It’s easy to criticize college coaches for monitoring athletes’ use of Facebook, or for asking them to stay away from social-networking sites altogether. But it’s also easy to understand why the coaches do it. After all, the Web has revolutionized the art of heckling.

An Orlando Sentinel article sheds some light on the kind of trash-talking that college football stars now routinely face online. The University of Central Florida’s starting quarterback, for example, once received so many “pokes” on his Facebook page, all from fans of a forthcoming opponent, that he complained to the site’s administrators.

Then there are instances when digital heckling seems to backfire. When a fan of Central Florida insulted the wife of a University of South Florida linebacker on a message board, South Florida treated the comment as bulletin-board motivation for its players. A few days later, they trounced...

After years of brainstorming, tinkering, and flesh-pressing, Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project is finally mass-producing machines, the Associated Press reports.

A company called Quanta Computer Inc. is manufacturing the laptops on a Chinese assembly line. Project officials plan on sending the computers off soon to schoolchildren in Uruguay, Peru, and Mongolia — and to American and Canadian consumers who buy machines through the project’s “Give 1 Get 1” promotion.

Mr. Negroponte said this summer that he hoped to produce one million machines a month by the start of 2008. It’s unclear whether he’ll meet that goal — mass production has started a bit later than he had anticipated — but the news that some students should receive low-cost laptops this month will surely hearten the project’s sponsors. —Brock Read

As expected, Facebook unveiled its new advertising scheme yesterday. Now comes the interesting part: We’ll see if the site’s users are willing to participate in the plan, which asks them to help companies hawk their wares.

The new scheme puts a slightly different spin on MySpace’s recently announced “behavioral targeting” strategy, according to The Times of London:If, for instance, a Facebook user downloads a film from Sony’s Web site, he or she would be given the option of broadcasting the purchase to friends, who would have no choice but to receive the message, along with an ad from Sony.

Users can either implant such consumerist tidbits into their “news feeds” — bulletin boards that let people know what their friends are up to — or have their photographs appear in “social ads” sent to their friends. The idea is to make Facebook’s advertising seem conversational, according to Mark...

The New Yorker‘s Anthony Grafton begins a rumination on the future of the library by evoking “an old and reassuring story: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom.” Now that many librarians are tasked with putting books online, not just depositing them in stacks, is that notion of the library as public space still resonant?

Mr. Grafton attempts to answer that question by tracing the intellectual history of Google’s and Microsoft’s library-scanning projects all the way back to the third millennium B.C. It’s an interesting tactic, and it leads the writer to a less Utopian take on the Web-as-library than some digitization advocates have posited:The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi,...

When they warn students about the perils of social networking, college officials often point out that prospective employers pore over profiles on MySpace and Facebook. And the sites themselves aren’t shy about doing the same.

As The New York Times reports, both MySpace and Facebook are embracing “behavioral targeting” as an advertising tool. MySpace has enlisted more than 50 companies, including Ford and Taco Bell, in a program that peruses profiles, makes note of users’ interests, and then delivers thematically appropriate ads. Facebook is expected soon to unveil a similar advertising scheme, also based on profile data,.

The social networks are going public with their microtargeting strategies just a week after the Federal Trade Commission held a hearing to consider whether it should regulate online advertising more aggressively. Privacy advocates like the Electronic Frontier Foundation a...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has chosen a successor to Vinton G. Cerf, the Internet pioneer whose term as chairman of the organization recently ended. Peter Dengate Thrush, a lawyer from New Zealand, will take over the job.

Mr. Thrush certainly has the pedigree: He specializes in Internet law and intellectual property, and he has worked with ICANN in various capacities since its creation, in 1998. (Since 2005 he has served alongside Mr. Cerf on the organization’s governing board.)

But Mr. Thrush’s home country might be just as important as his professional credentials. Critics of ICANN have argued that the group needs to find a more international (and less U.S.-centric) focus. The new chairman will very likely be tasked with helping ICANN fulfill that mission. —Brock Read

Carnegie Mellon University’s team has taken the $2-million top prize in this year’s Pentagon-sponsored race for robotic vehicles, the Associated Press reported.

“It’s official (finally) — we won!” the team, Tartan Racing, announced on its Web site.

If that announcement sounds like crowing, it also reflects a bit of suspense, as a vehicle created by a group at Stanford University was actually the first to complete the course. But Carnegie Mellon’s entry, nicknamed “Boss,” had started its journey more than 20 minutes after Stanford’s “Junior,” yet was only a couple minutes behind at the finish.

“Odin,” designed by Team Victor Tango, which includes students from Virginia Tech, came in third.

Those vehicles and nine other finalists navigated themselves through a course at a former Air Force base in California in the contest, called Urban Challenge. Stanford’s team placed first in the first such...

Key to Facebook’s initial success was the simple fact that the vast majority of its profiles represented actual people: The social network requires users to register under their real names.

Arguably that restriction has made Facebook feel safer and less entropic than MySpace, which teems with pseudonymous users and joke profiles. But Facebook’s real-name requirement is drawing some fire, reports The Globe and Mail, in Toronto. A blogger who goes by Jon Swift recently had his Facebook profile yanked, and although the site later relented and reinstated the page, the issue sparked broader debate about the merits of Facebook’s ban on pseudonyms.

“Impersonating anyone or anything is prohibited,” states Facebook policy, and understandably so. But unless one argues that Jon Swift really was trying to pass as the 18th-century Irish satirist, it’s hard to argue that impersonation was really the...

Add the University of Oregon to the small but growing list of institutions that are fighting the recording industry’s antipiracy lawsuits: The university is asking a federal judge to quash subpoenas seeking the names of 17 campus song-swapping suspects.

The Recording Industry Association of America asked Oregon officials to forward pre-litigation notices — which offer discounted rates for out-of-court settlements — to the students earlier this year. But the university declined, so the trade group went ahead and filed a “John Doe” subpoena that called on Oregon to name students identified only by Internet-protocol numbers.

When faced with similar subpoenas, most colleges have acquiesced. But according to Ars Technica, Oregon officials enlisted the state attorney general’s office to help them argue that they simply cannot identify the students the RIAA wants to sue.

Most of the students did...

College librarians are leading a charge against measures in the House and Senate that would grant federal intelligence agencies great latitude in gathering data on library patrons.

The bills, which are intended to replace a temporary law amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, would let the government force “communications-service providers” to hand over information about the activity of users who are not U.S. citizens. Government officials would not be compelled to demonstrate probable cause that subjects are spies or terrorists, reports The Washington Post. (The Department of Justice has stated that libraries are considered to be Internet-service providers.)

Campus librarians say it’s all too easy to imagine scenarios in which federal investigators look in on foreign students who just happen to use library machines or networks as they conduct research at American colleges or...