GoKawiil
Tech News
pwn.college is a hands-on cybersecurity education platform maintained by a team at Arizona State University, used to teach core computing and security skills through terminal-based exercises and a belt-ranking progression system. ASU has made the platform freely available worldwide, and it already underpins much of the university's own cybersecurity curriculum.
Google has told schools that administrators who want to disable Gemini AI features will also lose access to Google Search within its education accounts. The company frames the move as giving schools greater control over how AI appears in their systems, but the opt-out is bundled with search functionality rather than offered separately.
Google announced that starting next year, AI features like Gemini and Gemini Notebook will be turned off by default for K-12 student accounts, requiring school administrators to manually enable them. However, schools that choose to keep AI disabled will also lose access to Google Search for those student accounts, since the company says the two are deeply integrated.
Google will default to disabling AI tools for K-12 student accounts starting early next year unless administrators opt in to enable them. However, schools that choose to block AI features entirely will also lose student access to Google Search, since the company says search and AI are now deeply integrated in its product.
Google announced it is changing default settings so Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom and Google Search will be off for K-12 student accounts until administrators turn them on. The company told Engadget and the New York Times that because Search and AI are deeply integrated, schools that opt out of AI tools will also see Search blocked for students, with a message explaining its unavailability. The move reverses an August change that had enabled some AI features by default in Classroom after educator backlash.
A computer science and AI undergraduate writes that their university has repeatedly reversed course on AI policy, at times mandating its use and at other times banning it entirely within the same term. The student says assignment briefs now appear to be generated or lightly edited using AI tools like Claude, resulting in more errors, last-minute corrections, and workloads that have roughly tripled compared to before.
Google told The New York Times that K-12 schools which opt out of its Gemini AI tools will also lose access to Google Search entirely, unless administrators explicitly turn the features on. The change was detailed in a Tuesday education update, where Google said Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Search will all be off by default and bundled together as a single setting.
A letter in Nature responds to Marc Schmitt's argument that universities should train students to actively argue with AI models and grade that interaction. The correspondence contends that assessing only AI-assisted performance is incomplete, citing a randomized trial of secondary-school math students in which chatbot access boosted practice scores but reduced scores on a later unassisted exam.
China's Academic Degrees Committee released draft rules on October 22 allowing professional master's and PhD students in clinical medicine to graduate by presenting a practical achievement, such as a clinical case analysis, instead of a traditional thesis. Engineering students gained a similar option in 2024, and officials say translation, agriculture, accounting and arts programs are expected to follow.
Casio has released the CT-FS1, a 61-key keyboard featuring new Feel Sync technology that analyzes any uploaded song via a companion app and adjusts the keyboard so players stay in key regardless of what they press. The keyboard can split into two zones, letting a beginner play simple keys while a more experienced musician plays actual notes elsewhere. It also functions as a standard keyboard with touch-responsive keys, built-in stereo speakers, Bluetooth, and headphone output, and is priced at $400 in black or white.
A social media post that went viral tested how ChatGPT and Claude respond when asked to help with schoolwork in ways that could be considered cheating, finding differences in how the two chatbots handled or disclosed such requests. The post comes amid data showing 54% of U.S. teens and 53% of English, math and science teachers have used AI for schoolwork.
A mathematics-focused newsletter post reflects on how the projective plane is traditionally introduced in topology courses through abstract constructions like edge-gluing a square or identifying antipodal points on a sphere. The author argues a more intuitive route is representing plane points as (x, y, 1) with (x, y, 0) denoting points at infinity, a technique the author says resembles what graphics programmers independently arrive at. The piece is framed as commentary accompanying recent posts in the author's newsletter.