Rutgers is desperate enough to make Gaypril a thing
As per Campus Reform, Rutgers University ran a Gaypril promotion, perhaps to create a Pride Month cash-in for when they could not wait for June to start.
When looking up "gaypril in college" through a simple search, one soon learns that many colleges have shared their Gaypril campaigns on their own webpages. Those universities have the same basic idea. On the Rutgers website, to name one example, the Gaypril campaign had heavily featured movies with LGBT themes. Saddleback College and Carnegie Mellon University also had their own Gaypril promotions.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Look out, Arizona State University profs. College class pirates may take your lectures.
Arizona State University has started beta testing an AI program, dubbed Atomic, that spawns entire "personalized" classes from professors' human-generated courses. The Atomic program was meant to simplify and "personalize" the professors' course materials for viewers online.
The practice of uploading copyrighted content into AI utilities is a legal grey area most of the time. Such uploads into an AI program, on the condition of being strictly for "educational," non-profit purposes, are considered Fair Use under U.S. copyright law.
In the university, "educational" may mean college students running class notes or school-provided materials through an AI widget, Quizlet, for instance, to craft a study guide to review notes and prepare for tests. Students are not trying to make money off of teacher-issued materials.
However, this Atomic AI tool might be seen as outright digital piracy, because the professors did not agree or have informed consent to these stripped-down, paywall-based reconstructions of their original courses, and because their lectures are being added to the AI generator in a "for profit" situation now. The Atomic subscription retails for a $5 monthly rate.
The distribution rights to the lectures might belong to ASU, because a faculty member whom The College Fix interviewed states that his employer usually owns all "faculty materials," but the professors would have had no way to know that this would happen to their hard work. Under U.S. copyright protections, this action could be walking on a fine line headed to digital piracy. The ownership dynamic is a two-way street.
The Canvas hack of May
The hacking outfit ShinyHunters was intending to sell student data, which was filched from Canvas, to the dark web. Colleges often have Canvas or Desire 2 Learn (D2L) as their LMS, or Learning Management System, when their classes are online. Canvas is an LMS that the Instructure tech company, which was the brunt of the hack, created.
For a few colleges, viewing Canvas on the student's end meant either a rude comment from ShinyHunters or being greeted with an error message explaining that the LMS was experiencing maintenance. Students did have extended due dates, since they temporarily needed to work on their assignments using methods that were not dependent on Canvas.
Following Finals Week, ShinyHunters got paid off on May 12. Instructure confirmed that no students lost their money and that no students' birth dates, private business information or social security numbers were taken hostage, but as per The College Fix, they discovered messaging and email history, names and student IDs located in data logs. This implied that ShinyHunters had combed through the Canvas "Inbox" email program to check student emails and messaging and scoured "Grades," "Profile," or discussion boards on a quest for student names.
It is odd that an obscure company would care about student email exchanges. The problem is already resolved, albeit the solution was for Instructure management to give in to ShinyHunters' demands. The data breach was surreal when Canvas and D2L had gone several years without big cybersecurity attacks that made the news.
