New and noteworthy for 11/21/08

By Ben Gross
in

College Stops Giving Students New Email Accounts: Start Of New Trend?: ReadWriteWeb writes about Boston College’s plan to stop giving out email accounts to incoming students next year, but still provide them email forwarding addresses from the university’s domain. I have listened to many institutions debate taking this action. The vast majority of incoming students will already have email accounts that they are already attached to. In addition there is a great deal of data to show that email is competing with many other types of of messaging and is down overall for that demographic.

Say Goodbye to BlackBerry? If Obama Has to, Yes He Can: The New York Times has an interesting piece about the dilemma that President-elect Obama faces with his BlackBerry (and email in general) as he enters his new office. Mr. Obama is known to make heavy use of his BlackBerry to keep in touch with friends and personal advisors, but all correspondence will fall under the Presidential Records Act so it remains open whether he will continue to use it or not. Presidents will eventually also use a range of modern communications tools and will figure out how to deal with the Act, hopefully it will be Mr. Obama.

Personal secrets your iPhone could reveal: The New Scientist writes about the risks of the data stored on smartphones given that they store vastly more and personal information that can be recovered. The article mentions the recently published iPhone Forensics book by O’Reilly.

Published November 21, 2008