What if your phone/tablet/computer is suddenly paper-thin and flexible, and therefore can bend or fold? Asks ZDNet. How about a device so thin and light that you wear on your arm rather than carry in your hand, and can transform into a digital notepad when flattened? No, this is not some gadget in a Sci-Fi movie you missed. This is PaperPhone, a prototype phone built collaboratively by Arizona State University’s Flexible Display Center, Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab and the E Ink Corporation…
…Read MorePodcast Series: Innovations in Education
Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.
When the cloud fails: Why universities went public anyway
The recession changed everything for higher education, including IT spending. But are universities trading in privacy for lower costs? asks ZdNet. The failure of the Amazon cloud and slow recovery of the web service over the past day has questioned the increasing reliance on the cloud, and whether regardless of backup systems and distributed datacenters, can in fact the cloud be innately trusted to provide the highest of uptime? Several prominent websites fell foul of Amazon’s cloud failure, including Foursquare, Reddit and Quora, when a datacenter in northern Virginia hit networking errors. However, universities, often with vast IT resources host their own solutions and services from the very heart of their campuses, have shifted from a private cloud to a public cloud approach; like Amazon’s or Microsoft’s competing platform…
…Read MoreSamsung reboots tablet strategy and beats Apple on price
Samsung has changed its tablet strategy and this time the company has an approach that is a lot more competitive with the Apple iPad on price, form factor, and overall features, ZdNet reports. We’ll have to wait until we do a full review of the new Samsung devices to decide if the overall product experience approaches what Apple has to offer, but since the Samsung tablet doesn’t arrive until early summer and will be running Android 3.0, that gives Google time to repair the Honeycomb problems we saw in the Motorola Xoom and it gives developers time to write a lot more tablet-optimized apps for Android 3.0…
…Read MoreFTC drops Google StreetView inquiry; other countries, not so much
The Federal Trade Commission has ended its inquiry of Google and the data it collected from unsecured wireless hotspots, citing the company’s improved privacy policies, reports ZDNet. Not only will the FTC not fine Google, but regulators “had received assurances from Google that it ‘has not used and will not use any of the payload data collected in any Google product or service, now or in the future.’” If only Google could get off so easily elsewhere in the world. In Italy, Google is facing tough new requirements for marking the StreetView cars and registering their itineraries, while the Czech Republic has banned the StreetView program entirely and Germany insisted upon a system by which homeowners could opt out of the service (244,000 households did, by the way)…
…Read MoreWarner Bros. recruiting students to spy on illegal file sharers
Warner Bros. Entertainment UK is providing internships to students in the United Kingdom with a computer or IT-related related degree to help the company reduce online piracy—in part by spying on their fellow students, ZDNet reports. The internships pay 17,500 pounds a year (around $26,000), and a notice of the opportunity was posted at the University of Manchester. Warner Bros. says it will give participating students the tools, knowledge, and training to search the internet for links, posts, torrents, and information that will help the company issue cease-and-desist notices and other legal means to remove pirated content. The job description says students would be asked to “monitor local internet forums and IRC [channels] for pirated Warner Bros. … content in order to gather information on pirate sites, groups, and activities,” among other responsibilities…
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