A Facebook security vulnerability discovered by a pair of doctoral students at Indiana University Bloomington's School of Informatics and Computing that allowed malicious websites to uncover a visitor's real name, access their private data and post bogus content on their behalf has been repaired, Facebook has confirmed. The vulnerability discovered by Rui Wang and Zhou Li enabled malicious websites to impersonate legitimate websites had received. Wang and Li said the vulnerability occurred when a user informed Facebook of his or her willingness to share information with popular websites like ESPN.com or YouTube. Full Story

Newly awarded fellowship grants from the Data to Insight Center, part of the Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI), and the IU Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH) are supporting the important coupling of technology with arts and humanities research and creative activity. The yearlong fellowships support collaborative projects in which scholars from the arts and humanities work together with computer scientists and informaticians to advance an area of humanities research. Full Story

A new, free Indiana University mobile application for Android handsets is now available via the Android Market to provide IU information -- from how to get to the closest bus route to real-time news and sports -- to students, faculty, staff and the public. The new mobile platform for Android comes at a time when the Google-engineered operating system is experiencing unprecedented growth, according to Brian McGough, director of Enterprise Services Integration and Delivery for Indiana University Information Technology Services. Full Story

Faculty at the IU School of Informatics are recipients of a $50,000 Google Research Award in support of their work exploring the semantic and cognitive value of non-speech sound. The award will fund a one-year project using short but complex collages of sound effects and music -- referred to as "audemes" -- to supplement K-12 textbooks and develop audeme-based games for students at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Audemes and audeme sequences serve as powerful mnemonic prompts that leverage the innate human ability to recognize, remember and interpret the world as a "soundscape" of aural signs. Full Story

Local web design students and professionals pulled out all the stops last month to develop and launch brand-new websites for four Indianapolis non-profit organizations in just 48 non-stop hours (Jan. 14-15). The project -- now in its second year -- partners top student talent from the IU School of Informatics at IUPUI with professionals from RefreshIndy, a local organization of web designers, developers and graphic artists. They ate, slept and worked in the school's computer labs and classrooms to deliver fresh, fully-operational websites on time and with absolutely no budget -- all in the name of community service and professional development. Full Story

The Jan. 7, 2011, edition of IT Matters @ IU includes an announcement by IU President Michael McRobbie that Bobby Schnabel, dean of the Indiana University School of Informatics, had been named a Fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's leading educational and scientific computing society. Also in the issue, read an overview of IU's integral participation at Supercomputing 2010 and learn about how one group of IU researchers attending the conference received the Best Paper award at the event; then read about an IU-led computing coalition that recently named 20 young Indiana women for their interests in information technology. Full Story