When I was in college I liked this Elvis Costello song, ‘What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?’ I think today we need a new song, ‘What’s So Funny About Individual Freedom, Free Enterprise and Accountability?’

– Yahoo activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point, in a speech after receiving the Columbia University 2012 John Jay Award for Distinguished Professional Achievement

In an unusual gift, Helen Gurley Brown has given Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University’s School of Engineering $30 million to create a bi-coastal Institute of Media Innovation.

Said the schools in a joint press release about the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, “it is designed to encourage and support new endeavors with the potential to inform and entertain in transformative ways. It will recognize the increasingly important connection between journalism and technology, bringing the best from the East and West Coasts.”

Each university will get $12 million, with the additional $6 million to build a “state-of-the-art, high-tech newsroom” at Columbia’s famous J-School in upper Manhattan in New York.

(Full disclosure: I went to graduate school there, but we used typewriters way back then.)

Among the advisors to the project is well-known Silicon Valley exec Bill Campbell.

The move will be interesting as a collaborative venture between the East and West coasts, although it is unclear what it might yield.

Interestingly, last week, Harvard University announced an on-campus venture fund with New Enterprise Associates to better compete with the enticements of California.

Great content needs useable technology. Sharing a language is where the magic happens,” said Gurley Brown in a statement. “It’s time for two great American institutions on the East and West Coasts to build a bridge.”

Here’s the official press release on the Brown gift:

COLUMBIA JOURNALISM SCHOOL AND STANFORD SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING ANNOUNCE JOINT $30 MILLION GIFT FROM DAVID AND HELEN GURLEY BROWN

Gift Establishes First of Its Kind Bi-Coastal Institute for Media Innovation — Bringing Together the Best in West Coast Technology with East Coast Content

NEW YORK and PALO ALTO, Calif., January 30, 2012, 1:00 p.m. ET – Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University’s School of Engineering today announced a $30 million gift from longtime Cosmopolitan magazine editor and author Helen Gurley Brown to establish the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

The Institute and the collaboration between the two schools is groundbreaking in that it is designed to encourage and support new endeavors with the potential to inform and entertain in transformative ways. It will recognize the increasingly important connection between journalism and technology, bringing the best from the East and West Coasts.

The Institute, the first of its kind, is inspired by the memory of Ms. Brown’s late husband, David Brown, a graduate of both Stanford University and the Columbia School of Journalism. Brown, who along with partners Richard Zanuck and Steven Spielberg created such classic American films as Driving Miss Daisy, The Verdict and Jaws, was also a former journalist, publisher and, late in his career, a stage producer whose credits included the musicals Sweet Smell of Success and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Of the total gift, each school will receive $12 million for Institute activities. The gift to Columbia’s Journalism School, the largest in its history, will endow a professorship whose holder will be the Institute’s East Coast director. The gift to Stanford’s Engineering School will similarly endow the position of the West Coast director. An additional $6 million will go to Columbia which will also pay for the construction of a highly visible signature space at the eastern end of the J-School’s landmark building, featuring a state-of-the-art high-tech newsroom.

The funding of the Institute will support graduate and postgraduate fellowships, both at Stanford and Columbia, and competitively awarded “Magic Grants,” intended to seed the most innovative and promising ideas for future development conceived of by Brown Fellows.

Commenting on the announcement, Helen Gurley Brown said, “David and I have long supported and encouraged bright young people to follow their passions and to create original content. Great content needs useable technology. Sharing a language is where the magic happens. It’s time for two great American institutions on the East and West Coasts to build a bridge.”

The east-west collaboration of the two schools will enable students at both institutions to build upon their ideas with professors and innovators at both universities. At both locations there will be a strong emphasis on executing new ideas and demonstrating products and prototypes. The
Institute will establish ongoing links to business leaders and media companies to bring its innovations to market.

“New York City, as the major center for the television, music, print media and advertising, is profoundly affected by rapidly evolving digital technology,” said Stanford engineering professor Bernd Girod, who will serve as the Institute’s founding director until Columbia appoints his East Coast counterpart. “The Brown Institute will bring together creative innovators skilled in production and delivery of news and entertainment with the entrepreneurial researchers at Stanford working in multimedia technology.”

“This gift from David and Helen Gurley Brown is truly transformative for the school,” said Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. “As we enter our Centennial year, the Browns’ generosity will enable us to explore new and exciting realms of leadership in our field. We are thrilled to have this opportunity to collaborate with Stanford Engineering.”

