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In today's increasingly mobile environment, many students, particularly those in college, are no longer tolerating being weighed down by their textbooks. Instead, they are turning to eBooks, and accessing their texts from a myriad of devices, like their laptops, tablets, or smartphones. Two of the more popular multi platform eBook brandss are VitalSource and CourseSmart. Lets take a quick look at the main points of what each has to offer.

Last week we reported on an outage that affected the SurfEasy network. The outage which happened on Monday October 8th lasted about an hour and prevented users from connecting to the service and also appeared to have left existing sessions exposed. SurfEasy has contacted us and given us more information about the outage and the steps they are taking to ensure that the issue does not happen again. For those of you that are not familiar with SurfEasy they are a private proxy network that is accessed through the use of a mobile browser (which is installed on a USB Key). This key has two partitions; a read only partition that contains the browser and a small writable partition for temporary files.  You can read more information about the SurfEasy Privacy key in our review of the product.

Since the introduction of Apple’s iADs Apple has been pushing for more efficient ways to track user habits to attract advertising money. In fact during the introduction of iADs Steve Jobs noted that establishing rich ad content was one of the main reasons for moving to HTML5. The demo was mostly lost on the journalists that were present at the event (and those that watched the live streaming) as an ad service is not exactly a selling point to consumers. On top of that one of the methods that Apple used to help advertisers track user preferences for targeted ads, the Unique Device Identifier (UDID), was quickly abused by app developers as well as others to tie a person to a device for tracking and also to scavenge personal information (like contacts). It was a mess for iPhone owners and Apple alike.

If you use Dropbox you probably have had a problem with reaching your storage limit at least once. Now, if you are a college student you can get up to 25GB of additional space that will be yours for 2 years without having to pay anything. The promotion named The Great Space Race will run for the next eight weeks and in order to qualify for the extra space there are few requirements that users have to meet. Each participant must be actively enrolled in a higher education institute, college, university, or the equivalent of a university, be over 14 years old, have an active e-mail address from an educational institution and have access to Dropbox obviously. Also important to note is that “Participants must be a part of a Higher Education Institution that has at least twenty-five Participants who signed up for the Program”