Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo e-mail account was hacked, and some of its contents posted on the internet Wednesday. (Wired)

Was Palin’s personal account fair game because she has been accused of using her personal account to conduct public business? If there really is damning evidence in that account, and a judge delivers a search warrant, I’m sure that Yahoo can pull the whole thing from a backup tape, even if Palin has deleted the account.

Seton Hill’s e-mail servers go down every night from 2 to about 5:30, and I’m sorry to say that I’m often up that late, so I often use my Yahoo account when I am contacting other professors for research projects.  For along time my Yahoo account was much better at blocking spam than my university account, so I always use my Yahoo account to sign up for subscription-only content. 

I’m generally reluctant to use any e-mail account to give out grades or adjudicate disputes between student editors, and there’s a boilerplate legalistic disclaimer that we’re supposed to append to all our messages.  (I tack on that message where I explicitly say something about a grade or a student’s performance; I don’t add it to routine replies such as “Thanks for telling me how much you enjoyed my website.”)

I’m looking for a current event that will be of interest to my “Writing
for the Internet” students, and I wonder if this will fit the bill. But
it might be a little too early in the course… we’ve had a brief unit
on e-mail and we’re talking about smileys now, but we’re mostly
focusing on hand-coding HTML.  Today we spent a whole class period on
basic file management, since most of these point-and-clickers had never
heard terms like “subdirectory,” and I notice that once I start asking
students to post their online work in directories
(“JoeStudent/project1: and “JoeStudent/project2”) there’s often a bit
of backsliding in the confidence level and an uptick in the tension
level.

Well, I’ll see how the media machine treats this story.