Microsoft’s long-rumored investment in Facebook has finally come to pass, but the software company will end up with a smaller stake in the social network than some observers had predicted.

According to CNET News, Microsoft will take a $240-million equity stake in Facebook, good for 1.6 percent of the social network. Microsoft had attempted to buy a 5-percent stake in the site, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.

The software company reportedly bested Google in a bidding war, so Microsoft officials likely view the deal as a significant victory in their battle for IT supremacy. But the big winner might be Facebook itself: Whether Microsoft overpaid or not, the transaction sets the social network’s value at a whopping $15-billion. —Brock Read

Campus IT officers whose networks and servers are being pushed to the limit can complain about the resources that are expended on file swapping and virtual classrooms. But the officials might also want to cast their glances on their e-mail accounts: At some institutions, untamed inboxes have gotten out of hand.

Computerworld profiles the University of North Texas, which has found itself scrambling to meet its employees’ ravenous appetite for e-mail. IT officials recently upgraded their e-mail system, and they figured that 3.5 terrabytes of storage capacity would be plenty for about 6,500 inboxes. But the university soon concluded that no less than 15.2 terrabytes would suffice. Since each terrabyte costs about $8,400, that’s a big difference.

An uptick in e-mail attachments — like video files and PowerPoint presentations — seems to be driving the inbox explosion, says Dave Gerlach, North...

The New York Times profiled the fast-growing Open Content Alliance yesterday under the headline “Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on the Web.”

As Jessamyn West, of Librarian.net, writes, that characterization seems harsh. To be sure, libraries aligning themselves with the alliance—a book-scanning project created by Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive—are implicitly rejecting similar efforts led by Google and Microsoft. But what’s at stake isn’t just whether books make it onto the Web. It’s how they get there. Many alliance members say that Google and Microsoft impose too many restrictions on the content they scan, and that Mr. Kahle’s project is a wide-open antidote.

Of course, some supporters of Mr. Kahle’s project have suggest more broadly that digitization projects shouldn’t be put in the hands of corporate giants at all. In that sense, the shunning of...

Duquesne University officials might be a bit red-faced after they accidentally e-mailed a raft of confidential financial-aid documents to an unsuspecting student. But it looks like no real damage was done, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

The errant e-mail message, sent to an unidentified student this month, contained data from about 7,900 federal student-aid applications. Duquesne is going ahead and warning all of the applicants that their personal records were exposed.

But the applicants probably won’t have to place any panicked calls about their credit reports. The recipient of the e-mail message immediately deleted the sensitive data from his in box and got in touch with campus police, so none of the financial information made it out in the open. “We are lucky the student is honorable, came forward immediately, and has been completely cooperative,” said Bridget Fare, a...

Scholars have often derided Wikipedia for its reliance on anonymous contributions: If anyone can traipse onto the site and start hacking away, the argument goes, vandals and smack-talkers will overtake posters willing to put their credentials (or, at the very least, their pseudonyms) on the line.

To be sure, Wikipedia does have its share of unnamed no-goodniks. But complaints about the scourge of anonymity might be overheated, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Dartmouth College. After poring over the Dutch and French versions of Wikipedia, the Dartmouth team concluded that anonymous “good Samaritans” are actually among the site’s most valuable editors.

Good Samaritans, the researchers say, are unregistered posters — typically with bodies work of less than 100 edits — who appear to contribute only to articles about their particular areas of expertise. As it turns out,...

On its iTunes U portal, Apple’s digital-music store has already built up an impressive empire of recorded college lectures and events, all available for downloading. Now iTunes U is casting its gaze outside the ivory tower.

The portal has unveiled a new section, “Beyond Campus,” which collects educational material from museums, radio stations, and other public institutions. iTunes users can still watch lectures from Berkeley and guest speeches from Duke, but they can now also view live music performances from the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Sound Live series and take video walkthroughs of Richard Serra’s sculptures the Museum of Modern Art.

“As we started down the track of iTunes U, one thing we discovered is that there are a lot of institutions and companies with publicly available content that was highly valuable,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes, in an interview...

An influential group of lawmakers yesterday asked the Federal Trade Commission to take a tougher stance against identity theft on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

During testimony at a House of Representatives hearing this summer, commission officials said they considered peer-to-peer file sharing to be only as dangerous as other online activities, like Web surfing and instant messaging. But 19 members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which held the hearing, apparently disagree. In a letter to Deborah Platt Majoras, the commission’s chairwoman, the lawmakers argue that “inadvertent file sharing” has left sensitive data like personal bank records and tax forms floating around peer-to-peer networks.

“Although we recognize that P2P networks have the potential to deliver innovative and lawful applications that will enhance business and academic endeavors,” the...

Charities like Second Harvest and the Darfur Stove Project can thank e-mail spam for financing their operations. Or, more appropriately, they can thank Joe Wagner, a graduate student at Stanford University who has sued spam merchants and made sure any awards or settlements are donated to charitable causes.

This summer Mr. Wagner and David Cannon, another graduate student at Stanford, filed suit in California small-claims court against a number of companies accused of firing off unsolicited e-mail messages. According to The Stanford Daily, the student plaintiffs made the spammers an offer: Give the money to charity, and we’ll dismiss the charges. Most of the companies agreed, but four businesses — Valueclick, WorldAvenue, SubscriberBASE, and Azoogle — decided to settle the cases in court.

A claims-court judge ruled...

Hundreds of thousands of people who applied for financial aid from the State of Louisiana may have had sensitive data exposed when a Boston company lost a bundle of records, The Advocate of Baton Rouge reports.

The Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance hired Iron Mountain Inc. to store state scholarship and student-aid files, which included bank-account data and the Social Security numbers of students and parents. But the company lost the records during a move.

The financial-aid office says it’s unlikely that any of the missing information is being misused: All the records are compressed, and it would take “sophisticated computer skills” to unlock them, according to one official. But the office has posted an online message about the data loss, and it has set up a telephone hot line for people concerned about identity theft. —Brock Read

How long will it be before every American research university has its own YouTube channel? The video-sharing site certainly seems to be attracting a lot of attention from academe, and for good reason.

The University of California at Berkeley unveiled its YouTube channel earlier this month, and the site has gotten off to a very promising start: More than 650,000 Web surfers have stopped by, and over 6,000 of them have subscribed to the channel.

Now the University of Southern California has created its own YouTube channel. The institution has already posted more than 200 videos, including course lectures, clips from a film festival, and a performance by a student jazz group. And seven schools at USC — including the School of Cinematic Arts and the Marshall School of Business — have already set up sub-channels to which users can subscribe. —Brock Read