evilrouters.net

the toronto star tells the story of chris avenir, a first-year student facing academic expulsion “for helping run an online chemistry study group via facebook“.

“so we each would be given chemistry questions and if we were having trouble, we’d post the question and say: ‘does anyone get how to do this one? i didn’t get it right and i don’t know what i’m doing wrong.’ exactly what we would say to each other if we were sitting in the dungeon.”

as an educator, i think ryerson university is taking this way too far (based on what i know). if there was blatant cheating going on, then by all means punish those involved. if this is, as the article says, the students were simply using the forum to “brainstorm” in groups then it is completely absurd.

i *encourage* my students to work together in groups. working together in groups in something that higher education should teach you. every one of these students will have to work together in teams once they get out into the “real world” and will have to collaborate with their peers. it should also be common knowledge that having multiple people in your group who can provide their own insights is an asset, and makes the team greater than the sum of its parts.

again, blatant academic dishonesty should be punished. from what i’ve read, however, that is not the case here.

best of luck to you, chris avenir.

el di pablo recently got a blackberry pearl. yesterday he wrote “reading rss feeds on your blackberry”, but he forgot to mention one very important thing (especially if, like me, you use google reader as your aggregator): google reader has a “mobile” version accessible from your phone.

if you’re using a blackberry, hopefully you’ve already installed opera mini on it. just load up opera mini and point it at the mobile version of google reader and you’re set. it even syncs up so that you don’t see the articles you’ve already read when you later visit the site in your browser.

a native application for the blackberry would be nice, but i can deal with that for now. =)

stan schroeder’s article “richard stallman invents new way of browsing the web” on mashable directed me to this e-mail on the misc@openbsd.org list where stallman (allegedly) states:

for personal reasons, i do not browse the web from my computer. (i also have not net connection much of the time.) to look at page i send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. it is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

this took me on a trip down memory lane. i can remember, 13 or 14 years ago, when i had to access the internet via long-distance phone calls (which didn’t please my parents a whole lot). juno came out with a service where they provided free e-mail to anyone (ad supported) and even had a 1-800 number you could use to avoid long-distance charges. the proprietary client would dial up, send any queued mail, downloading any received mail, and disconnect.

some of us discovered that it was possible to access the internet by e-mail. using juno’s free e-mail service, you could construct specially crafted e-mail messages and send them to certain “gateways” to do things like download web pages, perform archie searches, and even ftp files.

ahh, the good ol’ days. =)

according to the international association of privacy professionals, january 28th is “data privacy day”:

north america joins 27 european countries to celebrate data privacy day 2008. the day will feature several efforts to promote the importance of data protection, including a meeting at duke university among european and u.s. privacy experts.

the iapp is encouraging privacy professionals to contact local schools, colleges and universities and offer to give a presentation on or during the week of january 28 about privacy using the materials provided. our goal is to have privacy professionals all over the country giving presentations to students about the importance of privacy today. details about presentations that happen during the week of january 28 should be sent directly to kim macneill at kim@privacyassocation.org.

as john bambenek mentioned on the sans handler’s diary, however:

“the important note about this effort is that it focuses its attention on the weakest area of privacy protection, the individual themselves. if people do not protect their own information (for instance, by putting their entire lives in their facebook profile) there is little other groups can do to prevent the misuse of that information.”

i just wish i had heard about this earlier. i work in higher education (college students are the most prominent facebook users) and could have done some presentations there. my hometown, an hour away, also has its share of parents who i’m sure would have benefitted from something like this. alas, maybe next year.

if you’re interested in seeing how much personal information i have on my facebook profile, add me as a friend!

just a heads up, don’t link to businessweek.

according to the terms of use on businessweek’s web site, you may not:

use or attempt to use any “deep-link”, “scraper”, “robot”, “bot”, “spider”, “data mining”, “computer code” or any other automated device, program, tool, algorithm, process or methodology or manual process having similar processes or functionality, to access, acquire, copy, or monitor any portion of bw.com, any data or content found on or accessed through bw.com, or any other bw.com information without prior express written consent of bw;

i guess that means it’s also against their terms of use to subscribe to their rss feed as well.

i suppose that launching firefox and entering the url to businessweek would constitute a “manual process” which, therefore, means that even reading their web site is now a violation!