Researchers who fear that their work in encryption and computer security could run afoul of the law will be getting support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation under an initiative called the Coders’ Rights Project.

The foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes civil liberties in cyberspace, announced today that the project will offer researchers assistance on legal issues related to computer-security vulnerabilities, intellectual property and free speech, and reverse engineering, which involves taking apart a technology to see how it works.

Computer scientists’ work is often stymied by bogus legal threats, said Jennifer Granick, the foundation’s civil liberties director, in a prepared statement.

Added Edward W. Felten, a Princeton University computer scientist: “The Coders’ Rights Project will give critical legal he...

Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford University law professor whose writings have profoundly influenced the way people think about intellectual property in the digital age, announced a year ago that he’d had enough of advocating for the reform of copyright law and would devote his energies to fighting corruption and the influence of money on American politics.

Turns out he has more to say on the subject for which he’s best known. This fall he’s coming out with his latest book, Remix, which argues that the legal system is making criminals out of young people who produce entertaining or informative videos, music, and other art works through piecing together parts of others’ works. He advocates a new type of economy that allows both...

Students at Sonoma State University learn how to create computer viruses, worms, and other malicious code in a controversial class taught by George Ledin, a professor of computer science. An article last week in Newsweek says anti-virus software manufacturers are irked by the professor’s class and some have vowed not to hire his students when they graduate.

According to the article, Mr. Ledin has been likened to A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who sold nuclear technology to North Korea. But Mr. Ledin says he’s performing a service, helping his students develop antidotes to computer viruses by teaching them to think like hackers. His students work on closed networks from which viruses can’t escape.

Mr. Ledin argues that anti-virus software produced by McAfee, Symantec, and other companies is ineffective. In this two-minute...

Colleges serving minority students may receive federal money for computer hardware, software, and network upgrades under a provision in legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. The bill cleared Congress Thursday and is expected to be signed by President Bush.

The provision largely restates the Minority Serving Institution Digital and Wireless Technology Opportunity Act of 2007, HR 694, which the U.S. House of Representatives approved in September. The provision would create a program at the Department of Commerce to distribute money for technology upgrades at colleges serving blacks, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Hispanics, and Native Alaskans. Institutions receiving the funds would be required to...

William Patry, Google’s senior copyright lawyer and a former lawyer for the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, has dissected the provision in the mammoth higher education bill regarding peer-to-peer file sharing on college campuses. And what he writes on his blog Wednesday is not encouraging for colleges. The provision requires colleges to develop plans to use technologies for stopping illegal file sharing and “to the extent practicable” to provide students with subscription based services for downloading movies and music.

After reading a congressional report that clarifies the bill’s language, Mr. Patry concludes that the next Congress...

Lawyers for two women at Yale Law School who charged a Web site with destroying their reputations have learned the identities of some of the individuals who posted to the site derogatory comments about the women, according to an article Wednesday in Wired.

A year ago the women sued an administrator for the Web site, AutoAdmit, and several others who posted messages to the site under pseudonyms. The messages were filled with misogynist attacks on the women. One message called one of the women a “stupid bitch.” In another, the commenter announced his/her intention to repeatedly sodomize one of the women.

The women who filed the lawsuit have not revealed their identities. They stated in their lawsuit that the online postings caused them to...

Richard A. DeMillo is stepping down as dean of Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing. During his six-year tenure at the college, Mr. DeMillo expanded the college’s research funds by 60 percent and increased the number of faculty members by 40 percent. A former chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard, Mr. DeMillo plans to write technology books after he leaves the dean’s office November 1. Then he will return to the university to teach computing and management.

Q. You told Cox News Service that your decision to resign was prompted by disagreements with the university’s provost. Can you elaborate?

A. Any questions about what the provost’s perceptions might be need to be addressed to him. I’m in the dark about that.

Q. What was your next big priority for the college of computing?

A. We’ve been working on establishing schools in biomedical...

In the longstanding battle between the higher-education community and the entertainment industry over how aggressive colleges should be in trying to stop the swapping of music and video files over campus networks, the entertainment industry has prevailed.

The industry triumphed in pushing through a provision in the renewal of the Higher Education Act that would force colleges to use “technology-based deterrents” to curtail the ability of students to share copyrighted works using peer-to-peer networks. The industry also succeeded in attaching language to the bill that would force colleges “to the extent practicable” to offer students music and video through subscription-based services such as Ruckus Network Inc. Negotiators for the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate

Some former Google employees have introduced a new search engine that they hope will overtake Google in popularity. The search engine is called Cuil, (pronounced “cool”) and it has been generating so much interest that its home page could not be opened at various points today.

Tom Costello, a former Stanford University researcher and one of the founders of the search engine, said Cuil culls through 120 billion Web pages, more pages than Google searches, according to an article today in The New York Times. But Google tells the paper it has the largest collection of documents searchable on the Web, and that it welcomes competition.

Cuil displays search results a bit differently from Google. Entries are longer and there are more pictures with...

In an effort to dissuade the Federal Communications Commission from penalizing cable companies for prioritizing peer-to-peer traffic, the cable industry is arguing that colleges do the same thing.

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association wrote a letter to the agency, dated Thursday, arguing that it is not “anticompetitive” for their member cable companies to prohibit or limit certain peer-to-peer programs. The agency is probing a complaint that Comcast had been slowing down the exchange of files that used the BitTorrent protocol in violation of the FCC’s network management principles.

“Virtually all of the top national universities, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, restrict users’ ability to engage in activities that cause excessive congestion,” the...