Serendipity35

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is the proposed intellectual property laws that are now in Congress. Both houses have bills that are aimed at combating copyright infringement of movies, music and other intellectual property. Supporting SOPA are some powerful players: content creators, led by Hollywood and the music industry, who want the most stringent measures. Currently opposing them are some tech and electronics players such as Google, PayPal and Twitter. A group of those companies took out newspaper ads this month saying that the bills would "give the U.S. government the power to censor the Web using techniques similar to those used by China."

Education has not played a large enough role in the battle, but there are some some potentially serious consequences if the content creators get their way. For educators, publishers who offer electronic products (which is just about all of them) are on board with strong SOPA legislation as content creators too. The act could have serious repercussions for the use of open educational resources too.

As described by the San Francisco Chronicle:

A bipartisan bill introduced last week in the House of Representatives would mark a fundamental change in Internet law, shifting liability for copyright piracy from the infringer to the host website.

It would chip away at critical safeguards that have shaped the Internet as we know it today, and many worry it would make it far more difficult for the next YouTube, Facebook or Craigslist to emerge and succeed.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is the counterpart to the Senate’s pending PROTECT IP Act, which already had rights groups, academics and many online businesses up in arms. But the House bill goes much further.

SOPA could take away the reasonable “safe harbor” protections for internet site operators and it is unclear what effect it would have on "fair use."

It is a bill worth taking note of in the next session of Congress.

Further Reading

http://mfeldstein.com/how-georgia-tech-has-shown-the-perils-of-sopa/

http://www.educause.edu/Resources/ProposedSOPAFixesfromtheHigher/242321

http://gigaom.com/2011/12/23/hate-sopa-6-things-you-can-do-to-stop-it/

http://civiliansnews.com/2011/12/24/is-it-piracy-or-sharing-the-truth-about-the-stop-online-piracy-act-sopa/

Somewhat related to my previous post...

For now, it looks like accrediting agencies have been given a reprieve because the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity has passed on any decision to break the connection between accreditation and federal funding. Those accrediting agencies very much want to maintain their role in determining a colleges’ eligibility that allows them to receive federal student aid programs.

But just how much the committee on accreditation, which was charged with the broad task of recommending how the nation’s accreditation system should be reshaped when the Higher Education Act is revised in 2013, will suggest changing the status quo was still somewhat unclear after two final days of discussion here. While committee members, under pressure from accreditors and colleges, agreed that the agencies should retain their role as the primary determiners of eligibility for federal financial aid, they still considered -- and many supported -- a host of other, smaller changes.
The committee’s draft report, published in October, presented a series of options and scenarios rather than making concrete recommendations. At its outset, two of three possible recommendations involved reimagining how accreditation works: separating accreditation from the eligibility process for federal student aid, or modifying the link between the two to create an “either/or” system wherein colleges would have to meet baseline criteria established by the government and then could pursue either accreditation or governmental certification.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/12/19/committee-higher-ed-accreditation-composing-its-final-report#ixzz1hCzoXMg4

As I have written before, as the cost of textbooks continues to rise, more and more college students are choosing not to buy them. Almost half of my class this semester has no textbook. They choose to either borrow a copy from a classmate or the library, or just rely on whatever parts of the book I cover in class (which is probably about 30%).

I would prefer to use a free and open textbook, but I haven't found one for that particular course (Critical Thinking).

Some scary stats:

According to huffingtonpost.com, 7 out of 10 undergraduates surveyed at 13 college campuses said they had not purchased one or more textbooks because the cost was too high when surveyed by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

The Government Accountability Office has estimated that textbooks cost a quarter the average tuition for state universities and three-fourths the average tuition at community colleges.

PIRG analysis also found the price of textbooks has risen 22% over the past four years, which is a much faster rate than overall inflation.

Rising prices come as student debt has also soared to record levels. In fact, that debt exceeds the total credit card debt in 2010.

Last week, I wrote a post called No Privacy By Default about how websites and services, in that case it was LinkedIn, make the mistake of sharing your private information by default.

Well, now Facebook has once again shot themselves in the foot in this way as many posts online the past week have pointed out that if you want to see the phone numbers of all your friends (and some strangers, oddly enough) take a look inside your Facebook contacts page.

Go into Facebook, click Account, then Edit Friends, then select Contacts from the menu on the left. You should see a list of profile pictures with phone numbers attached.

Of course, these people gave Facebook their phone number, It's not like FB can just pull them out of some Internet phonebook. But, I am betting that almost all those who did give their phone number did not expect it to be available so widely.

What piqued my interest is that there are people there who ARE NOT on my "friends" list and I have their numbers too.

I have yet to find the definitive explanation of this, but some posts have suggested that without your knowledge or consent, if you use your phone to access Facebook, FB imported all the names and phone numbers from your phone’s address book and uploaded them.



According to Facebook:

Facebook Phonebook displays contacts you have imported from your phone, as well as your Facebook friends.If you would like to remove your mobile contacts from Facebook, you need to disable the feature on your mobile phone and visit this page.

To stop sharing your phone number on Facebook, go first to Facebook’s Remove Imported Contacts page (see image above). You should also check your Account/Privacy settings and click Customize settings to change access to your Contact Information so only people you select can see your number - or maybe you should just delete your number from Facebook altogether.

Once again, instead of informing you of this "feature" and giving you the option to turn it on, they have turned it on and allowed you (if you knew about it) to turn it off (if you could figure out how). No privacy by default.