A 23-year-old student named Craig Feigin is facing possible felony charges in Florida for allegedly putting spyware of the worst kind on up to 10 women's laptop computers. The programs, which he apparently wrote himself, would cause the integrated webcams on the laptops take snapshots at certain times when a person was close and upload them to a server on the Internet, where he would be able to browse them at will. This included several photos of at least one woman in various states of undress. The moral of the story: Make sure you trust your computer repair geek, or at least keep an eye on what they're doing to your machines. [Ars]

A group of electrical engineering students at West Virginia University has built the most insane beer pong table ever. It's got lights all around that react to the music playing as well as a pair of built-in swirling ball washers. It's incredible. They're taking orders for them now if you want one of your own, but be warned: this first one cost them US$1,000 and 400 hours of work to complete, so it won't be cheap. Hit the jump for a video of it in action, and be sure to skip to 2:30 unless you think still photos of electrical engineering majors and circuit boards are suddenly cool when set to Linkin Park.

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These Electrical Engineering students at Texas A&M love Guitar Hero so much that they made a "robot," which is actually just some levers and switches and a circuit board set up on top of a Guitar Hero guitar, and a system that analyzes the video signal to determine when and where to hit the notes. The end result is a bot that can get a very respectable 96% on some hard- arse songs, negating the need for a human player to get all the crazy achievements in Guitar Hero 3. We would have suggested these college kids go get drunk and laid instead of spending their time building a Guitar Hero robot, but then we remembered that they're Electrical Engineering majors. [Slashbot]

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Georgia Tech is going to create the nation's interdisciplinary Ph.D program in Robotics, pulling from various engineering (mechanical, electrical, biomedical, aerospace) and computer science disciplines to form a more focused program. Other schools tend to offer a concentrated look at one area of robotics. The idea behind Georgia Tech's program is to get students to think about robots holistically, rather than only focusing on one aspect of a bot with minimal knowledge of the rest.

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