In 1951, Columbia teamed up with Harvey Comics to produce an anti-drug comic book called “Trapped.” And now it’s on eBay. You have just 2 hours and 36 minutes left to bid on what the seller promises is a “fine condition copy of this scarce early anti-drug effort with light cover wear!”

the internet: the land of opportunity

Oh no, this record isn't straight!

Columbia librarians are using the Internet Archive to save full websites from human rights organizations so that they can continue to be accessed by scholars even after they’re shut down. (Internet Archive, Inside Higher Ed)

Although the late Manning Marable “never read e-mail on a computer, but had an assistant print it out,” his students created an online version of The Autobiography of Malcolm X full of links to historical documents and recent interviews. (NYT)

Columbia professor David Eisenbach and Hustler publisher Larry Flynt want to make sure that the steamier side of presidential politics is never forgotten. (WaPo)

How anal is the New York Times? Check out this correction they published yesterday. (Gothamist)

On average, New Yorkers tip taxi drivers almost 20%! How much do you tip? (WSJ)

This university is buying up low-income housing so it can expand its footprint in the city. Nope, it’s not Columbia (or NYU). It’s SUNY-Buffalo! (NYT)

“What would you do if you had to kill one man to save a hundred?” is a question in Wikileaks job interviews. That’s right, Julian Assange is a real-life Raskolnikov. (Independent, LitHum)

Frontiers flashback from Wikimedia Commons

Don’t fret Barnard, in the storm of Columbia housing coverage, Bwog hasn’t forgotten you! We will not be liveblogging Barnard housing selection because the powers that be across the street already provide excellent and efficient resources.

Matt Kingston, Associate Director for Housing Operations, explains two of the most important online tools for Barnard students in an email:

One of the most important things for students to know, but that a lot of people don’t seem to pick up on, is that our “Available Rooms” page updates instantaneously as rooms/suites are picked. That means that students can refresh the page before their appointment time (and even as they’re waiting in line at Room Selection, since the page is “mobile-friendly” for iPhone, Blackberries, etc.).

Our goal is for students to have realistic expectations about what they’ll be able to pick when their appointment time arrives. To that end, we also introduced a feature this year that shows students exactly how many individuals or groups by size that have not selected yet. If you log in (and are registered for Room Selection), the page also tells you who many individuals / groups haven’t selected who have an appointment time before your own. This hopefully helps students to have an idea of whether there are more groups ahead of them then the number of available suites for their group size.

That page also updates instantaneously as students select at Room Selection. However, because students can change their group membership up until they actually select (i.e. join, change, or drop from a group), these numbers can also change at any point.

Barnard’s housing website has a comprehensive collection of additional information, including a breakdown of different housing options, procedures, and a calendar of important dates. Jealous much?

Lincoln, contemplating history

History Professor Eric Foner strikes gold—for the second time! Yesterday, Columbia University awarded the Bancroft Prize to Foner for his book “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.” Thanks to CU, Foner will also receive $10,000 (!) in prize money. Damn, it must feel good to be a Tweedster. (ABC News)

There’s good food in Morningside Heights—who would’ve guessed? Apparently, certain foodies find Veggie Sandwich at Amir’s particularly scrumptious. (Serious Eats)

Columbia University Press, along with its peers at Harvard and Cornell, plans to make its scholarly books available on JSTOR through its Books at JSTOR initiative. Writing research papers just got 34508 times easier. Win! (INFOdocket)

FYI, the Oxford English Dictionary plans to add certain internet initialisms to its lexicon. LOL! (engadget)

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, a disaster in Lower Manhattan that took the lives of 146 mostly female garment workers. Though tragic, this fire is a landmark in the history of the city of New York, for it led to important reform in the realms of workers’ rights and factory safety. (City Room, NYT)

Inspired by the memory of the Triangle Fire, the Sweatshop Free Upper West Side Campaign has planned a news conference and rally to protest Saigon Grill Restaurant’s labor law violations. Protesters will meet outside Saigon Grill on 90th Street and Amsterdam Avenue at 1 pm to call attention to the restaurant’s continued unethical policies.

