Neowin.net

Students at an Iowa college [over t' pond in the US folks, where else] can forget the quintessential experience of pulling all-nighters at the library poring over stacks of books. For one thing, there's no library. For another, there are no books.

Instead of a library, the school has a resource center equipped with computer workstations that can access the Web, e-books and online journals. The resource center also houses several meeting tables, audio-visual materials and a few paper magazines -- but no books.

The school plans to be an entirely paper-free campus. Last year, about 75 telecommunications students participated in a pilot program to go paperless. Each student used a Compaq iPaq handheld to access e-textbooks, syllabi and class materials, and to take notes and exams.

This fall, the paperless program expands to include all technology courses and some business and liberal arts courses. All of the students concentrating in tech fields such as network administration and information technology are required to have their own handheld. Campus Dean Tony Paustian estimates that over half of the campus community will be totally paperless this fall.

"Hopefully within a year, we'll have the whole campus paperless," Paustian said.

The campus has its own wireless infrastructure. Faculty use smartboards, which work like giant touch screens for professors to jot notes. Students can download notes from the board to their handhelds.

Hmmm, I cut n pasted my way through several of my university assignments... heck I even d'led one from a US college site. This brings up whole new opportunities lol

News source: Wired News
View: Who Needs Paper? Not Iowa College

Rather than teaching hackers in the audience how to monitor others' networks, Higbee and Davis said the demonstration was intended to alert network administrators to the danger that many innocent-looking devices could pose to network security.

"We are really attacking the concept of what computers are," he said, adding that many other devices could be used to monitor networks, including TiVo television recording devices, some new "intelligent" vending machines and even printers.

Walking into a company and dropping a device onto the network is a simple way to defeat much of the network security that businesses might erect to keep out attackers, Higbee said.

"Physical access is pretty easy to obtain," he said. "Especially for short moments of time."

Moreover, companies tend to build a wall around their networks, with heavy security at the perimeter--between the Internet and the firm's network--but have little security on the inside. So getting a device on the internal network can give a hacker far more access, they warned.

"The data that is valuable and worth protecting is on the inside," Higbee said. "We want to get on the inside."

The software that Higbee and Davis have created--they stress that they haven't modified the hardware because they don't want to run afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act--is a Linux-based system. The software will first scan the network the Dreamcast console is on and then attempt to create an encrypted network back to the hacker's network.

Dubbed "180-degree" hacking by the duo, the ability to have a device on the inside makes a hacker's job much easier.

"Most people believe that inside traffic is trusted," he said, adding that most of the time a system administrator believes that any traffic coming from the inside is legitimate.

"I truly believe that in this attack...firewalls are pointless," Davis said. "They need to be a lot more aware of what's on their network. They almost have to treat their internal network as the Internet--as an untrusted network."