Faced with a shrinking audience of journalists for their press releases, a consortium of universities has launched Futurity, a site that will aggregate edited versions of the best materials produced by university press offices.

In recent years, the economic hardships that have crippled newspapers and hurt other media outlets have taken a disproportionate toll on science journalism. Many news establishments, including CNN, have entirely eliminated their science staff, while others have severely curtailed coverage or handed it off to journalists with no science experience. The net result is that the press officers of major universities, whose job is to help increase the public’s recognition of the research that goes on there, increasingly feel like they’re speaking to an empty room. Their solution has arrived in the form of Futurity.org, a site that aggregates a selection of the releases they used to feed to the press.

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Never ones to let a good deed go unpunished, scammers quickly learned to take advantage of a user-friendly policy that allowed a misregistered domain name–perhaps due to a typo–to be withdrawn at no cost. Scammers used this “Add Grace Period” to grab huge numbers of domains, throw up pages full of advertising, then withdraw the applications before the bill came due.

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File-sharing, to the (very large) extent that it involves copyright infringement, has affected the music business. But, as a pair of academic researchers happily point out in a working paper they’ve posted online, copyright law was never meant to protect the music business in the first place—instead, it is intended to foster creative production in the arts, which happen to include music.

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As revenues from sales of traditional media have plunged, the music business has been looking for alternate ways of making money from its products, including a variety of subscription services, ad-supported streams, and blanket licenses. The focus of these efforts has largely been on how to ensure that revenue gets collected by the industry in general instead of disappearing into the black hole of piracy, but there’s a related issue that doesn’t receive as much attention: how that money gets distributed once it’s collected.

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Over the past several years, Wikileaks has made a name for itself by poking its electronic fingers in the eyes of the powers that be while shining a light on the confidential documents of said powers. Now, it appears that the spotlight has been turned inward. Due to a bit of careless email etiquette, a list of past Wikileaks donors has fallen into the hands of an individual that, in turn, posted the list to Wikileaks. True to its principles, the organization has placed the list online.

It’s hard to have followed the news of the past several years and not heard of Wikileaks–even if your taste in news stories doesn’t tend towards confidential government documents–as the organization has found itself at the center of legal cases that raised questions about the basics of sharing information on the Internet. After confidential bank documents appeared on the site, a judge ordered its DNS record erased, which attracted the attention of some major civil liberties groups. Meanwhile, other documents hosted there have drawn the ire of the Mormons and Scientologists, who object to having their practices revealed to the public.

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It seems like it’s rare for a month to go by without a story appearing in the popular press in which the frequent enjoyment of violent games by today’s youth is linked to a specific violent act by members of said youth. Behind the press reports, the academic community has been engaged in a hot debate over whether the evidence supports a connection between the violent content of games and any behavioral effects. One of the researchers who has argued forcefully that it’s not is Christopher Ferguson, who has just published a paper that argues that the continued societal focus on games as a causal factor in violence is an example of what’s termed a “moral panic.”

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Up until recently, economies around the globe were on a fairly steady upward trajectory, a growth that put pricing pressure on some of the raw materials needed for both production and infrastructure. That pricing pressure has, in some cases, led to a bit of a black market where the materials are forcibly recycled through various forms of theft. Copper is one of these materials, and a variety of anecdotal news reports suggests that theft of copper from various places it’s in use has been an ongoing nuisance in the U.S. Now, the FBI has performed an analysis of the situation that suggests copper theft actually poses a serious risk to the national infrastructure.

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As more of the student population gets access to broadband connections, faculty at major universities are exploring how rich media and online interactivity can enhance, supplement, and even replace the classroom experience. In the latest development, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas is going to experiment with replicating a graduate seminar online in order to serve a very specific function: providing graduate students at other institutions with access to a course that isn’t offered by their university.

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YouTube may make a lousy place to hold a class, but that doesn’t mean that the YouTube experience isn’t shaping the expectations of students, especially those engaged in online learning. Those expectations are not being met by universities, where most online student-support systems have a rigid, hierarchal structure modeled on the university itself. According to an essay by a professor at the Open University in the U.K., this mismatch between expectations and reality create a challenge for the university system, one that it may be poorly equipped to meet.

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Last week, Human Rights Watch released a report describing human-rights abuses in a remote area of Ethiopia. With that region closed to foreigners by the Ethiopian government, the report relies on a combination of eyewitness reports and commercial satellite imagery performed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Science and Human Rights Program. The report highlights the growing importance of commercial imagery in monitoring abuses in areas otherwise off-limits to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). We talked with the AAAS’ Lars Bromley, project director of the Science and Human Rights Program, about the history and future prospects for this application of technology.

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The Telecommunications and Internet subcommittee of the the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing today on H.R. 5353, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008. The bill would establish an official national broadband policy, one that prevents service providers from subjecting lawful content to “unreasonable interference” or “discrimination.” It also calls on the Federal Communications Commission to assess competition in and consumer access to broadband Internet access in light of this policy. The testimony at the hearing, however, suggested that these provisions, and Net neutrality in general, mean very different things to different groups. And, as far as the RIAA is concerned, Net neutrality legislation could hamstring the fight against piracy.

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Last week, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would bar employers and insurance providers from considering the results of a person’s genetic tests when making hiring or coverage decisions. The House has passed a similar bill and the Bush administration has indicated it would sign legislation of this sort. In the wake of the bill’s passage, however, a number of people have questioned why it shouldn’t be an employer’s or insurer’s right to make decisions based on genetics. As a matter of policy, these questions were answered a decade ago, and the intervening progress in human genetics has only reinforced some of the reasoning of the initial decision.

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As the role of the Internet has grown, there have been persistent fears that the less wealthy in society would be left out, due to lack of access to hardware, the Internet or broadband. Although these concerns have lessened as dropping prices and public access programs have increased Internet use across the socioeconomic spectrum, a study in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology suggests that a new divide is becoming apparent: The wealthier and better-educated are better equipped to find and evaluate material on the Internet.

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