E-NEWSLETTER: UNIVERSITY NEWS
Mahoney named 11th dean at U.Va.'s School of Law
Focus on a glowing problem
U.Va. Engineering School student probes Facebook's vulnerabilities
Mahoney named 11th dean at U.Va.'s School of LawSource: Richmond Times-Dispatch
Paul G. Mahoney / Photo by Tom Cogill |
Paul G. Mahoney, a University of Virginia law professor, has been appointed the 11th dean of the university's School of Law, U.Va. President John T. Casteen III has announced.
Mahoney, 49, is an expert in corporate law who joined the law faculty in 1990. His appointment will be effective July 1.
As academic associate dean from 1999 to 2004, Mahoney administered the school’s curriculum and academic policies. He has won an All-University Outstanding Teaching Award, the law school’s Traynor Award for excellence in research and the Corporate Practice Commentator's Award for top corporate and securities law articles.
Mahoney's predecessor, John C. Jeffries Jr., launched a $150 million fundraising campaign, improved student recruitment and enhanced curricular and public-service programs during his tenure.
After a yearlong sabbatical, he will return to teach full time in the law school.
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Focus on a glowing problem Source: Charlottesville Daily Progress
Jennifer Barlow
Photo by Fariss Samarrai |
For more than 4,000 years, poets, artists and stargazers have found inspiration in the nighttime heavens.
Not so much anymore, fears Jennifer Barlow. Widespread light pollution is increasingly diminishing the view of the starry night sky.
"We’re all missing out," said Barlow, a 20-year-old University of Virginia student and anti-light pollution activist. "The night sky is so beautiful. It shouldn’t be wasted."
In 2003, Barlow founded National Dark Sky Week while attending Midlothian High School outside Richmond.
Now, five years later, astronomy clubs across the country are encouraging businesses and homeowners to mark the week of April 6 by turning off unnecessary outdoor lighting.
By curtailing the skyward glow from light posts, spotlights and security floodlights, the week is intended to offer communities a temporarily clear view of the stars, as well as encourage people to switch to energy-efficient lightbulbs and to shield outdoor lights to ensure they are cast downward rather than into the sky.
"Turning off the lights during National Dark Sky Week has become sort of symbolic," Barlow said. "The main goal is mostly to raise awareness about light pollution."
As Central Virginia has grown over the past 20 years, its levels of light pollution have steadily increased, U.Va. astronomy professor Ed Murphy said.
"It used to be that you could see the Milky Way from the backyard of a home in Charlottesville," said Murphy, who is in charge of the bimonthly public nights at the university’s McCormick Observatory. "Nobody around here can see the Milky Way anymore. Our children who are growing up now will never be able to see the galaxy from their homes. That’s a shame."
The root of the light pollution problem, however, is not progress, Murphy said. The problem’s cause, he said, is improper lighting techniques. Outdoor lampposts that spread light sideways are major contributors, as are homeowners who keep lights on throughout the night. Security lights can be fitted with a timer or motion sensor, decreasing the duration of time they add light pollution, he said.
"Dark skies should be an issue for everybody," he said. "The light that goes up into the sky is just wasted light and wasted energy."
The nonprofit International Dark-Sky Association estimates that unnecessary outdoor lighting costs more than $10 billion each year and emits 38 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Moreover, light pollution can affect the migration, mating and predation of several species of animals, including frogs, sea turtles, birds and fireflies.
"Turning off the lights is good for our health and it’s good for the ecosystem," said Robert L. Gent, president of the association, which is based in Tucson, Ariz., and has 11,000 members. "It’s how the Earth evolved. Who are we to turn night into day?"
Even the power company backs the notion of cutting back on light pollution.
"We’ve supported similar events in the past," said Le-Ha Anderson, a spokeswoman for Dominion Virginia Power. "We don’t have any opposition. If a jurisdiction wants to turn off their street lights, and there’s not any safety concerns, then there’s no opposition on our part."
Barlow hopes to one day see her National Dark Sky Week go international. In the meantime, she left the country last week to study abroad for a semester in Valencia, Spain.
"I’m really looking forward to stargazing there," she said. "It’ll be really beautiful on the beach, I’m thinking."
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U.Va. Engineering School student probes Facebook's vulnerabilities Source: U.Va. Today
Adrienne Felt
Photo by Dan Addison |
Facebook, the social networking platform that has redefined communications, has millions of users. According to University of Virginia computer science major Adrienne Felt, all of these users should be concerned about security.
Felt, a fourth-year student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at U.Va., leads a research project on privacy issues surrounding social networking platforms and is investigating the information sharing that occurs when users download a Facebook application — a program that allows the user to interact with other users in interesting ways, from sharing music to playing games.
Although these applications add variety to a Facebook user's profile page, they also increase the user’s vulnerability. Here’s how: Anyone with an account on Facebook can create an application. Although this application appears as if it is part of Facebook's platform, it is actually running on application developer’s server. When a user installs an application, that application’s developer is given the ability to see everything the user can see — name, address, friends’ profiles, photos, etc.
"The Facebook privacy policy always seemed unsatisfactory to me," said Felt, an experienced Facebook application developer.
It was this unsettling feeling that led her to investigate Facebook’s vulnerabilities as a student researcher working with David Evans, an associate professor in U.Va.’s Department of Computer Science. With the help of fourth-year physics major Andrew Spisak, Felt examined the 150 most popular Facebook applications. She discovered that 8.7 percent of these applications needed no personal information to run, while 82 percent needed only the user’s public information (name, network, list of friends). Still, 9.3 percent require a user’s private information in order to function.
"Since all applications receive access to private information," said Felt, "this means that 90.7 percent of Facebook's most popular applications unnecessarily have access to private data."
There are currently no restrictions on what applications (and their developers) can do with user data, and though the Facebook "Terms of Use" warn developers not to abuse the data they have access to, Facebook cannot enforce this rule, Felt says. In fact, when a user installs an application, the user’s computer communicates with the Facebook servers and the Facebook servers then communicate with the application developer’s servers. Once users’ private data leave the Facebook servers, the company has no way of knowing what happens to it.
"An application developer could easily acquire personal information for millions of users," said Evans. "There is a risk it could be used to launch targeted phishing attacks, exploited by identity thieves or sold to marketing companies."
Felt's goal is to make users more aware of how their private information is being used — and to close this privacy loophole.
She has developed a privacy-by-proxy system — a way for Facebook to hide the user’s private information, while still maintaining the applications’ functionalities. Under Felt’s system, at the point at which the Facebook server is communicating with the application developer’s server, the Facebook server would provide the outside server with a random sequence of letters instead of the user’s name (and other personal information).
Felt is working on refining the privacy-by-proxy design and building a prototype implementation. "This is the first step," she said. "Hopefully, the research findings and proposed solution will trigger more responsible privacy and information management policies from social networking sites and will better inform users."
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