Every year as fans clamor to get tickets to big football games, unscrupulous entrepreneurs crop up to take advantage of those who are willing to spend more than face value to see their favorite teams play. The danger for the fans goes beyond shelling out big bucks, though. In recent years, it has become increasingly common for scalpers to sell counterfeit tickets. With No. 4 Michigan set to visit Penn State in a highly touted Big Ten matchup this weekend, Tom Sowerby, University Police supervisor, is concerned that fans will encounter problems with counterfeit tickets once again. "I think it is very likely that we will see counterfeit tickets for this game, especially since the ring leader of a group that was arrested for selling counterfeit tickets for Penn State's game at Notre Dame a few weeks ago was arrested here for the same offense in 1997," he said.
More than a quarter of a million subscribers receive news about Penn State in their e-mail boxes through the Penn State Newswire, the companion Penn State Live Web site receives nearly 10,000 hits a day from people seeking information about the University, and RSS feeds deliver much of the same information directly to news Web sites and individual subscribers. Now, the Department of Public Information has launched the Penn State news widget. Anyone who uses an Apple computer loaded with the OSX 10.4 (Tiger) operating system can get Penn State news delivered right to the desktop with the new Penn State Live widget. Widgets, which are mini-applications that perform common tasks and provide fast access to information, run through the operating system's Dashboard feature. The Penn State Live widget gives users the most recent Penn State headlines automatically. The headlines then link directly to the full stories on the Penn State Live Web site.