Colleges are tracking students' location to enforce attendance, analyze their behavior and assess their mental health. One company calculates a student's "risk score" based on factors such as whether she is going to the library enough. Washington Post reports: When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin's Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their "attendance points." And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they've been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full. "They want those points," he said. "They know I'm watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change." Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students' academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.

But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students' privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilize students in the very place where they're expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not. "We're adults. Do we really need to be tracked?" said Robby Pfeifer, a sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, which recently began logging the attendance of students connected to the campus' WiFi network. "Why is this necessary? How does this benefit us? ... And is it just going to keep progressing until we're micromanaged every second of the day?" This style of surveillance has become just another fact of life for many Americans. A flood of cameras, sensors and microphones, wired to an online backbone, now can measure people's activity and whereabouts with striking precision, reducing the mess of everyday living into trend lines that companies promise to help optimize. The Washington Post includes mention of a Slashdot comment from a user who worries whether anyone will truly know when all this surveillance has gone too far. "Graduates will be well prepared ... to embrace 24/7 government tracking and social credit systems," the Slashdot commenter said. "Building technology was a lot more fun before it went all 1984."

This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Jason Koebler, writing for Motherboard: Emperor Palpatine is back with a fleet of planet-killing Star Destroyers, the masses are scared to fight the Final Order, and the last glimmer of hope for the rebellion is nearly stamped out by ... overbearing DRM? The Rise of Skywalker is an allegory for the dystopian nightmare we are quickly hurtling toward, one in which we don't own our droids (or any of our other stuff), their utility hampered by arbitrary decisions and software locks by monopolistic corporations who don't want us to repair our things. In Skywalker, C3PO, master of human-cyborg relations, speaks six million languages including Sith (spoken by the Dark Side), but a hard-coded software lock (called Digital Rights Management here on Earth) in his circuitry prevents him from translating Sith aloud to his human users. Presumably, this is to prevent the droid from being used by the Sith, but makes very little sense in the context of a galactic war that has relied so heavily on double agents, spies, and leaked plans and documents. The only explanation that makes any sense is a greedy 3PO manufacturer that sells the Sith language pack as a microtransaction and a galactic Congress that hasn't passed strong right to repair laws for the junk traders, droid mechanics, and droid users of the galaxy. C3PO's software lock is a major plot point in Skywalker as he's unable to translate a Sith passage that could lead our heroes to the Sith planet that the aforementioned Palpatine is hanging out on.

deblau writes "NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured for the first time enough light from planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, to identify signatures of individual molecules in their atmospheres. The landmark achievement is a significant step toward being able to detect possible life on rocky exoplanets and comes years before astronomers had anticipated."