Surprise! Most students use Wikipedia at some point during their research on a paper or project, and they usually do so early on in the process. Online peer-reviewed journal First Monday recently published the findings of its research on student Wikipedia use and said that the service often serves as a starting point for the students who use it, allowing them to gather information for further investigation elsewhere. This is despite the fact that their professors still frown on Wikipedia use—but it seems that students believe what their profs don't know won't hurt them.

Critics of the National Broadband Plan released yesterday by the FCC are already complaining that the document goes far beyond its broadband mandate. They may have a point; we're not quite sure how the NBP wandered its way into Copyright Town, but the Plan does make several suggestions for US copyright law, including a new copyright label for educational use.

The good news is that the Plan refuses to indulge in discussions of ISP filtering and graduated response schemes to address digital copyright infringement. We'll see if the FCC's network neutrality proceeding can display the same discipline in light of intense lobbying on the subject from major copyright holders, who want the agency to "encourage" ISPs to start filtering traffic somehow.

Should the Google/China spat over censorship start a trade war that puts an end to Chinese-made computers? One international trade lawyer argues that it should: "If China shuts out our Internet companies, we need to shut out their hardware that the Internet runs on."

The sentiment comes from Gil Kaplan, a former Commerce Department official who is now in private practice. Writing Tuesday at The Huffington Post, Kaplan argued that free trade deals are all about reciprocity—and that the US has opened its markets while China has not.

Google's Goats

Unbeknownst to most users, Google's Chrome Web browser is powered by a distributed array of goats. In order to prevent the creatures from clogging the tubes, Google uses teleportation to moves them between endpoints on the network. A hidden feature in Chrome's task manager allows users to see the total number of goats that are actively being teleported for each running browser tab. In Chrome's task manager, right-click the task table—check the "Goats Teleported" item in the context menu.