Cellies Get Their Campus Phreak On

The campus grapevine is going high-tech. Move over, word-of-mouth virality, and make room for Rave Wireless, a service being launched on fifteen college campuses this year, and shooting for a hundred schools in 2007.

Rave Wireless is a MVNO (Mobile Voice Network Operator), essentially leasing time from the big-infrastructure wireless companies and then launching their own suite of services, handsets, and plans. (Other examples of MVNOs include ESPN, Disney, and Helio, each with their own "hook.")

Rave is designed specifically for an on-campus college student. The service/handset combination includes several student-friendly features, including the ability to pick up and track classwork assignments from a Learning Management System (LMS), instructor-generated push messaging, and handset access to an online gradebook to check out your GPA, with future plans to allow blogging, social networking, and other savory 3G/Web 2.0 snacks. In addition, the handset includes a GPS (Global Positioning System) chip, and a unique capability that is designed to increase campus safety: a student traveling from point A to point B on campus can set a timer for the duration of their trip. Then, if they don't deactivate the timer or make a call, the GPS unit transmits a "distress" call to campus security, and alerts local authorities that there may be a problem. The campus cops can call the cellie, and if they don't get an answer, can scramble fighter planes or whatever to respond to the phone's location.

There are other campus cell services out there, doing everything from notifying students of their grades to notifying them when a dryer is free in the laundry room. But Rave Wireless seems to have the richest set of offerings to date. Sheesh-- add music downloads to the handset on some kind of subscription service like Yahoo or Napster and this thing would probably be close to perfect.

The article, here, on USA Today doesn't mention monthly service fees, but one can imagine that these services carry some kind of premium. But if Mumsy and Daddums are footing the bill anyway ... . Of course, most student phones are adjuncts to some kind of family plan, so Rave, for the moment, probably means students would have to carry two handsets-- one for talking and texting, and another for all the other 3G goodness. But it's not hard to imagine services like these finding their way to the major carriers in the not-too-distant future. Converged data and communication, after all, is the name of the game. And as mentioned above, if a clever carrier adds content, the "Three Cs" will be covered and enrollment would seem to be a slam-dunk.

Cool, huh?

Dramatic MySpace Vulnerability Exposed, Closed

Members or readers of social network site digg.com are today engaging in some self-congratulation. Seems the "digg effect" was in play Sunday, whereby a digg user posted a blog post about a major security hole in MySpace. Turns out, all you had to do was append a few letters to the end of a "private" MySpace url and you could see everything that was intended to be password-protected. In other words, "private" was really public, with the simplest of hacks. Literally all you had to do was enter a few characters at the end of the url in your browser; this is something anyone could have done, and probably "anyone" was doing it.

Apparently the vulnerability was originally discovered in April of 2006, and was-- allegedly-- brought to the attention of MySpace administrators. But it took something of a wake-up call to get the MySpace techies mobilized, it seems. After months of inaction, someone posted the details of the vulnerability on digg, where the story received thousands of diggs (votes) and which doubtless generated hundreds of hits to MySpace to try the hack. The story appeared on digg on August 27.

By the following day, the vulnerability had been plugged, at least temporarily, by an abashed MySpace. Digg users, naturally, claim credit for bringing focus to the issue and forcing MySpace to do something about it. There isn't an obvious mention of the issue on the front pages of myspace; it's unclear whether there's any way to tell if a user's "private" content was viewed by someone using the exploit.

This is yet another example of the potential "dangers" of online social networks, but it's also a great example of how another social network (digg) was able to rally their user base and create a positive outcome. While it's scary that lots of private data may have been compromised, it's also good to know that there are enough "good guys" out there to rally around an issue that needs attention, and bring about a resolution (however belated). Let's hope the diggers and other networks like them keep a weather eye open for John Q Public. And for heaven's sake, PLEASE be smart about what you post to your online presence-- even private stuff is likely to be viewed by people you don't know. Be smart, and don't post anything online that you wouldn't put on a billboard along a major highway.

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Want to learn something cool?

Well, who doesn't, right? This blog post is a trial run in the new Blogger beta, and may eventually become the home of the well-traveled "Want to know something cool?" that lives over on the "old" Blogger boxes. Whether we merge, migrate, or just start running in parallel with slightly different bents on things educational, technological, and, well, cool, we'll keep both urls open so that we can minimize confuzzlement and (hopefully) drive more traffic.

Meanwhile, we'll play around with Blogger Beta's new features, including the labels that may have brought you here. Sorry for the detour, but if you're looking for things that actually go along with the labels on this post, please jump over to our older sister blog, "Want to know something cool?" where you'll find lots of posts on technology and its' impact on education. Thanks for visiting; we hope you'll dig WTKSC and eventually, when we get up and running, you'll come back to learnsomethingcool as well.