Category: Technology

Total Telecom – Online ad sales open door to viruses

Total Telecom – Online ad sales open door to viruses

A good deal of the Internet is, for better or worse, funded by advertising. Stories like this show just how shaky of a foundation this might be.

Viruses can be incorporated directly within an ad, so that simply clicking on the ad or visiting the site can infect a computer, or ads can be used to direct users to a nefarious Web site that aims to steal passwords or identities. In most cases, the problem becomes apparent within a matter of hours and quick fixes are put in place, but that’s not fast enough for Internet surfers whose computers end up infected or compromised.

If Internet users loose faith in their ability to click an advertisement, ad revenue will decline. If ad revenue declines, companies like Google or (insert newspaper name here) will be hard pressed to continue operating at no cost to the bulk of their users. While a business model change might not be a bad idea, problems like this show just how quickly the landscape of the Internet might change.

I wonder if we can categorize this as a browser bug? Could Firefox/Safari/Opera/IE/etc lock themselves up tight enough to prevent malware, or do we need more trusted computing (or Macs)?

Open sourcing homework

Academic source code dust-up symptom of CS education ills – Ars Technica

Short story–student puts Comp Sci class homework online under an open source license after the class is over; instructor is annoyed.

My quick take on this is that it sounds much like paranoia over sharing of test questions. I think, as academics, we should approach teaching just like research. The way that we teach should evolve over time to be constantly improving. This includes revising test questions and assignments every time a subject is taught. It’s more work, but it has the added benefit of eliminating the exact problem that this professor thought he saw.

Keeping the momentum locally and nationally

A Penn State colleague who we were fortunate enough to meet at (and before) Drupal Camp WI blogs about how we might keep the momentum of this event going. He’s right that there are a number of similarities between our schools, and hopefully this will be an incentive to keep the connection alive. Sharing ideas about technology was great, but the real take-away was the idea of forming a Drupal in Higher Education consortium. What makes this idea special is that we, as universities, face challenges that are different from other sorts of Drupal users–both technological and political.  I’m not sure whether it would be attached to other Drupal camps, the CIC, or just be an online group (one thing that ComETS has taught our campus is that events are key to keeping connections alive). I wonder if a good way to start might be to find out who is interested, and then to find out what the strengths/needs of each are. We found a lot to agree about–even regarding the role of central vs distributed systems–so it would be a shame to let geography keep these good ideas from coming to fruition.

That Thing About Drupal

I gave 2 presentations at Drupal Camp WI over the weekend.  One of them has been on my mind for quite some time.  When I first started learning Drupal, I could tell that there was a certain “thing” that was the hurdle to understanding the platform–once you get it, everything is more or less easily. I described the session as:

There is a “thing” about Drupal that makes it hard for beginners to get started, yet at the same time provides much of the platform’s flexibility and power. It’s also a “thing” that is easy for seasoned developers to forget after awhile.

This session will broadly cover site organization using content types, taxonomy, and views. We will cover strategies for planning a site and how you might “translate” needs into a structure in Drupal. If time is available, we will build a simple site using these modules and talk about how to search for additional modules when what’s there doesn’t fit the plan.

This session is for people who starting their first Drupal site, or for anyone who is considering Drupal for a project.

Fortunately for myself and those who couldn’t make the camp, most of the sessions were archived.  Watch the video here, and check out my slides below.