NEW RESOURCES

New-to-Me: a Web site that chronicles the state of Missouri’s participation in World War I. “The site so far features 51 collections of documents, letters home, photographs, artifacts and memorabilia from the war. It includes a virtual service database of government and personal records for the Missouri men and women who served in the war. Individuals can also contribute their privately held records to the database so families can share their ancestor’s World War I history.”

Samsung has launched its own site for 360-degree video, though as this article notes Samsung seems to be using the terms “VR” and “360-degree video” interchangeably. “It’s also a bit ahead of the curve on making 360-degree videos viewable. While you can view them with a Gear VR headset, there’s also a dedicated Android app if you’re on the go — or don’t feel like strapping a headset on.”

USEFUL STUFF

From MakeUseOf: a roundup of collaboration apps to use with GMail. “When it is time to collaborate with your team, there are plenty of extensive applications that can assist you. However, these days many of us still live in our inboxes. So, when you want to collaborate on emails received, those you are composing, or even hold a quick conversation, this can all be done right from your Gmail account.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

A story with politics, and therefore I’m reluctant to include it here, but I think it’s important. One party staged a sit-down in the House. The other party cut off the C-SPAN feed. Then things got interesting. “A bunch of Democrats decided to hold a sit in on the House floor to push for a vote on some gun legislation. That’s a bit of a stunt no matter how you look at it, but the Republicans shot back by helping that stunt get much more attention by not just gavelling the House out of session, but also turning off the live feed of the House floor that flows to C-SPAN and out to the rest of us. C-SPAN doesn’t control the cameras and is at the whim of Congress to access that feed, so when the GOP shut off the feed, C-SPAN was left without. This isn’t a stupid move that’s limited to the Republican side of Congerss, apparently. Eight years ago the Democrats did the same thing when they controlled the House and were upset about Republicans trying to focus on a particular issue.” I hope it isn’t too political to opine that neither party should be able to turn off C-SPAN’s feed.

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Another misconfigured database has lead to another massive leak of voter data. “This week, Vickery mentioned that he has uncovered yet another exposed voter list database. This one contained 154 million records and was exposed because of a misconfiguration in a CouchDB installation. Unlike the previous leaky databases that had been hosted on Amazon, this one was hosted on Google.”

You’ve probably heard of the old “tech support pretending to be Microsoft” scam. Now we’ve got the “tech support pretending to be your ISP” scam. “A new scam, in which fraudsters pose as legitimate internet service providers to offer bogus tech support, either via the phone or on the net, is on the rise, the BBC has found….The online version of the scam involves a realistic pop-up that interrupts a victim’s normal browsing session with a message that appears to be legitimate and seems to come from the victim’s real ISP.”

What are US government agencies most worried about when it comes to IT security? other countries, apparently. “The gravest attacks — and most common — perpetrated against agency networks involved nation states, according to an audit that happened to be released amid accusations the Russian government allegedly hacked the Democratic National Committee. The Government Accountability Office assessment comes one year after the Office of Personnel Management disclosed the biggest known breach of government-held personal information, also allegedly a foreign job.”

Google is being sued by an Israeli company for patent infringement (PRESS RELEASE). “Buy2 Networks (TASE: BUY2) today reported to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange that last night (U.S. time) it filed a lawsuit in the USA against Google Inc. (‘Google’) for infringement of its U.S. Patent No. 8,661,094 entitled “WWW Addressing” (‘the ‘094 patent’) . The ‘094 patent was issued in the USA in 2014 and claims priority to an Israeli patent application filed January 30, 1998. ”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

I will cop to the nostalgia: Atlas Obscura has an article about microfilm / microfiche. The best part of using microfilm was when you had to scroll halfway through a roll, and if you were lucky you’d stop right near where you needed to be. Such a ninja feeling. Good afternoon, Internet…

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