News

• NetChoice: California privacy bills are bad for Internet

  By Grant Gross | 16 May, 2013 16:55

  E-commerce trade group NetChoice takes aim at state legislation -- and at open access and privacy advocates -- in the newest list of bills it deems would be awful for the Internet.

• Court orders names to be withheld before release of Aaron Swartz records

  By John Ribeiro | 14 May, 2013 06:30

  A U.S. federal court has modified a protective order to allow disclosure of the court records of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, but ruled that names and other personal identifying information of those involved in his arrest and prosecution should be redacted.

• Prosecutors, others involved in Swartz case express safety, privacy concerns

  By Jaikumar Vijayan | 03 April, 2013 11:34

  The U.S government and two other entities involved in investigations leading to the indictment of the late Internet activist Aaron Swartz have asked a federal court in Boston to redact the names of people involved in the case from documents being sought by Swartz's estate and by some lawmakers.

• New molecules could bring super-dense, solid-state hard disk alternatives

  By Stephen Lawson | 23 January, 2013 21:37

  A recent breakthrough in storage research may someday produce a new type of solid-state device that can be used like a hard disk drive and holds 1,000 times as much data.

• MIT to probe its role in Aaron Swartz's suicide

  By John Ribeiro | 14 January, 2013 04:18

  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is conducting an inquiry into its role in the legal struggles that are believed to have lead to the suicide Friday of Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

• Best tech colleges are harder than ever to get in

  By Carolyn Duffy Marsan | 03 January, 2013 19:13

  Results from the early application rounds at the nation's best technical colleges indicate that it will be another excruciatingly difficult year for high school seniors to get accepted into top-notch undergraduate computer science and engineering programs.

• 2012: The year that coding became de rigueur

  By Joab Jackson | 24 December, 2012 20:19

  Does true literacy now include the ability to write software programs, just as it does the ability to read, write and do sums?

• MIT research shows new magnetic state that could aid quantum computing

  By Stephen Lawson | 19 December, 2012 20:09

  Researchers at MIT and other institutions have demonstrated a new type of magnetism, only the third kind ever found, and it may find its way into future communications, computing and data storage technologies.

• MIT beats the rush, names Dropbox CEO as 2013 commencement speaker

  By Bob Brown | 14 November, 2012 18:49

  Colleges and universities typically don't announce commencement speakers until the spring, but the Massachusetts Institute of Technology got a jump on things this week by announcing that Dropbox CEO and 2005 MIT grad Drew Houston would be doing the honors in 2013.

• Naval researchers pioneer TCP-based spam detection

  By Joab Jackson | 24 December, 2011 08:39

  A group of researchers from the U.S. Naval Academy has developed a technique for analyzing email traffic in real-time to identify spam messages as they come across the wire, simply using information from the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) packets that carry the messages.

• MIT to open source educational software

  By Joab Jackson | 20 December, 2011 04:48

  As part of an initiative to expand its online course offerings, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to release as open source the software it will use to manage student online learning, the institution announced Monday.

• Ongoing drive-by download campaign hijacked MIT server

  By Lucian Constantin | 04 November, 2011 00:25

  A server belonging to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was commandeered by hackers who used it to launch attacks against other websites as part of a larger drive-by download campaign, according to antivirus vendor BitDefender.

• Thought-controlled computers may soon be a reality

  By Lucas Mearian | 20 October, 2011 03:36

  CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - In 1960, computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider published Man-Computer Symbiosis, a paper that outlined his dream for interactive computing and helped pave the way to the creation of the graphical user interface.

• Senators push for changes in cybercrime law

  By Grant Gross | 08 September, 2011 04:05

  The main U.S. law targeting cybercrime may need to be changed because it has allowed law enforcement agencies to target people who simply violate websites' terms of service or their employers' computer use policies, two senators said Wednesday.

• Internet activist charged with hacking into MIT network

  By Grant Gross | 20 July, 2011 06:43

  The cofounder of online news site Reddit has been charged with computer intrusion, fraud and data theft for allegedly stealing 4.8 million documents from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology network, the U.S. Department of Justice said.