NEW RESOURCES

This might be just new-to-me, but I think it’s new: the CSS Georgia now has a digital archive at the Museum of Underwater Archaeology. “The CSS Georgia Project Digital Archive is a repository for digital materials related to the Civil War shipwreck archaeological investigation in the Savannah River. This collection currently includes educational resources, public outreach materials, videos, and photographs. This archive is a work in progress and will continue to grow.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Twitter now lets you retweet yourself. For some reason. “You can apply the retweet and quote tweet function to your own posts the same way you would to any other tweet: Simply scroll through your timeline and hit the retweet icon under your selected post, and then choose whether you want to reshare it in its original form, or quote it and add accompanying text.”

Google Photos has a slideshow feature. “With this new feature, users can now play a slideshow from any album. All they have to do is open the album, click on a photo, and select Slideshow from the dropdown menu.”

Buffer has laid off 11% of its staff. Oh boy, I hope Buffer isn’t going anywhere. It’s a great tool.

Got a business? Somebody might be showing up for a “field scan”. “Basically, Google may have real people come to your premises and take out a mobile app and scan your business’s or location’s Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth BLE and cell tower signals.” Google, I hope you’re giving these folks some verifiable ID. There is too much going on in the world today for people to be going around doing this without other people asking what’s up.

USEFUL STUFF

From the wonderful Larry Ferlazzo, The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education In 2016 – So Far. He includes links to his other lists going back to 2007, so there’s a lot of information here.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The archives of photographer Harold Baquet has been donated to the Historic New Orleans Collection. “Baquet’s work appeared in various local and national publications, including Ebony, Jet, Rolling Stone, Essence and Time magazines, and he worked for a time as a photographer for both City Hall and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation before spending more than 25 years with Loyola University. Touring the city of his birth with a camera in hand, Baquet captured images of second lines, Mardi Gras Indians, flambeaux, jazz musicians, Mardi Gras celebrations and daily life in the French Quarter.” The story says the archive will be made available to the public – I really hope that means digitized….

Okay, the video thing was odd enough for me, but what Mark Zuckerberg had to say about telepathic Facebook even went beyond that. “Facebook users in the futures will share telepathic thoughts and feelings to each other, Mark Zuckerberg claims. The social network’s CEO made the statement in a live Q&A on his own Facebook page.”

What company is getting into self-driving cars? Why, it’s IBM! “IBM Watson, the company’s AI platform, is powering services in Olli — an electric-powered vehicle that can carry up to 12 people designed by Local Motors, a car maker based out of Arizona that uses newer technologies like 3D printing to bring down the cost of making cars on a low-volume basis. The cars will start operations first in Washington, DC, before expanding to deployments in Miami-Dade County and Las Vegas later this year. IBM says Miami-Dade County will run a pilot to transport people around Miami with autonomous vehicles.”

Google has opened a machine learning research center in Europe. “If there was any doubt that artificial intelligence is the future of technology, look no further than Google. It’s making a major commitment to Machine Learning (perhaps the only form of AI that matters), by dedicating a Zurich-based research group to it.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

The fallout from the LinkedIn password hack has apparently spread to GitHub. “Following a massive cache of LinkedIn passwords being dumped online last month, users of another online service — GitHub — have become the latest target of a password reuse attack as hackers apparently seek to exploit credentials obtained elsewhere to gain illicit access to user accounts and data.”

The Internet Archive was DDOSed yesterday. “The Twitter account @AttackNodes appeared to claim credit for the DDoS, tweeting from the #opISIS hashtag. #opISIS is short for Operation ISIS, an online campaign against ISIS that affiliated with the hacktivist group Anonymous. A source familiar with Anonymous operations said that the attack wasn’t launched by the main Operation ISIS group (AnonOps) or from its spin-off CtrlSec, but from yet another offshoot that other members of Anonymous have been unable to get in contact with. ‘They do not come across as the sharpest tacks in the tack-box-factory,’ said the source.” The attack is apparently because of something the IA is hosting. But DDOSing the Internet Archive? What are you going to do next, shoot a puppy out of a cannon? Good morning, Internet…

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