Thinkin’ Lincoln via Wikimedia Commons

You Are Here

You never know when someone on your Wi-Fi network is trying to change your Facebook status, tag Aaron Phillips in your profile picture, play FarmVille, or worse. Fortunately, such profile infiltration is easily avoidable. Bwog updates you on how to keep your digi-self free from malicious tampering.

Columbia’s wireless network is unencrypted, which means nefarious eavesdroppers can monitor how many times a day you visit Bwog or discover your secret love for Rick Astley’s complete works (and mash-ups thereof). It also means that, without too much trouble, they can log into your Facebook. Luckily, Lord Zuckerberg and his minions have recently released a feature allowing you to protect your Facebook data from snoopers.

Facebook does automatically encrypt your password, hooray! But once you’ve logged in, your computer is assigned a temporary unique identifier called a cookie that is used to keep track of you on the site—so that you don’t have to enter your password again every time you click a link—and this cookie is unencrypted by default. Armed with your cookie, creepers can imitate your computer and surf Facebook with your identity.

There’s a simple fix. To enable full encryption: log into Facebook, choose Account–>Account Settings–>Account Security (change). Then check this box:

Microsoft Paint, because pros don't need Photoshop

visual stimulation via Wikimedia Commons

The dictator's dilemma: to let the Internet be, or to not be?

A few months ago, Malcolm Gladwell discussed social media’s limits in a New Yorker article with the above subtitle. Journalist and researcher Evgeny Morozov may not share Gladwell’s beloved frizzy halo of hair, but they both recognize a dark side of internet activism. Evgeny Morozov spoke at the Journalism School on Tuesday about The Net Delusion, his recent analysis of social technology in authoritarian regimes. Bwog’s resident Online Security Expert Jason Donenfeld reports…

Having most probably just finished Dawkin’s The God Delusion, an anxious audience murmured in fear of having their new deities of Facebook and Twitter crushed. After working for NGOs that promoted “new media” for social justice, Evgeny Morozov began to suspect that organizations like his own were doing more harm than good. He saw evidence not just of government censorship, but also of governments paying bloggers to publish propaganda and large government projects to scour social networks to learn how best to squelch opposition activists. Eventually he left his organization to investigate just how much an impact–for better or for worse–the Internet has had on activism in authoritarian countries.

Morozov claimed that our fundamental incorrect presumption about the Internet is what he called the “dictator’s dilemma”: either a country can keep the Internet out, and thus exclude themselves from the global economy, or they can let the Internet in and be eventually usurped by protestors well organized through websites like Twitter. In reality, however, autocratic powers have figured out how to let the Internet in without the supposed massive undermining consequences, not just through firewalls and censorship–as in the case of China–but through tracking and surveying. Governments can easily learn which activists are associated with one another, what their plans are, how they acquire funds, and the like. There have even been reported instances in which governments have crawled Facebook for pictures of an anti-state protest, and then created a fake “crowd-sourcing” website that encouraged viewers to identify their “friends” in the pictures. Arrests came swiftly after. In Belarus, the government went so far as to request a cellphone company to query the identities of all cellphone users who were located in a particular square during a protest. And just last week in Tunisia, the government attempted to access protestors’ Facebook accounts. Of course, Morozov made sure to remind us that our own government undoubtedly has similar interests.

Read more…

There’s a new beta version of the Columbia home page, and it looks spiffy! So much less Columbia blue than its predecessor, so much more Bwog blue! The website was designed entirely in-house with CUIT, took many drafts and about a year and a half to finalize, and was designed to make your life easier. And it seems that it will! Navigation and search functions are much more streamlined and you’ll generally have to click around less to find what you’re looking for.

