HackCollege Reader “Marla” tipped us to the following story. Apparently Irvine Valley College wasn’t aware it was hanging the flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. I’m no Vietnamese history buff, but it seems this would akin to hanging a North Korean flag somewhere around school. Read on:

Vietnamese flag removed at Irvine Valley College [Orange County Register]

If you have any tips for a HackCollege story, send them to tips@hackcollege.com

And has been met with heavy criticism. Reportedly, JuicyCampus is:

• picking Yale apart:
  

  Posters to the site have mentioned specific student names in discussions such as “craziest bitch on the Yale campus” and “most overrated person at Yale.”

• highly visited and hurtful for Princetonians:
  

  Sarah Ferguson ’10 has firsthand experience with the negative effects of JuicyCampus. She was named on the site in several defamatory posts and challenged the anonymous poster to “grow a pair” and say something to her face.

• at UPenn but will fade soon enough:
  

  Like it or not, students have been ruining their own reputations long before gossip Web sites ever came along. And Web sites like these tend to fade fast. Words like “man-whore” and “slut” can only be read so many times before they start to lose their bite and put you to sleep faster than a Friday morning math recitation.

• still relatively unheard of at Brown:
  

  Looking to create a place for students to share their college stories, Ivester and his team initially launched JuicyCampus at seven trial schools across the country in Oct. 2007. Although JuicyCampus has attracted media attention - including critics at Cornell, Yale and Loyola Marymount University - many Brown students have yet to hear of the site.

• trashing Cornell students pretty hard:
  

  You have to have thick skin.

It is for good reason that there is no link to the anonymous forum from this post.

Stanford will announce today that tuition will be free for students whose families earn less than $100,000, plus a few other things. Damn, girl.

Stanford drops tuition for some students [via SFGate.com via digg]

In a weird twist of fate just a week after LMU’s emergency system failed, a shooting occurred yesterday at Northern Illinois University. Six people died, including the shooter.

A HackCollege reader from NIU Kellie wrote in a comment yesterday:

It’s a weird time to be a student. Two major school shootings in less than a one year period. Tragedy is inevitable, but why does it have to happen at schools? Why does if have to be so senseless?

We’ve been covering the failure of emergency notification systems, but the New York Times reports that the NIU’s system worked well and was used quickly: “At 3:20 p.m. [about 15 minutes after the shooting], he said, the university posted an alert on its Web site, through its e-mail system and through another campus alarm system: ‘There has been a report of a possible gunman on campus. Get to a safe area and take precautions until given the all clear. Avoid the King Commons and all buildings in that vicinity.’” Within an hour after the shooting, school officials posted a message that there was no longer a threat. We’re glad that at least everyone at NIU was kept informed.

Our hearts are again with NIU during this week and into the future. As Kellie said, we’re all Huskies.

Earlier today, an unidentified gunman opened fired inside a lecture hall, injuring as many as 16 and killing as many as four before killing himself. Northern Illinois University reports there is no longer a threat. Their emergency system reported the incident within 15 minutes, according to the Washington Post. Our hearts are with NIU.

Gunman Opens Fire at Northern Illinois University [Washington Post]

Last night at about 9:50 pm PST, 7-8 gunshots rang out across the campus of my school, LMU. Within a half hour, I could see half a dozen LAPD cars 200 yards outside of my window with a helicopter circling over my building. My roommates and I wondered what exactly was going on.

I’m just going to say the two phrases that everyone is thinking of right now to get them out of the way: Virginia Tech and Columbine. There.

Read on to your heart’s content »

It’s the first week back at LMU and everyone is running around trying to find the cheapest place to buy books before their professors start noticing. Four months abroad made me momentarily forget what book companies in the States are allowed to get away with. I present to you the latest scam I have discovered–which I am sure is not new to many schools: textbooks sold in tandem with an online “workbook.” As always, it’s difficult to tell who exactly is to blame: the publisher, the school, the department, or the professor.

I went to my German II class earlier this week and was informed I would need a book and a workbook. No problem, I thought. I ballparked the package around $80 online. You’ll see I was pretty close.

Read on to your heart’s content »

Music gets stolen on college campuses. College students are also poor. And Americans will stop at nothing to pay nothing. Music can easily be obtained through theft. Music pirating happens. Whatever your stance is on pirating music, one thing is unquestionably up: the RIAA is up to no good.

To bring you up to speed, very few people have been sued by the RIAA. Rather the RIAA just bullies people into settling out of court for 1/100th of the amount the RIAA claims that a specific pirate “owes” them. The RIAA banks on citizens freaking out and agreeing to pay a few thousand dollars, without the due process of the court.

Until now. The Oregon attorney general is now pursuing the RIAA:

“In the Fight Over Piracy, a Rare Stand for Privacy” [New York Times]

Why go to college if you don’t even have to any more? The world-renowned MIT has put its entire class catalog online under the moniker MIT OpenCourseWare. Sure you won’t get professorial feedback or fire-under-your-ass lighting, but the information’s there.

It’s foolish to assume that you’ll be able to teach yourself enough material to earn a degree, but we’re suggesting that you double-check your notes in a crunch. If your own professor doesn’t put his or her notes online, then you might be able to find some overlap in the MIT OpenCourseWare catalog. And I don’t care which school you go to, MIT probably knows better.

• So read the article: An MIT Education is Now Just a Click Away [Boston.com via digg]
• … and then start skipping physical class: MIT OpenCourseWare

These exploits have been plaguing Windows users for years. Today, Mac users, your time has come. If you download videos from porn sites, don’t install “new version of codec”.

Exploit: OSX.RSPlug.A Trojan Horse

Discovered: October 30, 2007

Risk: Critical

Description: A malicious Trojan Horse has been found on several pornography web sites, claiming to install a video codec necessary to view free pornographic videos on Macs. A great deal of spam has been posted to many Mac forums, in an attempt to lead users to these sites. When the users arrive on one of the web sites, they see still photos from reputed porn videos, and if they click on the stills, thinking they can view the videos, they arrive on a web page that says the following:

Quicktime Player is unable to play movie file.
Please click here to download new version of codec.

After the page loads, a disk image (.dmg) file automatically downloads to the user’s Mac. If the user has checked Open “Safe” Files After Downloading in Safari’s General preferences (or similar settings in other browsers), the disk image will mount, and the installer package it contains will launch Installer. If not, and the user wishes to install this codec, they double-click the disk image to mount it, then double-click the package file, named install.pkg.

If the user then proceeds with installation, the Trojan horse installs; installation requires an administrator’s password, which grants the Trojan horse full root privileges. No video codec is installed, and if the user returns to the web site, they will simply come to the same page and receive a new download. …

Read the full security alert: Intego Security Alert [via Mashable]
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