NEW RESOURCES

In development: an archive for Emmett Till. “The brutal death of Emmett Till — an African-American teenager — in Mississippi in August of 1955, and the subsequent acquittal of his white murderers by an all-white jury, was a pivotal moment in the surge for civil rights in America….Now, 60 years after the tragedy, Florida State University is creating an Emmett Till Archive. The university plans to make the announcement soon.”

Now available: a database of shipwrecks in Rhode Island waters — over 3000 of them! “Users can search most of the 38 fields of information, including names of ships, dates of incidents and cargo being carried. The database documents cases where ships sank and what’s left of them still lies on the bottom, as well as other incidents, such as groundings and collisions, which the ship survived.”

Ancestry is teaming up with Gannett for a huge newspaper digitization project (PRESS RELEASE). “Ancestry, the leader in family history and consumer genetics, today announced its collaboration with Gannett Co., Inc., the largest local-to-national media company, to digitize more than 80 daily newspapers across the nation. Newspapers.com, an Ancestry business unit, and Gannett will provide a historical newspaper viewing experience complete with full text search, clipping and sharing features. Together, they expect to deliver more than 100 million full-page images of historical newspapers in a simple, easy-to-use online archive.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Feeling a little retro? Mail your storage data to Google. “Using this service, developers will be able to send their physical media, including hard disk drives, tapes and USB flash drives to its partners — and those partners will then import it into a pre-selected Cloud Storage class (that’s Standard, DRA and Nearline, Google’s new low-cost, high-latency storage service). The previous version only supported hard drives.”

Google Classroom has gotten some updates.

Foodie photos on Google Maps? It’s being tested. “Though services dedicated to photos of food – like Foodspotting or Forkly, for example – have exited the scene (as well as consumers’ collective consciousness) over the years, snapping photos of your delicious dinner still remains a popular activity. Now Google is looking to capitalize on this ongoing trend with a new feature in Google Maps that encourages users to share their ‘foodie pics’ with others by posting the photo to Google Maps itself.”

Facebook has added a “Donate Now” button. “Today, Facebook for Business announced in a post that it has added ‘Donate Now’ as a call-to-action button available for Brand Pages. These buttons can now appear right on a Facebook Brand Page, or directly within an ad on the site.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Tech Times has an update on the social network Ello. “It’s been a strange year-and-a-half for Ello. In Spring of last year, the site kicked off an invite-only launch after a year or so of private beta testing, its simple homepage greeting users with a plain language manifesto – a shot across the bow against the social network status quo.”

The British Library wants help identifying the zillions of images in its collection. It also wants the process to be fun. Therefore it is hosting a game jam. “An ideal game draws a random image from our 1-million-strong collection and through gameplay the player tells us something about the content of the image. You might choose from our limited set of tags (flora, fauna, mineral, human portrait, landscape, manmade – eg. machine, buildings, ship, abstract, artistic, music, map), or opt to be more creative. If we like what we see, we’ve set aside up to £500 (courtesy of the Andrew Mellon Foundation) to work with someone to polish their game and release it as part of our ‘Mechanical Curator Arcade Game’, a 1980s-style arcade console that we’re planning to install in the British Library this autumn.”

A security researcher who hacked a moving Jeep is leaving Twitter. “Charlie Miller, a former National Security Agency hacker who is the one of the world’s best-known security experts, declined to comment on his departure or say what he would do next.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

A recently-patched IE exploit is being used in the wild. Make sure your patches are up to date! “When it released the emergency patch for the memory corruption flaw (CVE-2015-2502) on August 18, Microsoft warned that the weakness had been exploited in the wild. One day after the remote code execution vulnerability was addressed, security firms Heimdal Security and Symantec reported seeing watering hole attacks in which malicious actors leveraged the bug to deliver the PlugX remote access Trojan (RAT), also known as Korplug.” Good morning, Internet…

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