Liudvikas Bukys

Back to School:
“Now let’s move on to the other criminally dumb figure in this fiasco. That Yale Web site was designed by a self-promoting Yale sophomore who brags that he has worked for Microsoft since he was 14. He’s the genius who decided that birth dates and Social Security numbers would make the perfect passwords because of their “personally identifiable nature,” according to the Yale Daily News, the student newspaper that broke the story late last month before it was picked up by The Washington Post and the wire services…. Outside audits of security still matter, too. Yale actually has an Information Security Office that investigates cases such as identity theft – but apparently no one talked to the office until after the site had been up for six months and had already been hacked. “

Yale Tells FBI Princetown Hacked [SecurityFocus]

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: The rise of hackers vs. colleges:
Security being bolstered for university computer systems

Lessig, Morpheus, and Stanford story:

Andy Oram:
“…the plug was recently pulled on law professor Lawrence Lessig’s computer by anxious university staff that detected a Morpheus server running on it. He had just installed the server so that he could offer some of his significant and highly desired legal papers to supporters and researchers. Nothing could better illustrate the alternatives facing us than the thrall of richly textured Web Services and the pall of Lessig’s blank monitor.”

Dave Winer:
“He wrote a scholarly paper. He launched a copy of Morpheus and put his paper in the shared folder. Went home for the weekend. On Monday he comes into the office and his computer is disconnected. Stanford security had paid him a visit. “That’s illegal,” they said. Heh. He’s the expert on what’s legal. He wrote the stuff. He wanted to share it. Gotcha.”

Chronicle of Higher Ed:
Virginia Tech Police Seize and Search a Professor’s Computer in Vandalism Case

University of Rochester: University Technology-Transfer Revenue Surges to All-Time High
Companies around the world paid more than 10 times more for the commercial
rights to University research last year than they did just two years before,
and that achievement has already been surpassed this year, only eight months
into fiscal year 2002, with more than $40 million in revenue coming to the
University since July 2001.

GOVERNOR, INDUSTRY ANNOUNCE BUFFALO CENTER OF EXCELLENCE

Buffalo Center in Bioinformatics will be Foundation for New Economy in Western NY

Governor George E. Pataki was joined today by Bill Blake, Compaq’s VP of Worldwide High Performance Technical Computing and business and academic leaders to announce up to $150 million in private sector support for a Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics in Buffalo a key component of the Governor’s $1 billion high-tech and biotech Centers of Excellence proposal.

Industry partners in the endeavor include major computing, software and communications networking companies such as Compaq, Veridian, InforMax and Stryker and others such as Dell, Sun, SGI and Q-Chem. Academic and research partners include the University of Buffalo, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute.

…

The Center will be located in downtown Buffalo, near the medical campus. Plans call for a 150,000 square foot building to house drug design research space, computational and three dimensional visualization facilities, product commercialization space and workforce training facilities. Academic and industry researchers will work side-by-side in a collaborative effort to identify key research areas, and will translate that research into commercial realities and opportunities to attract high tech and biotech firms of all sizes to Western New York.

…

In addition to academic and research partners such as the University of Buffalo, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, the Center of Excellence will also involve academic collaborations with the New York State Structural Biology Consortium, Cornell, Syracuse Health Science Center, the University of Rochester and Columbia University.

Universities in NY, Netherlands Targeted in Warez Raids
[CNET article] [CNET article]

The US Justice Department and international law enforcement agencies
last week seized over 130 computers belonging to suspected software
pirates around the world. Many of the people targeted in the raids
have been providing law enforcement officials with information that
has resulted in additional search warrants. The Rochester Institute of
Technology and the University of Twente in Hilversum, the Netherlands
were both targets in the raids.

Wired News: Linux Plus Itanium Equals Whoosh. It’s billed as academia’s fastest supercomputer: an IBM machine using Intel’s Itanium processor running a Linux application that can process 2 trillion calculations per second. Wanna know how gravitational waves work? By Michelle Delio. [Jake Savin: Linux]

Techies Learn to Go It Alone. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute receives a $1 million donation to pump up entrepreneurship at the university. Also: Black colleges assess their information technology goals…. [Wired News]