Several boxes containing confidential student records were apparently discarded on a street outside a Manhattan high school on Friday night.

[ ... ]

The records, many of which are from the last few years, included information that appears to be protected by United States Department of Education regulations requiring schools to "protect the confidentiality of personally identifiable information at collection, storage, disclosure and destruction stages."

The regulations, available on the department's Web site, require schools to destroy or remove personally identifiable information from the records of special education students. In addition, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 requires that schools keep personally identifiable information secure and access to it kept to a limited number of people.

Schools risk losing federal financial assistance if they violate the act or the Education Department's regulations.

iRights - Palladium Comments. A few strong comments on Palladium and its probable impact if it actually gets shipped. If Apple and their Macintosh can stay out of the fray maybe they will take over the world.

CNET NEWS.COM - New Apache worm starts to spread.

Security experts are rushing to decode a worm program that exploits a 2-week-old flaw to infect computers running vulnerable versions of the popular open-source Apache Web server application.

The worm is thought to be capable of spreading only to Web servers running the FreeBSD operating system, an open-source variant of Unix, that haven't had a patch applied for the recent flaw. Although few people have reported the worm, it is thought to be infecting vulnerable Web servers worldwide.

"It is spreading," said Domas Mituzas, a systems developer for Baltic information-technology firm Microlink Systems and the first to report the new worm. "It hit us from Poland, and the comments are in Italian, so it could be from any part of the world."

Online Journalism Review - Getting to Know You.

A friend, Jon Maples, e-mailed the other day with a question. "Is it my imagination, or are newspaper sites suddenly requiring registration to read the news?" he writes, citing the Web sites of the Chicago Tribune and Dallas Morning News. "I have to say that the Dallas registration was so intrusive and required so many fields that I gave up."

What's going on?

Mandatory registration is making the rounds at major online news sites, as media companies try to peel away the Internet's cloak of anonymity and build closer relationships with their customers. But it's a tricky dance, and one that risks alienating news junkies when they bump into registration walls as they surf from site to site.

Registration also throws up roadblocks for weblogs, community news sites, discussion boards and e-mail newsletters that point to news articles. 

Slashdot | News Sites Getting to Know You.

The Online Journalism Review has a story about more and more news sites requiring registration. Has assorted facts and figures, including how much sites' traffic dropped when registration was required. Even though a fair percentage of people just make up the data they are asked to provide, I'd guess that as a statistical measure it's probably pretty accurate - many people would tell the truth without caring that they're being tracked.