“Stanford brings to this partnership its exceptional research and teaching, a history of transformative technology innovation and a tradition of multidisciplinary collaboration,” said Stanford University President John Hennessy. “We are excited about the opportunity to partner with Columbia University’s truly outstanding School of Journalism, and look forward to combining the expertise of New York and Silicon Valley at a critical point in the evolution of media.”

Stanford Engineering has a storied history of achievement and entrepreneurship. Its faculty and graduates have founded such iconic companies as Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems and Yahoo! and contributed to such groundbreaking technologies as lasers, global positioning, magnetic resonance imaging, digital sound synthesis and modern web-search algorithms.

“Under Dean Nick Lemann, Columbia Journalism School is building on its tradition of leadership by developing innovative teaching and research addressing the future of a fast-changing news media,” said Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar who has written extensively about press freedom. “We are deeply appreciative of Helen Gurley Brown’s vision in honoring her late husband by bringing together his two alma maters to develop the next generation of digital journalism. We look forward to working with Stanford in seeking new ways for technology and creativity to enhance a robust free press in our society.”

The Institute will have a distinguished board of advisors including leaders from technology, venture capital and media including, among others, Frank A. Bennack, Jr., CEO of Hearst Corporation; Bill Campbell, Chairman of the Board at Intuit and an Apple Inc. board member; and Eve Burton, Vice President and General Counsel of Hearst Corporation.

Helen Gurley Brown, who turns 90 in February, is one of the world’s most popular and influential editors. She led Cosmopolitan magazine from 1965 to 1996 and authored many books, including the 1962 bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl. Her impact on popular culture and society has reached around the globe, largely due to the three-plus decades when she put her personal stamp on Cosmopolitan in a way that has rarely been replicated. Under her reign, Cosmopolitan became the go-to magazine for women worldwide and remains the best selling young women’s magazine around the world today with 64 editions, in 35 languages and more than 80 countries.

“As both CEO of Hearst Corporation and advisor to the Brown Institute, today marks a very special day for education, journalism and technology,” said Bennack. “I’m very proud of David’s legacy and Helen, who understood the power of community, in particular, and its importance to women, long before social media had a name.”

(Photo credit: Hearst Corp.)

Printers are Internet-connected devices just like computers. They have their own operating systems and software, and so, in theory, are vulnerable to attacks by hackers just as computers are. There was an old urban myth that in the run-up to the first Iraq War in 1991, hacked HP printers shipped to Iraq were instrumental in shutting down Iraqi radar systems. It wasn’t true — it was published on April 1 of that year by the trade magazine InfoWorld — but the idea stuck, and at least one group of security researchers has been studying the use of Trojans installed into printers.

The Columbia researchers had claimed that a part inside a printer called a fuser, used to dry the ink, could be remotely instructed to overheat, eventually causing paper inside the printer to turn brown and start to smoke.

Conceptually it’s not that different from the Stuxnet attack against the Iranian nuclear research program. The attackers in that case, thought to be Israel with a little help from the U.S., attacked industrial control computers known as SCADA systems that serve as the bridge between typical Windows-based machines and industrial equipment that the SCADA systems control. In the case of Stuxnet, the SCADA systems were controlled — often they have only default passwords or no passwords at all — and the machines they were connected to could be instructed to literally destroy themselves.

Some researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Lab did just that in the video below, showing in a controlled environment that a generator could be hijacked over the Internet and made to destroy itself.

But could you do the same thing with a printer? Theoretically, I’d say it’s possible. But in this case, HP says not where its printers are concerned.

Below is an internal HP memo from Vyomesh “VJ” Joshi, the head of HP’s Imaging and Printing Group, that was circulated to employees today.

First off, he says, the fire issue is not true. As noted in the public statement, HP’s printers have a component called a thermal breaker that prevents the fuser from overheating, and it can’t be overcome by a firmware upgrade.

But Joshi also spanks the Columbia researchers for turning to the media and not calling HP first, which is the way security researchers usually operate when they identify a serious vulnerability. There is, he concedes, a vulnerability to malicious firmware modifications, especially on printers that are left unprotected on a network without a firewall running. HP aims to fix that. But usually in these situations, the media doesn’t get called until a fix is ready. “Unfortunately in this situation, a Columbia representative took it upon himself to contact the media and reports were published prior to a solution being available,” he writes.

