In today’s Bulldog wrapup of technology news:

  • An MIT team wins a Hyperloop design competition
  • China drone schools train pilots
  • A sentence in a big spam case
  • Facebook’s new gun policy

The details:

  • MIT wins design competition for Elon Musk’s Hyperloop

MIT student engineers won a competition to transform SpaceX and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk’s idea into a design for a Hyperloop to move pods of people at high speed.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was named the winner Saturday after a competition among more than 1,000 college students at Texas A&M University in College Station.

The Hyperloop is a high-speed ground transport concept proposed by Musk to transport “pods” of 20 to 30 people through a 12-foot diameter tube at speeds of roughly 700 mph.

More than 100 university teams presented design concepts to a panel of judges in an event that began Friday.

Delft University of Technology from The Netherlands finished second, the University of Wisconsin third, Virginia Tech fourth and the University of California, Irvine, fifth.

The top teams will build their pods and test them at the world’s first Hyperloop Test Track, being built adjacent to SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California, headquarters.

  • Drone schools spread in China to field pilots for new sector

Joysticks at their fingertips, the mostly male students packing the classroom lift their virtual helicopters into the air, part of a new cottage industry that’s sprung up in China: drone pilot schools.

China is already the world’s biggest drone manufacturer, churning out remote-controlled flying machines that range from 3-D urban mappers to tear-gas spraying models for police. But it lacks qualified pilots to fly them.

Young men in particular are flocking to drone schools such as TT Aviation Technology Co., one of more than 40 in China, hoping to land a potentially lucrative job in an exciting new field.

TT Aviation offers a two-week intensive course for 8,000 yuan ($1,200) where students learn regulations and how to pilot using simulators and real drones. At the end of the course, they can try to earn the license required by China’s Civil Aviation Administration to operate drones that are heavier than 7 kilograms (15 pounds) and fly higher than 120 meters (400 feet).

  • Indiana man gets 27 months in international spam case

An Indiana man who helped send millions of illegal spam messages to U.S. and international cellphones and computers has been sentenced to 27 months in federal prison by a federal judge in Pennsylvania.

Phillip Fleitz, 31, of Indianapolis, was handcuffed and ordered Monday to immediately begin serving the sentence.

Fleitz’s two co-defendants previously received probation for their roles, and defense attorney Stephen Capone argued Fleitz should receive a similar sentence.

But the judge agreed with U.S. Attorney Jimmy Kitchen who said “Fleitz was the architect. It was his idea. He was the first to do it” and enlisted the others.

“This was a sophisticated and serious scheme,” U. S. District Judge Maurice Cohill Jr. said in imposing the sentence.

Fleitz was one of a dozen U.S. residents charged with marketing illegal computer skills on Darkode.com, a cybercriminal marketplace disabled by the FBI in July. Seventy people in the U.S. and 19 other countries were targeted in that takedown.

  • Facebook announces stricter policy on firearms sales

Facebook says it’s cracking down on online gun sales,announcing Friday a new policy barring private individuals from advertising or selling firearms on the world’s largest social network.

The new policy applies also to Facebook’s photo-sharing service Instagram. It comes after gun control groups have long complained that Facebook and other online sites are frequently used by unlicensed sellers and buyers not legally eligible to buy firearms.

Facebook “was unfortunately and unwittingly serving as an online platform for dangerous people to get guns,” said Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a group that launched a public campaign to convince the social network to change its policies two years ago.

Watts said her group has found numerous cases of felons and minors who were able to buy guns on the site, including two cases in which the buyers used the guns to slay others. Representatives of two gun-owner rights groups, including the National Rifle Association, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.