To wit: if you are a caveperson and still use your Cubmail, good news! You can log in to your email directly on the front page instead of clicking four links to get you there. And in keeping with the times, there are social media buttons for lectures on iTunes, relevant podcasts, and links to Columbia’s YouTube channel. There’s a new search tool for student organizations and an A-Z directory of University-wide departments. The events calendar is on the homepage, too. The main photo on the site is now a slideshow, with each photo linking to relevant content.

And Columbia wants your feedback. Look for a “give us your feedback” link, and if you’ve got something constructive to say (the Columbia central administration isn’t Bwog!), say it there. Happy clicking!

That’s right, the fine people of International Wines & Spirits want you to like their Facebook page. More importantly, if you do like their page, you get 10% off your next purchase! So head on over there and save yourself some booze money.

there's a flier, so it must be legit

Toasty!

Procrastinating instead of reading Politics, Bwog was scrolling aimlessly through the sidebar of its iTunes library when “FREE WEEZY” caught its eye. Thus a quest began, and Bwog has spent the last weeks feverishly scrolling through iTunes and checking available Wi-Fi networks for the cleverest and most outlandish. If you think we missed a good one, leave it in the comments.

iTunes Libraries

• Aaron Phillips‘ Library
• Bob Loblaw’s Law Blog
• BORA has nice music
• c.v.s.
• foomp.
• FREE WEEZY
• music FOR ME
• Newfun
• NO! I don’t want butter on my toast
• Oh, yes…you may butter my toast allllll you want
• planetary systems
• Poopie
• RAAAAAAA
• Shallow Mailbox
• Tyra’s Hot Shiz
• Virus!! Don’t Click!

Wi-Fi Networks

• Aurelia Aurita
• clown
• Dragon’s Breath
• ExoticBallhairCompetition
• FRATPARTY
• golagy
• GoldCheetah
• Heathbar Net
• IT’S SO FLUFFY
• South Africa
• lock and load
• NOURtorious G
• Ocampo
• snorlax
• stegosaurus
• The Kremlin
• White Castle

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Photo via waitwhat

If you haven’t heard of wait what yet, your playlist is due for an update. Wait what, (aka Columbia alum Charlie Kubal, CC ’08) released his first album last Thursday called The Notorious xx (click for free download), a mash up of Biggie and The xx. It’s caught on: NYMag, Prefix Mag, and the general worldwidewebz have given the mashup their kudos. Charlie, who currently lives in San Fransisco, started out DJing in high school and was once in a band called Jubala. He’s played sets at bars and house parties, but recently has been more into creating new tracks. Here’s what has to say about his music and his time at Columbia.

Columbia’s influence

Columbia played a pretty substantial role for me — I did shows on WBAR for a couple semesters, recorded tracks in my room in McBain, and got to take classes from two of the most awesome music professors you could imagine: Brad Garton and Terry Pender at the Computer Music Center on 125th. ADP and Postcrypt were both really cool venues to check out new music, too.

The Columbia music scene was definitely getting better during my time — there were some awesome artists there: Vampire Weekend obviously leading the pack, but also Supraliminal, The Stolen Cars, Live+Direct, Kane, Reni Laine, Anton Glamb, Farm to Market — lots of people doing really cool stuff.

One thing that’s tough about Columbia is the tendency, that I found, for Columbia kids’ baseline attitude to be to dislike something — there’s a unique brand of hate that Columbia kids tend to have for new things, as if an implicitly negative attitude makes your opinion more compelling. I was guilty of this too, and when the Varsity Show touched on it (my Senior year, so ’08), and it really resonated.

Read more…

Between Culpa, Bored@Butler, and that thing we can’t pronounce, we have a relatively wide selection of websites developed by Columbia students that provide services exclusively for Columbia students. Now, a new one has been released: I Saw You Columbia, a site for student missed connections. Sweet, sweet young lovers are asked to indicate where they saw their desired mate, and can write a short message to them. The site has only been running for a few days, but Bwog already has a favorite: Female spotting Male: Lit Hum class– “When our legs touch under the table it’s never an accident.”

Our doobie-sparking cousins to the North have their own version, as does Rutgers.

Go get ‘em, tigers.