UC Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley, officials said Friday that hackers infiltrated restricted computer databases, putting at risk health and other personal information on 160,000 students, alumni and others.

The university said data include Social Security numbers, birth dates, health insurance information and some medical records dating back to 1999. Personal medical records -- such as patient diagnoses, treatments and therapies -- were not compromised, officials said.

College too expensive? Try YouTube.

It might seem counterintuitive to look for higher education alongside Avril Lavigne music videos, but the video-sharing site has become a major reservoir of college content.

The Google Inc.-owned YouTube has for the last few years been forging partnerships with universities and colleges. The site recently gathered these video channels under the banner YouTube EDU (http://www.youtube.com/edu).

By Olivia Scheck

Bay Area motorists with GPS-equipped cell phones can tap into new technology designed to help them avoid traffic jams.

UC Berkeley and Nokia phone company researchers late Monday night rolled out new software that can be downloaded for free onto cell phones and used to get quicker and more accurate traffic information to plan driving routes.

The software turns cell phones into mobile traffic investigations.

When Egyptian police scooped up University of California, Berkeley, graduate journalism student James Karl Buck, who was photographing a noisy demonstration, and dumped him in a jail cell last week, they didn't count on Twitter.

Buck, 29, a former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, used the ubiquitous short messaging service to tap out a single word on his cellular phone: ARRESTED.