Chris Gulker is researching a crawler called Cyvelliance. He thinks it's working for the music industry and watching sites of their critics, including this site. [Scripting News]

I'm seeing those IPs Chris noticed.  A quick Google, and you find all sorts of things about Cyvelliance, including this little nugget from their newsroom: With over 40 million registered domains today and over 20 million live sites, CyWeb Watch™ and CyDomain Watch™ crawl every one of these domains to provide not just cybersquatting infringements, but also uncover unauthorized affiliations, unauthorized use of logos, association with objectionable content, site redirection schemes and many other tactics used by competitors and predators. Service coverage spans all global and country code top level domains (gTLDs and ccTLDs).

See, this is scary, because it is the most dangerous entity out there in terms of being able to quietly, effectively, gather and analyze data and do whatever they want with it:  a privately-held company.  The only thing they need to do is pay taxes, beyond that the way they operate is not really regulated or scrutinized by any government agency.  Cyvelliance claims 19 of the Fortune 50 as clients, so if they are crawling your site, it could be for just about anything.

2:56:03 PM    comment []  

Slashdot | Students Get iPods as Study Aids

Students Get iPods as Study Aids

Posted by pudge on Friday May 02, @03:00PM
from the mmmm-gothic-imagination dept.
WIAKywbfatw writes "Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia has given iPod digital music players to its students to help them with their coursework, as reported by BBC News. Apple donated about 50 iPods as part of an experimental project to illustrate creative uses for the machine, and University professors say the gadgets have helped the students think more critically about their Gothic Imagination course." I wonder if I can write off my new iPod as an education expense.

Ok, this is fine, but it's still music.  How about putting lectures on those puppies or commentary about the music?   That would be an imaginative use of the iPod.

6:26:58 AM    comment []