Friday, October 5, 2007

UC Berkeley offers free course lectures on YouTube

The University of California at Berkeley took a dive into the Web 2.0 world with Wednesday's launch of a program that offers entire course lectures and special events on YouTube to all Internet users without charge.

Users can view more than 300 hours of videotaped courses on topics that include bioengineering, peace and conflict studies, and physics, the university said. Moving forward, Berkeley said that it will constantly expand its catalogue of YouTube videos.

"UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life - academics, events and athletics - which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community," said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley's vice provost for undergraduate education, in a statement.

Berkeley said that it is the first university to offer lectures on the YouTube site. However, it noted that it has used open-source video since 2001, when the campus's Educational Technology Services division launched webcast.berkeley.edu, a local site that now provides course and event content via podcasts and streaming video.

The university noted that the number of courses available by podcast has increased from 15 to 86 since that program was launched in April, 2006.

Dan Herman, an analyst at research firm New Paradigm, blogged that while the university's YouTube project and previous podcasting efforts don't "allow for the engagement that makes academia what it is, it's a heck of an improvement over readings lists, course notes and audio recordings."

In addition, Herman noted that such programs could help improve access to post-secondary education in developing countries where budgets are focused on primary education.

(ComputerWorld)

Sun patches critical Java bugs

Sun Microsystems Inc. patched 11 vulnerabilities in the Windows, Linux and Solaris versions of its Java Runtime Environment and Java Web Start yesterday, including several rated critical by outside researchers.

The fixes to Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.3.1, 1.4.2, 5.0 and 6.0 plug holes that attackers could use to bypass security restrictions, manipulate data, disclose sensitive information or compromise an unpatched machine. Among the JRE bugs, Sun said in several security advisories, are two that allow attack code from malicious sites to make network connections on machines other than the victimized computer. One possible result, according to a paper by several Stanford University researchers that was cited by Sun: circumvented firewalls.

Other vulnerabilities in JRE and Java Web Start, a framework that lets Java-based applications launch directly from a browser, could be used by attackers to read local files, overwrite local files and hide Java-generated warnings.

Although Sun does not assign threat scores or label its advisories with terms such as "critical" or "low," Danish bug tracking vendor Secunia collectively tagged the five advisories and their 11 patches as "highly critical," its second-highest ranking.

Some of the vulnerabilities are limited to specific JRE versions, but pulling action items from the advisories is difficult since Sun does not use an easy-to-understand grid as does Microsoft, for instance, to indicate affected software. Neither JRE nor Web Start includes an automatic update mechanism; users must manually download and apply the updated versions Sun has posted on its Web site here.

Mention of Mac OS X was, as usual, absent in the security advisories. Sun does not post updated editions of JRE and other Java components for the Mac operating system. Instead, Apple Inc.'s implementation of Java requires that the company provide Java fixes as part of its own security updates. That's been a sticking point with some Mac users, who have expressed concern that Apple has not updated its Java code since February.



(Computerworld)