There's a new Facebook group called Go Global in IST that's been gaining traction in the community. Created by Matt Prindible (President, IST Student Government), the group has started an initiative to globalize the scope of the IST curriculum. If you haven't already, check it out and post to the wall. The following is Matt Prindible's introduction to the Facebook group: Hello everyone-- Last year, a cooperative effort between IST and ...

Update: Heekya has been TechCrunched and featured on popular social application news blog Mashable. Congrats! We have 25 Heekya beta invites for our readers. They will be distributed on a first-come first-served basis, so, if you want to be one of the first to check out Heekya, email me at daehee@istbuilding.com. Also, Heekya has a demo video freshly released just today: Sample story #1: http://www.heekya.net/stories/read/20/ Sample story #2: http://www.heekya.net/stories/view/58/ Now, some words from ...

From Newsweek: College Teacher Shows Students How to Be Hackers. Ledin compares the companies' hold over antivirus technology (under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, the companies' codes are kept secret) to cryptography decades ago, when the new science of scrambling data was largely controlled by the National Security Agency. [. . .] Why should we shy away from learning something that is important to everyone?," Ledin asks. "Yes, ...

From the New York Times: China Orders Highest Alert Level. Chinese officials have thrown an almost smothering blanket of security across this capital of 17 million in preparation for the start of the Olympic Games on Friday. Above all else, Chinese leaders say, these Olympics will be “safe.” China, infamous for accusations of human-rights violations from Amnesty International and suppression of free speech by Reporters Without Borders, is investing heavily ...

Update: IST Wiki has been soft launched at http://wiki.istbuilding.com. I am looking for several reliable, enthusiastic people to become editors for the upcoming IST Wiki. Inquisitive individuals with a knack for writing would be ideal for this position. Please email me at daehee@istbuilding.com if you are interested in taking part of this effort. The IST Wiki will profile people, companies and research projects associated with the College of IST. I ...

With the onset of the new academic year, IST Building is shifting directions. Here are some items we have in store for you in the near future: Recruit more exceptional blogging/journalism talent from the College of IST. We will now handpick our writers and articles, so open registration is no longer available. Please email me at daehee@istbuilding.com if you are interested. Change the focus of IST Building from the currently internal ...

Another Penn State entrepreneur is gunning for the $10k prize on ideablob. David Adewumi's startup Heekya is presenting a revolutionary new platform for sharing content on the web. David calls it a "Wikipedia for Stories" on his ideablob entry, but it's much more than that. Think of it as a way to aggregate people's life experiences through all forms of media, while weaving similar entries together with the Heekya algorithm ...

Re-posting from the mailing list... Hello everyone! I hope you are all having great summers. The IST Honor Society's officers have been hard at work all summer putting together a couple of cool initiatives. We hope to have our constitution revamped so keep an eye out for our first general meeting so that you can vote on this new constitution! Also - we are planning to continue ...

(Via Robert Shedd, at PSU Startups) Dr. Robert Macy, professor of entrepreneurship in the Smeal College of Business, passed along information on a new course that he will be teaching this fall for the first time. The course will cover the business side of video games. Macy said, “There are classes across this and other campuses that cover art, programming and development; but I see a real gap from ...

IST students were sent an email recently announcing a new job posting system and the dismantling of ISTechTRAK. Despite the awkward name, ISTechTRAK worked fairly well and played an indirect role in landing each of my internships. It also had room for improvement, which I won't address here nor speculation on its replacement. My interest was piqued by the opaqueness of the message. The turnover of the system is ...