Joshi’s full memo is below.

From: IPG, Vyomesh Joshi
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 4:40 PM
Subject: Inaccurate Printer Security Press Coverage

Dear IPG Employees,

As many of you have read today there has been sensational and inaccurate press coverage regarding potential security risks with some HP LaserJet printers. I wanted to make sure you had the most current information and context for this situation. No customer has reported unauthorized access. We have also seen speculation in the media regarding the potential for devices to catch fire due to a firmware change. This claim is inaccurate. We have issued a public statement communicating to customers and partners and refuting inaccurate information.

This information first came to us late last week from a research lab based at Columbia University. As a result, we have identified a specific vulnerability exists for some HP LaserJet devices if placed on a public internet without a firewall or if a malicious effort is made to modify the firmware of the device by a trusted party on the network. Our security team is taking immediate measures to build a firmware upgrade to resolve any potential risk and will be communicating this proactively to customers and partners who may be impacted.

Typically when a security issue is identified, responsible disclosure is followed so that vulnerabilities are not made public until a solution is available. Unfortunately in this situation, a Columbia representative took it upon himself to contact the media and reports were published prior to a solution being available.

We have always taken security very seriously. In fact, HP’s reputation for security continues to be among the highest in the industry. I want to assure you that our security experts are working around the clock to mitigate any potential risk.

We will make every effort to communicate new information as it becomes available.

Regards,

VJ

“We as members of Congress are never inclined to censor testimony in open congressional hearings,” Rep. Zachary Space, an Ohio Democrat, said when introducing the professor, Eben Moglen. “But Congress tries to foster highest level of decorum. I would ask you to avoid personal attacks against any companies or company employees.”

The hearing focused on the possibility of legislation requiring data companies and Web browser makers to provide a “do not track” tool allowing people to opt out of having their Web surfing tracked.

In written remarks submitted before the hearing, Mr. Moglen did not mention “do not track” but talked generally about online privacy. He criticized Facebook Inc. extensively, describing the social networking site’s privacy settings as “mere deception.” Facebook “has uncontrolled access to everybody’s data, regardless of the so-called ‘privacy settings,’” he wrote.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

And Arik Hesseldahl (pictured here) makes it four.

New reporters and bloggers for All Things Digital, that is.

The well-known tech writer–based in New York–will be covering the enterprise arena, as well as chips, for us.

As most regular readers know, this site has been expanding its staff, adding even more top-notch editorial might to our already terrific work.

That includes Ina Fried on mobile, Liz Gannes on social and Tricia Duryee on e-commerce.

All are key areas of tech coverage for ATD, obviously. But, as we thought about it, it was clear that there was not nearly enough cutting-edge tech journalism going on in the enterprise space.

It’s an important topic, involving a range of companies, such as Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and a spate of interesting start-ups. And, did you hear Google’s moving into enterprise?

While all the attention in the tech press is usually focused on the latest minor innovation from Facebook or some other Silicon Valley phenom, enterprise is also a hotbed of change and disruption, as businesses seek to understand and adapt to what digital technologies mean to them.

Thus, we turned to Arik, who has a long history covering a wide range of beats in tech.

He’s most recently been working for Bloomberg Businessweek, where for five years he covered it all: PCs, consumer electronics and semiconductors.

He was also the third person to write Businessweek.com’s popular “Byte of the Apple” column, and contributed to a companion blog of the same name.

Before joining Businessweek, Arik spent five years at Forbes.com, covering pretty much every aspect of tech, writing a daily column called “Ten O’Clock Tech,” a daily survey of a single new tech product that predated properties like Engadget and Gizmodo.

Before that, he cut his tech teeth learning all there was to know about the chip industry as a reporter for a now-defunct trade newspaper called Electronic News, which is notable for being the place where the phrase “Silicon Valley” was first used in print.

One Friday in March, 2000, in fact, he actually got to say “Stop the presses” to editors in San Jose, Calif., as the paper was being put to bed, with the dramatic news that AMD would the following Monday announce its first chip to run at the then-blistering speed of 1GHz.

The story was flashed to subscribers of a daily fax newsletter–quaint, no?–that night before tearing out that issue’s front page. Previously, chip speeds were measured in Megahertz.

Arik attended the University of Oregon, and is originally from that state. After a two-year stint reporting for a daily newspaper in Idaho, he moved to New York to attend graduate school at Columbia University.

