NEW RESOURCES

Now available: Civil War diaries and letters from Mississippi State University. “Mississippi State University Libraries has made available in its digital collections the Civil War era, first-hand accounts of the Orville Babcock Diaries and Letters of Pvt. Arthur McKinstry.”

A new Web site highlights archaeological finds in coastal Alaska. “In 2013, construction workers laying cable for a new 3G network stumbled upon some artifacts near a Kotzebue beach. Those objects — about 4,000 were found — were sent for storage at the University of Alaska Museum of the North archives. … Now the most notable of the Kotzebue objects are available on an interactive website for anyone to check out.” Not all the items were included on the Web site because many were severely degraded – the items are estimated to be about 800 years old.

The TASS News Agency (Russia) now has an online digital archive of photos. “The work to preserve the unique historic archive of TASS photographs lasted for two years. Specialists digitized, scanned and filed more than 850,000 pictures and captions from the early 1920s and to the late 1980s.”

The British Journal of General Practice is adding a new journal: BJGP Open. “For some time we have been aware that the BJGP receives far more high quality original material that it can publish: less than one in four research articles is accepted, pressure on the non-research sections of the Journal is intense, and many of the research articles that we decline are of good scientific quality. The same goes for articles submitted to other sections of the Journal. Primary care everywhere needs to continue to build an evidence base for health care and clinical practice, and to continue to make its political and health policy arguments in all health systems. Peer-reviewed publication is an important means of achieving this. The same is true for education and training in general practice and primary care, and we will welcome original observations and analysis in these fields. BJGP Open provides a new opportunity for primary care researchers, clinicians, and policymakers to publish and read a wider scope of original articles of direct relevance to practice, research, teaching, and healthcare delivery.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Looking for people to follow on Instagram? TIME has a list of Instagrammers by state. I really liked the ones for Vermont and North Dakota.

Interesting: Iowa startup Terva wants to be Zillow for farmland. “When you’re looking to buy residential property, it’s easy to use a site like Zillow to find out almost everything you would want to know about a home. If you’re a farmer looking to expand your acreage, the process isn’t quite as simple. The Ames startup Terva is hoping to simplify the process and to become the destination site for agricultural real estate.”

Business Insider: Voice search has created a huge vulnerability at the heart of Google’s business. “Today, Google may be at the beginning of a new shift — one toward artificially intelligent virtual assistants — where we use our voice to interact with technology, instead of our eyes. The problem with voice assistants is they do not have a screen on which to display ads.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

This is why we can’t have nice things. From Bleeping Computer: You Can Now Rent a Mirai Botnet of 400,000 Bots. “Two hackers are renting access to a massive Mirai botnet, which they claim has more than 400,000 infected bots, ready to carry out DDoS attacks at anyone’s behest. For our readers unfamiliar with Mirai, this is a malware family that targets embedded systems and Internet of Things (IoT) devices and has been used in the past two months to launch the largest DDoS attacks known to date.”

Google is being sued for $750,000 over defamatory search results. “A Brisbane businessman has upped the ante in a defamation lawsuit against Google, seeking aggravated damages after the internet giant allegedly backflipped on its removal of search results highlighting online slurs against him. Jarrod Sierocki was awarded a record defamation payout by the Queensland supreme court last year after suing a disgruntled former business partner and client over character attacks on sites including the controversial US-based ripoffreport.com.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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