British Colleges Selling Screen Saver Ad Space

gotroot801 writes: "The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that eighteen British institutions plan to generate income during the coming academic year by displaying advertisements on the computer screen savers of students, professors, and staff members. Why does this remind me of that Simpsons episode where Troy McClure is teaching a Pepsi-sponsored class?"

Student machines, or university machines?

[Jimmy_B]

It's not entirely clear whether they intend to do this only for university-owned computers or for student-owned computers as well. If this is only for the school's computers, I don't see too much problem with it. (I would see a problem if it turned into anything more than a screensaver, though). After all, it's the school's hardware, and a screensaver really can't interfere with work.

If they're talking about putting it on machines that belong to students, then this is objectionable in the extreme. Students have the right to control what software runs on the hardware they pay for, and I can imagine bad things happening when faculty demand to install it on incompatible platforms such as Linux.

Commercialising education

[gorre]

Obviously this is a good thing as many colleges are under funded in the UK (my dad works at a college where they are facing redundancies like several others here in Scotland) but there must be control as education should not be too dependant on companies. For example microsoft sponsored computer science departments serving up propaganda from the evil empire.

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Emacs is a nice OS - but it lacks a good text editor. That's why I am using Vim.

UHM

[rhymez0r]

Has anyone else thought about how stupid this is? Screensavers come on WHEN NO ONE is at the computer!

Why is advertising so bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

without the banner ads that you all hate you wouldn't have this site...

... nor many open source projects hosted at sourceforge.

Infact, we have banner ads to thank for the growth of the internet (and many of our jobs) - without ads many web sites would not exist, because they would not make any money (bandwidth, servers, and above all - sysadmins aren't free!) - no google, yahoo!...

Adducation.

[jiheison]

Add placement is just one step closer to advertorial. Once schools become dependent on this revenue, advertisers will be able to dictate their policies on the threat of withdrawing it.

They advertise in other WORSE ways too!

[Giant Robot]

At least they don't rename [toronto.edu] their Electrical and Computer Engineering program to the local cable company [rogers.com]!

And you thought that Disney webpage prank MIT pulled a while back was all for laughs!

Re:Student machines, or university machines?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this screensaver was able to become "more than a screensaver" would it be illegal? The janet [ja.net] rules for .ac.uk are that only students of whatever university are allowed to use the uni's janet connection, non uni students/staff are not allowed (at least that is what we got told). If this is (still) true then would the companies advertising be allowed to advertise this way, as they are most likely companies who are not uni staff, and having a "more than a screensaver" could mean they could use this internet connection somehow
Another thing is, if this kind of advertising was to become a common thing then it would make sense to have a centralised ad server which the screensaver running at each uni would pull a new ad from each time, that would probably violate janet's rules too as it is using the connection for non-academic purposes..

Re:What's next, OS adverts?

[Trejus]

It seems like Sun's already got hold of this idea. My cs department is about as anti - ms as you can get. Hardly a semester goes by without some insults veiled and unvieled towards Windows and Microsoft in general. Sun doesn't put advertisments on our boxen. They subsidies our departments computer spending. Therefore we get cheap sun boxes and in class anti-microsoft ads.