Cellies Get Their Campus Phreak On

The campus grapevine is going high-tech. Move over, word-of-mouth virality, and make room for Rave Wireless, a service being launched on fifteen college campuses this year, and shooting for a hundred schools in 2007.

Rave Wireless is a MVNO (Mobile Voice Network Operator), essentially leasing time from the big-infrastructure wireless companies and then launching their own suite of services, handsets, and plans. (Other examples of MVNOs include ESPN, Disney, and Helio, each with their own "hook.")

Rave is designed specifically for an on-campus college student. The service/handset combination includes several student-friendly features, including the ability to pick up and track classwork assignments from a Learning Management System (LMS), instructor-generated push messaging, and handset access to an online gradebook to check out your GPA, with future plans to allow blogging, social networking, and other savory 3G/Web 2.0 snacks. In addition, the handset includes a GPS (Global Positioning System) chip, and a unique capability that is designed to increase campus safety: a student traveling from point A to point B on campus can set a timer for the duration of their trip. Then, if they don't deactivate the timer or make a call, the GPS unit transmits a "distress" call to campus security, and alerts local authorities that there may be a problem. The campus cops can call the cellie, and if they don't get an answer, can scramble fighter planes or whatever to respond to the phone's location.

There are other campus cell services out there, doing everything from notifying students of their grades to notifying them when a dryer is free in the laundry room. But Rave Wireless seems to have the richest set of offerings to date. Sheesh-- add music downloads to the handset on some kind of subscription service like Yahoo or Napster and this thing would probably be close to perfect.

The article, here, on USA Today doesn't mention monthly service fees, but one can imagine that these services carry some kind of premium. But if Mumsy and Daddums are footing the bill anyway ... . Of course, most student phones are adjuncts to some kind of family plan, so Rave, for the moment, probably means students would have to carry two handsets-- one for talking and texting, and another for all the other 3G goodness. But it's not hard to imagine services like these finding their way to the major carriers in the not-too-distant future. Converged data and communication, after all, is the name of the game. And as mentioned above, if a clever carrier adds content, the "Three Cs" will be covered and enrollment would seem to be a slam-dunk.

Cool, huh?

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Dramatic MySpace Vulnerability Exposed, Closed

Members or readers of social network site digg.com are today engaging in some self-congratulation. Seems the "digg effect" was in play Sunday, whereby a digg user posted a blog post about a major security hole in MySpace. Turns out, all you had to do was append a few letters to the end of a "private" MySpace url and you could see everything that was intended to be password-protected. In other words, "private" was really public, with the simplest of hacks. Literally all you had to do was enter a few characters at the end of the url in your browser; this is something anyone could have done, and probably "anyone" was doing it.

Apparently the vulnerability was originally discovered in April of 2006, and was-- allegedly-- brought to the attention of MySpace administrators. But it took something of a wake-up call to get the MySpace techies mobilized, it seems. After months of inaction, someone posted the details of the vulnerability on digg, where the story received thousands of diggs (votes) and which doubtless generated hundreds of hits to MySpace to try the hack. The story appeared on digg on August 27.

By the following day, the vulnerability had been plugged, at least temporarily, by an abashed MySpace. Digg users, naturally, claim credit for bringing focus to the issue and forcing MySpace to do something about it. There isn't an obvious mention of the issue on the front pages of myspace; it's unclear whether there's any way to tell if a user's "private" content was viewed by someone using the exploit.

This is yet another example of the potential "dangers" of online social networks, but it's also a great example of how another social network (digg) was able to rally their user base and create a positive outcome. While it's scary that lots of private data may have been compromised, it's also good to know that there are enough "good guys" out there to rally around an issue that needs attention, and bring about a resolution (however belated). Let's hope the diggers and other networks like them keep a weather eye open for John Q Public. And for heaven's sake, PLEASE be smart about what you post to your online presence-- even private stuff is likely to be viewed by people you don't know. Be smart, and don't post anything online that you wouldn't put on a billboard along a major highway.

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OLPC Launches CM1, First Production Model

Finally, finally, we can stop calling the machine being developed by the OLPC project "the OLPC," which really didn't make much sense practically or grammatically. The do-dad has at last been christened with the catchy moniker "CM1," or, "Children's Machine 1."

