If you haven’t heard of ConnectU, you’re not alone: The college social-networking site has just 70,000 users, a drop in the bucket compared to the 31 million people now registered with Facebook.

But ConnectU — which, like Facebook, was created in 2004 by students at Harvard University — says it should have had first crack at those millions and millions of patrons. The site’s three founders charge in a federal lawsuit that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-creator and CEO, ripped off their idea.

ConnectU’s first lawsuit, filed in 2004, was dismissed earlier this year on a technicality. But the social network’s creators quickly refiled. The new suit — which will be heard Aug. 1 in a U.S. District Court in Boston — asks that ConnectU be given control of Facebook along with all of the site’s assets, according to the Associated Press.

ConnectU’s creators say they hired Mr. Zuckerberg to help write ...

Fresh off of proving that a perfectly played checkers match will end in a draw, computer scientists at the University of Alberta are going back to the game that has become their bread and butter: poker.

The university has pitted its most advanced poker-playing computer program against Phil Laak and Ali Eslami, a pair of high-stakes professional players, in a limit Hold ‘Em match billed as the First Man-Machine Poker Championship. Alberta’s program, Polaris, is the latest in a long line of poker bots designed by the university — including Hyperborean, which won a computer poker tournament last year, and Poki-X, which dueled Mr. Laak (but lost) in 2005.

So far, Polaris is more than holding its own. Yesterday the program squared off in two 500-hand matches against Mr. Laak while simultaneously playing Mr. Eslami with the same hands reversed. In the first session Polaris edged out the human...

A couple of public library systems in Arizona have drawn attention for scrapping the Dewey Decimal System — a move that, at first glance, might seem a bit odd. But Karen G. Schneider of the American Library Association says the shift away from Dewey makes perfect sense for the modern library.

In place of Dewey, the Maricopa County Library District is using subject headings developed by the Book Industry Study Group, an organization for publishers and booksellers. The BISAC headings, as they are known, should be fairly familiar to anyone who has browsed at Borders or Barnes & Noble. According to Ms. Schneider, the headings are more accommodating to visitors than the trusty old Dewey numbers: BISAC codes are pragmatically user-centric; they’re designed to make it easy for customers to browse for books. The language is simple, the subcategories broad, and the main groupings are designed...

Reports of iPhones’ network-wrecking capabilities have been greatly exaggerated, or so it would seem. Last week Duke University accused the stylish cellphones of periodically knocking out many of its wireless routers for brief stretches of time, but now campus officials have exonerated the devices.

As it turns out, Duke’s router problems were caused by an unspecified “particular set of conditions” intrinsic to the university’s large wireless network, said Tracy Futhey, Duke’s vice president for information technology, in a written statement.

No other institutions have reported any iPhone-related network issues, so it looks like the devices are no threat to college networks after all. —Brock Read

A key U.S. senator is planning to introduce a controversial amendment to the Higher Education Act intended to put an end to illegal file sharing on college campuses — and putting some colleges on the spot to do so.

The Senate is scheduled to begin debate today on long-awaited legislation to reauthorize, or renew, the Higher Education Act. Sen. Harry M. Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the Senate majority leader, is expected to propose an amendment that would require many of the largest colleges to use technology designed to prevent students from illegally downloading and swapping music and movie files. But the technology to prevent piracy may not even work and could cost universities hundreds of thousands of dollars, critics say.

Read the complete Chronicle story.

Computer scientists at the University of Alberta have proved what Marion Tinsley probably realized half a century ago: In a perfectly played game of checkers, nobody wins.

As many as 200 of the university’s computers have spent parts of the last 13 years poring over the game’s 500 quintillion (that’s 500 billion billion) possible board positions. And they’ve now concluded that there are no surefire winning moves in checkers, just mistakes that lead to losses.

Alberta researchers have also worked to teach computers to play poker, and they’ve earned accolades for those efforts. But poker requires decisions to be made based on incomplete information, so skilled human players still have a significant edge on their computerized counterparts. Not so with checkers: “I don’t think a human would have a chance against a computer now,” said Jonathan Schaeffer, Alberta’s chairman of computer science,...

When the Perry Branch Library decided to stop using the Dewey Decimal System to organize its books, library officials saw the move as a way to make their stacks more user-friendly. But some skeptics saw something rather more sinister: To them, it was a sign that the creeping “Googlization” of libraries continues apace, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Instead of the Dewey system, the Perry library, in Gilbert, Ariz., has placed its books within broad categories like “business” and “history.” Patrons can search a computerized catalog to determine where a particular title is filed, or they can head straight to the stacks and start browsing, as they might do at a bookstore.

For casual browsers, that might be a boon. But for serious researchers, the more general categorization scheme could be problematic: It’d be much more difficult to compare books on ancient Greece if they were filed under “...

Professors and librarians have already come up with plenty of interesting uses for YouTube, and they’ll certainly have little trouble thinking up more. But is the site doing a good job of encouraging creative content? Nick Douglas, a video-blogger writing for Slate, thinks not.

The crux of Mr. Douglas’s argument is that YouTube traffics only in a particular kind of short-form video: While the site has done a remarkable job building up the infrastructure that allows people to watch videos on the Web, it has also created a number of barriers to entry. The site bans nonpornographic nudity, places a 10-minute limit on most uploads, and has a resistance (so far) to including live streams.

A question for academics who use (or have considered using) YouTube for teaching or scholarship: Is the site flexible enough to meet your needs? —Brock Read

“Imagine a library that collected all the world’s information about all the world’s books and made it available for everyone to view and update,” write members of the Internet Archive’s Open Content Alliance. “We’re building that library.”

And now the alliance has put a demo version of that library online. The Open Library is meant to serve as a vast digital card catalog, and Web surfers will be able to edit entries, much like in Wikipedia. The repository will also collect books in the public domain, a mission that will bring the library into competition with Google’s much-publicized book-scanning service.

Some critics of the Google project have high hopes for the Open Library, which seems more eager to embrace the ideals of Web 2.0. “If all goes well,” writes Ben Vershbow of if:book, “it’s conceivable that this could become the main destination on the Web for people looking for...

Duke University administrators are big fans of the iPod. But their assessment of the iPhone, Apple's new attraction, is not as glowing: The cellphones seem to be wreaking havoc with the campus's wireless network.

Several times over the past week, up to 30 of Duke's wireless routers have blacked out, usually for about 10 minutes at a time. They were being inundated with as many as 18,000 MAC address requests per second, reports Network World.

Duke officials finger iPhones as the culprits. About 150 of the devices are already registered on the campus network, and it appears many of them may be repeatedly firing off invalid router requests. The likely problem: iPhones that were first connected to the Web through home wireless routers may be furiously trying to reconnect to those local outposts rather than to the campus network.

Duke can be thankful for the iPhone's summertime launch: For the...