He has been a New Yorker ever since. When not working, he can often be found catching a jazz show at the Village Vanguard.

And Arik Hesseldahl (pictured here) makes it four.

New reporters and bloggers for All Things Digital, that is.

The well-known tech writer–based in New York–will be covering the enterprise arena, as well as chips, for us.

As most regular readers know, this site has been expanding its staff, adding even more top-notch editorial might to our already terrific work.

That includes Ina Fried on mobile, Liz Gannes on social and Tricia Duryee on e-commerce.

All are key areas of tech coverage for ATD, obviously. But, as we thought about it, it was clear that there was not nearly enough cutting-edge tech journalism going on in the enterprise space.

It’s an important topic, involving a range of companies, such as Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and a spate of interesting start-ups. And, did you hear Google’s moving into enterprise?

While all the attention in the tech press is usually focused on the latest minor innovation from Facebook or some other Silicon Valley phenom, enterprise is also a hotbed of change and disruption, as businesses seek to understand and adapt to what digital technologies mean to them.

Thus, we turned to Arik, who has a long history covering a wide range of beats in tech.

He’s most recently been working for Bloomberg Businessweek, where for five years he covered it all: PCs, consumer electronics and semiconductors.

He was also the third person to write Businessweek.com’s popular “Byte of the Apple” column, and contributed to a companion blog of the same name.

Before joining Businessweek, Arik spent five years at Forbes.com, covering pretty much every aspect of tech, writing a daily column called “Ten O’Clock Tech,” a daily survey of a single new tech product that predated properties like Engadget and Gizmodo.

Before that, he cut his tech teeth learning all there was to know about the chip industry as a reporter for a now-defunct trade newspaper called Electronic News, which is notable for being the place where the phrase “Silicon Valley” was first used in print.

One Friday in March, 2000, in fact, he actually got to say “Stop the presses” to editors in San Jose, Calif., as the paper was being put to bed, with the dramatic news that AMD would the following Monday announce its first chip to run at the then-blistering speed of 1GHz.

The story was flashed to subscribers of a daily fax newsletter–quaint, no?–that night before tearing out that issue’s front page. Previously, chip speeds were measured in Megahertz.

Arik attended the University of Oregon, and is originally from that state. After a two-year stint reporting for a daily newspaper in Idaho, he moved to New York to attend graduate school at Columbia University.

He has been a New Yorker ever since. When not working, he can often be found catching a jazz show at the Village Vanguard.

This week’s example involves Patton Oswalt, who is a really great comedian, and Brian Corman, a valedictorian at Columbia University.

It’s hard to understand how Corman thought he could get away with lifting one of Oswalt’s routines for a speech he delivered at his May 17 graduation. But YouTube makes it very clear that this is precisely what happened.

Corman:

Oswalt (in two parts):

I’m not sure who sussed this one out, but it may have been True/Slant columnist Michael Roston.

In any case, the story ends sort of nicely. Both Columbia and Corman apologized to Oswalt yesterday, and if you watch the official version of the speech on Google’s video site (GOOG), you’ll note that an apology/disclaimer pops up when Corman begins to speak. Sort of cool, actually.

Speaking of cool, here’s one of my favorite Oswalt bits. Also not suitable for commencement speeches (or for work, if swearing isn’t cool in your office):

Oh, I have seen a suit on the typically more casually dressed Walt before–at my wedding and when Walt got a big award from Columbia University recently. But we really like the photo of him in what looks like a James Bondish Brioni in the ad for his debut this week on the Fox Business News.

He had previously appeared weekly on CNBC, which has a deal with The Wall Street Journal for appearances by reporters.

(Fox Business is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Journal and this site.)

Walt will be appearing now every Thursday at 11:30 a.m. ET on Fox Business, but will also appear tomorrow at the same time to talk about the newest iPhone.

In the review, Walt gave the new device a thumbs up, although with some caveats.

He wrote:

Bottom line: If you’ve been waiting to buy an iPhone until it dropped in price, or ran on faster cell networks, you might want to take the plunge, if you can live with the higher service costs and the weaker battery life. The same goes for those with existing iPhones who love the device but crave faster cellular data speeds. But if you already own an iPhone, and can usually use Wi-Fi for data, you probably should hold off and get the free software upgrade before deciding whether it’s worth getting the new hardware.”