Not only have they launched an actual product with a name and everything, they've actually upped the ante hardware-wise and are throwing in some unexpected gadget love on the $140 lapsters.

Derided by critics as being "too small," the 8" display on CM1 will actually carry a higher resolution than most full-sized lappies: a whopping 1200x900 resolution! In addition, the CM1 will launch with speaker and microphone jacks, which is fueling speculation about VoIP capabilities when the production models roll in 2007. The mesh-networkable CM1 will still only carry 128MB of DRAM and 512MB of flash-based storage, but work is underway to upgrade the processor to a speedier 400MHz and there will be a built-in still/video camera. Skype video calls, anyone? "Hello, future? It's Thailand calling ... ." (Of course, now you can be solicited more personally by the displaced Nigerian royalty as they earnestly offer to share their wealth with you, for just allowing them to deposit to your bank account ... .)

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$80M in Tech Funding to Florida's Poorest Districts

The latest in a series of lawsuit settlements has impoverished school districts in Florida slated to receive $80M from Micro$oft. Following on the heels of a similar payout in California (to the tune of about $500M), the Florida deal sends much-needed tech funding to districts with 50% or more of their enrolled students receiving reduced-cost or no-cost lunch. This according to an article from the wire services and eSchool News (here).

The Florida payout actually saves Micro$oft tens of millions of dollars. The original antitrust lawsuit was brought against the company by the Attorneys General of several states (including Minnesota, Montana, Vermont, California, and Florida). As part of the terms of the settlement, consumers who were unfairly "forced" into using MicroSoft products were able to receive vouchers for between $5 and $12 for computer software or hardware from any company. The money going to the schools in Florida represents 50% of the funds unclaimed by consumers. MicroSoft is able to recoup some of the unclaimed funds as well. Florida's total payout was not to exceed $202,000,000.

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User Interface of the Future

This is absolutely amazing. Jeff Han, from New York University, gives a demo of a multi-touch-sensitive screen interface that can literally and dramatically change the interface between humans and machines.

The software he demonstrates in the video clip are cool in a gee-whiz kind of way, but more importantly they offer a glimpse into how software can interpret sensory input, or maybe it's more accurate to say "sensory output," a tactile and intuitive means of adjusting everything from scale to axis to 3-D mesh objects.

The video was posted on the Wired Campus blog from the Chronicle of Higher Education. No subscription is required (click the Source link below to see that post). The demo is very impressive, but more dramatic are the things that can be envisioned and now enacted by people to completely reshape the way we interact with data, images, and machines. You seriously need to check out the manipulative capabilities of this input device.

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One Dude Talks Smack on OLPC

OK, we get it: not everbody is a fan of the OLPC program-- peer-to-peer mesh networks of no-storage hand-cranked (or pull-stringed) minicomputers. According to Christopher Dawson, in his blog post (here) on ZDNet's education page, "AMD Gets It." "It" being shared, fully-functional, hyper-utilized community resources with a more robust infrastructure.

While nobody debates the lilliputian computing capacity of the OLPC lappies, it's interesting to note how the debate over developing-world technology draws itself into a tri-polar battlefield. There are the OLPC believers, who think that unleashing a personal device with the ability to connect to its' peers with minimal infrastructure means a more "democratic" platform of distributed computing. Then there are the non-computing campers, such as Micro$oft's Billy Gates, who claim that converged devices like a phone/pda/pim are the way to go. Then there's Dawson's platform: spend the money building out infrastructure and put in communal, fully-functional machines (refurbished discards are often touted) that will unleash the full computing power of the industrialized world upon the 'poor, huddled masses yearning to key free.'

Thailand will pilot 500 OLPCs for an eventual rollout of 1 million units in 2007. Brazil, meanwhile, is on the fence, courting proposals from Negroponte and also AMD. Then there's India, who have soundly rejected OLPC but haven't announced what they'll do instead. Sadly, while the debate is so polarizing, some governments-- Nigeria, for example-- may choose to sit out the mating dances and wait for some models to emerge. On the one hand, that's probably good, because no one solution is necessarily "right" for every nation. But on the other hand, the clock is ticking, and every day that goes by is another 419 scam opportunity wasted.

Where do you stand on computing and technology in the emerging world? Comment this post and let's start the debate afresh in these very pages.

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