In less than two months after a group of University of Washington computer researchers proposed a novel system for making electronic messages “disappear” after a certain period of time, a rival group of researchers based at the University of Texas at Austin, Princeton, and the University of Michigan, has claimed to have undermined the scheme.

In July, the University of Washington team described an experimental system called “Vanish” predicated on the idea of scattering the parts of an encryption key on a publicly accessible peer-to-peer file sharing network in such a way that the key–a large number–would become unusable as pieces of it were lost from the network.

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It is still out there.

Like a ghost ship, a rogue software program that glided onto the Internet last November has confounded the efforts of top security experts to eradicate the program and trace its origins and purpose, exposing serious weaknesses in the world’s digital infrastructure.

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A group of computer scientists at the University of Washington has developed a way to make electronic messages “self destruct” after a certain period of time, like messages in sand lost to the surf. The researchers said they think the new software, called Vanish, which requires encrypting messages, will be needed more and more as personal and business information is stored not on personal computers, but on centralized machines, or servers.

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For the first time in six years, enrollment in computer science programs in the United States increased last year, according to an annual report that tracks trends in the academic discipline.

The revival is significant, according to computer scientists and industry executives, who in the past have pointed to declining numbers of science and engineering students as a canary-in-a-coal-mine indicator warning about the nation’s weakening ability to compete in the global economy.

The number of majors and pre-majors in American computer science programs was up 6.2 percent from 2007, according to the Taulbee Survey, an annual survey conducted by the Computing Research Association following trends in student enrollment, degree production, employment and faculty salaries for computer science, computer engineering and schools of information in the United States and Canada.

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The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.

It has been 25 years since the desktop, with its files and folders, was introduced as a way to think about what went on inside a personal computer. The World Wide Web brought other ways of imagining the flow of data. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map.

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The lack of security and privacy online has some technology experts pushing for a do-over on the Internet, according to a Sunday Week in Review article in the New York Times.

“What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a ‘gated community’ where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety,” writes John Markoff. “Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.”

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For Apple, these are the best of times and the worst of times. The company is on a tear like never before. It’s winning market share from Microsoft, enough to persuade the software giant to embark on a costly ad campaign that’s being described as a belated response to Apple’s Vista-baiting Get-a-Mac ads. Apple stock has outpaced Google’s, and in the space of a year the iPhone has turned the telecommunications industry in a knot trying to find a way to respond. But there have also been dramatic stumbles.

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At the outset of his presentation at the opening session of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs showed a slide of a stool with three legs to describe the company’s businesses: Macintosh, music and the iPhone. The company is making another bet on parallelism, and the implications may be more profound than anyone yet realizes.

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