QR codes welcoming freshmen to campus

Three in four WLU freshmen own a smart phone.

The newest crop of Washington and Lee University (WLU) freshmen didn’t have to look past T-shirts worn by the school’s IT staff in acclimating to life on campus.

First-time students came to the Lexington, Va., campus in early September and were greeted by IT staffers donning T-shirts filled with 18 Quick Response (QR) codes – nine on each side – that directed students to helpful web resources like the university’s IT help desk site and local attractions like the Blue Ridge Parkway, which connects to nearby national parks.

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Google search change leads to major higher-ed security breach

IT experts say campuses should more quickly adjust to Google search changes.

A modification in the way Google searches the web exposed the Social Security numbers of 43,000 people affiliated with Yale University, highlighting another data storage vulnerability that could vex campus IT leaders and prompting questions from technologists who are skeptical of colleges’ commitment to securing sensitive information.

The Yale breach is the latest high-profile data security incident in higher education—one that originated in September 2010, when Google announced its searches would include file transfer protocol (FTP) servers, which previously had been off-limits to general internet queries.

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