveillance service for colleges, allowing security officials to view live and recorded video over a campus computer network.

The move follows Blackboard’s recent acquisition of NTI Group, an emergency-notification company, which can send alerts to students and faculty members in the event of violence or other hazards (like dangerous weather) on the campus.

With both the video security system and the emergency alerts, Blackboard is selling services that reach beyond its traditional classroom territory.

Because the digital surveillance cameras can send images through existing campus computer networks, they may be attractive to colleges, which wouldn’t have to spend money on building separate wiring systems. That’s a lot more elaborate than...

This week, The Post, the Ohio University student newspaper, reported a security breach in the computer system that allowed outsiders access to photographs of students. Today the university’s chief information officer emphatically denied the charge.

“It’s been overblown,” Brice Bible told The Chronicle.

There was a directory containing photographs of students, Mr. Bible said, but contrary to the newspaper report it was not freely available from the Internet. The directory was protected, he said, and it contained no confidential information.

“There has been nothing exposed, and the information was non-descriptive to start with,” Mr. Bible said. “There is no sensitive data tied to this site.”

The directory was one used by resident assistants in university dormitories. They could use their passwords to get into the directory, and then right-click on a photo to get...

Just a week after Ohio U.‘s president told a packed room at The Chronicle’s Technology Forum in Tampa that the university’s days of sloppy IT security were over, the student newspaper has reported another lapse: 25,000 photos of students were on a freely available Web server, with no password protection.

The photos appeared to be head shots of students taken for their university identification cards, the paper, The Post, reported. They were on a Web site used by the university’s resident assistants. The site was available to anyone who knew the precise Web address to type into a browser.

No other data were associated with the photos, and within hours of being notified of the lapse by the newspaper, the university restricted access to the images. It does not appear that anyone’s privacy was compromised. But in these situations one can never be sure. And leaving these...

Microsoft wants to help students get their lives together (their learning lives, at least), and Tuesday it rolled out a product to help. As part of Live@edu, the company’s free Web-based email and calendar suite, Microsoft unveiled Office Live Workspace, which lets students access their work online and share it with others. Live@edu is in use at more than 600 colleges.

“The most visible new feature is the activity panel,” said Guy Gilbert, a Microsoft group product manager, in an interview with The Chronicle Monday. “Suppose you are in a work group with other students. You can look at the panel and see everything that anyone has done since you last logged on. And links in the panel take you right to that object,” whether it is a document, a spreadsheet, contact list, or database.

Users can also set up e-mail alerts that notify them any time an item is changed.

The service...

The naturalist John James Audubon attempted, in the 19th century, to paint every species of North American bird. He got through 435 of them before running out of time and money. Now the University of Pittsburgh Library System, with a little more time and money, has digitized all 435 of the images and mounted them online.

Only 120 sets of the large, hand-colored works — acknowledged as masterpieces of ornithology — are known to exist. Pitt’s Digital Research Library used a high-resolution scanner to create the digital set for the Web, along with reprints from Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, his five-volume text describing each of the birds.

The little tyrant fly-catcher has never been so easy to spot. —Josh Fischman