Imagine taking a college exam and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program.

Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies, and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday. He was 56.

The line between cyberspace and the physical world is blurring with a new search technology being demonstrated by Autonomy, a British software publisher.

A malicious software program has infected the computers of more than 2,500 corporations around the world, according to NetWitness, a computer network security firm.

<i>SAN FRANCISCO </i>— Google has turned to the National Security Agency for technical assistance to learn more about the computer network attackers who breached the company’s cybersecurity defenses last year, a person with direct knowledge of the agreement said Thursday.

A group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology edged out about 4,300 other teams on Saturday in a Pentagon-sponsored contest to correctly identify the location of 10 red balloons distributed around the United States.

Oliver G. Selfridge ’45, an innovator in early computer science and artificial intelligence, died Wednesday in Boston. He was 82.

Harrison R. Brown ’12, an 18-year-old freshman majoring in mathematics at MIT, didn’t need to do complex calculations to figure out he liked this deal: In exchange for letting researchers track his every move, he receives a free smartphone.

A legal dispute involving model railroad hobbyists has resulted in a major courtroom victory for the free software movement also known as open-source software.

Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, took several big gambles on Tuesday, betting that he could repeat his success in selling digital music by convincing Hollywood to allow Apple to rent digital movies, while at the same time returning to his original Macintosh roots with an elegant — but limited — ultralight computer called the MacBook Air.