Company Claims to Own Online Testing
The article on the Chronicle site is behind a subscription wall, but coverage is provided on PoliTechBot. In a nutshell, a company is claiming to have obtained patents for testing over the internet. The company, Test Central Inc., says that it doesn't own patents on every sort of testing, but the patents they do hold are very broad - excessively so, say some. More...

Don't Steal This Book
The textbook industry is beginning to suffer the effects of file sharing, as evidenced in this shrill article from the Chronicle deploring this new type of 'piracy'. Actually, the copying isn't all that new - I saw Chinese reproductions of texts a good 20 years ago. It's the WTO regulations to counter copying that are new. More...

Live TV on Your Cell Phone
From Poynter's E-Media Tidbits: "The new service of Telefónica Móvil -- live TV on your cell phone -- was introduced in Chile with full print ad pages in major Chilean newspapers. The TV signal belongs to Televisión Nacional, and it is coded in RealONE. More...

Nottingham City e-Games
For those of you interested in games and learning, you may want to follow up this link sent to me by Ben Straw, who notes that Nottingham City e-Games is a project "which uses the vehicle of computer games to get kids otherwise disengaged with learning back into school and back on track with school work." The site is a bit sparse, but you can find some reports in the resources section. More...

Re: Major Single Sign-On
I don't usually link to my own discussion list (though I have plans to one day include discussion contents in the OLDaily newsletter itself - if you have comments on this, I'd love to hear them), but CETIS's Scott Wilson offers an important clarification of a link I posted earlier, noting that proposed authentication systems are not, as I described them, federated authentication. More...

Distributed Digital Rights Management
Slides from my second presentation to the Learning Object Summit, describing the eduSource approach to digital rights management. Additional papers and slides (as well as video, even) should be available on the site shortly. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, March 30, 2004. More...

SNS Picking & Parsing…
This list isn't complete (missing Orkut and Flickr), but it's still a pretty good set of links to a wide variety of social software and networking sites. More...

Major Single Sign-on Work Starts in the UK and Australia
When I started work on DRM for eduSource, the demand for this sort of service was heard from some quarters. But a single signon is contrary to an open system. So, for that matter, is the sort of federated identity sharing described in this article. It requires, as the author notes, a "web of trust" - which means that participation in the network must be restricted to organizations you trust. More...

University Hits PeopleSoft with $510M Lawsuit
People who use PeopleSoft, rejoice! A university is taking the software company to court, arguing that "the student administration applications were 'vaporware' when the project began" and never did work properly. More...

Postini Antispam Patent Could Cause Headaches
So how would you feel if you could not block spam because some company received a wide-rranging patent for email filtering. Such a possibility is in the cards after the U.S. patent office granted (as usual, well after such systems were widely deployed) just such a patent. More...