The Chronicle T h e i n d e p e n d e n t d a i ly at D u k e U n i v e r s i t y
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2009
ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTH YEAR, Issue 51
www.dukechronicle.com
Climate plan Activist reflects on fall of Berlin Wall to focus on low cost projects $25M steam plant, hybrid buses to cost most in plan by Rachna Reddy The chronicle
One hundred years after Duke got its name, the University hopes to be carbon neutral. The Climate Action Plan outlines strategies to tackle the biggest campus contributors to carbon output: emissions, energy and transportation. Duke aims for a 45 percent reduction in carbon emissions on campus by 2024 news said Tavey Capps, Duke’s environmental sustainabilanalysis ity coordinator. If Duke accomplishes this goal, it will become carbon neutral. “I think we’ve put together a very strong and aggressive plan,” said Bill Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and co-chair of the Campus Sustainability Committee. “I’m very, very proud and optimistic about the one we’ve put together.” The current economic climate will force administrators to focus on implementing less costly green initiatives in the near future. Because the plan will change and 2024 is still far See climate plan on page 6
libby busdicker/The Chronicle
Vera Lengsfeld, a civil rights activist and former member of the German parliament, speaks Monday night about the state of German politics twenty years after the fall of Berlin Wall. Lengsfeld said her oppositions are continuing to promote the same communist policies that decimated East Germany two decades ago. by Julius Jones The chronicle
Few undergraduate students at Duke can recall the events of November 1989. Perhaps they may remember a textbook chapter about the fall of the Berlin Wall. But then, they would only have a small piece of the story. The Berlin Wall did not merely fall—it was torn down by men and women like Vera Lengsfeld. Lengsfeld, a civil rights activist, author, teacher and former member of the Ger-
man parliament addressed an audience of approximately 100 students, faculty and Duke community members Monday night. She began her 30-minute speech by criticizing historians’ and scholars’ impulse to focus on world leaders instead of ordinary citizens when studying the collapse of the Soviet Union. “The politicians were not involved,” she said. “Rather, it was ordinary people of the streets who had been demonstrating for weeks and months before and eventu-
ally were successful.” Although Lengsfeld has been out of politics since 2005, she is making a comeback by running for a seat in the German parliament as a member of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany. Lengsfeld accused the oppositional Social Democratic Party of continuing to promote some of the same policies that decimated East Germany under communist rule. See langsfeld on page 5
Professor awarded grant to improve online privacy by Shaoli Chaudhuri The chronicle
The cost of a more secure Facebook: almost half a million dollars. Landon Cox, assistant professor of computer science, was recently awarded a $498,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate privacy problems pertaining to online social networks like Facebook and MySpace. Cox is working with a team of two graduate students and collaborators at AT&T to identify and target potential privacy issues. Cox said his team is concerned that users’ personal information is all controlled by a single centralized entity, making it vulnerable to hackers. The other danger, Cox explained, lies in the fact that social networking Web sites own rights to users’ information and can use that data as they see fit. “Is there a way to get the same service and protect
ourselves a little more?” Cox asked. Cox and his collaborators aim to find a more decentralized setup. In this alternative, instead of personal information being concentrated in a single administrative domain, each user would upload his or her information into a Virtual Individual Server. This VIS would be one component of a peer-to-peer network. “It’s a much safer model if you’re in control,” he said. Cox proposed three possible uses for the VISs within the alternative social network. The first would require each user to host a VIS on his or her desktop, the second would involve “clouds” of servers hosting VISs and the third would be a hybrid of the two. Cox added that if the privacy and ownership issues are not addressed in some way, the consequences could harm millions of users of social networking Web sites. “I don’t think Facebook is evil,” Cox said. “But this
information can leak. Administrators of these major Web sites can make mistakes and they leak data and it [can] get into the wrong hands.” Cox cited a recent study from the University of Cambridge as only one of numerous examples showing that Facebook users’ data are not completely secure. Researchers found that photos deleted from Facebook accounts still existed on the Internet even six months later. Cox said another example of privacy problems stems from location-based social networking sites like Foursquare, on which users update their location information with mobile devices such as iPhones or Blackberrys. “When location comes into the equation, the danger really goes up,” he said. David McDonald, NSF program manager of Cox’s project, said that although NSF had the opportunity to See privacy on page 7
Graphic by Bonnie Fishel/The Chronicle
ONTHERECORD
“It’ll be good to play against a team with a very big ego who knows how to win.”
—Forward Lance Thomas on Duke Basketball facing Findlay today. See story page 9
Durham election preview Check out the candidates running in today’s mayoral and ward election, PAGE 3
Blue Devils get passing marks against UVA, Page 10