NEW RESOURCES

Danish Museums are creating an online database where amateur collectors can register their finds. “Amateur archaeologist Freddy Arntsen from North Zealand, Denmark, puts the detector aside as he grabs a handful of soil that turns out to contain a silver coin from 1623 AD, embossed with King Christian IV’s monogram. The little coin is far from the only find made by amateur archaeologists like Freddy in recent years. Now, Danish museums have come together to create a new database, DIME (Digital Metal Finds), where amateur archaeologists can register their finds.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

From Mashable: Snapchat reveals its 10 most popular lenses of 2016. “In honor of the new year and the first full year of the product, Snapchat revealed a list of the 10 most popular lenses. Unfortunately, they’re in no particular order, so we’re left to guess which lens takes the top spot. They also don’t have official names, but we relied on Snapchat’s judgment.” I promise to try to keep the 2016 retrospective stuff to a minimum now it’s actually 2017.

The UC Berkeley Department of Geography has joined the Flickr Commons. “The Department’s Flickr account contains the photography collection of Urbain J. Kinet, a geographer and world traveler. This is the first of many works they intend to post on Flickr as they establish this page as a portal for department associated visual collections.”

MetaFilter: “LiveJournal represents social media without borders.” “As of a few days ago, the IP addresses for blogging service LiveJournal have moved to 81.19.74.*, a block that lookup services locate in Moscow, Russia. Now users — especially those who do not trust the Russian government — are leaving the platform and advising others to leave.”

USEFUL STUFF

Wanna get more productive in 2017? Dear Myrtle has a multi-part series on setting up a Bullet Journal. Part 1 is here. The last part contains links to all the other parts in case you get lost.

Lifehacker has a writeup on an email client that makes it easy to switch between GMail accounts. “Shift gives you separate tabs to access Gmail, Calendar, and Google Drive within a single window. If you want to switch to a different account, just click the profile tab on the left side of the window.”

How-To Geek: How to Link Your Google Calendar to Your Amazon Echo. “The Google Home can obviously access your Google Calendar as well, but some buyers simply can’t pass up that $50 price tag on the Echo Dot, so if you ended up on Amazon’s side and heavily rely on your Google Calendar, you have nothing to worry about. Here’s how to link it up with your Echo.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

From the British Library: Re-imagining a catalogue of illuminated manuscripts – from search to browse. “As the final project for my Masters in Computer Science at UCL, I worked with the British Library to design and start to implement alternative ways of exploring the collection. This project had some constraints in time, knowledge and resources. The final deadline for submission was only four months after receiving the project outline and the success of the project rested on the knowledge, experience and research of a fresh-faced rookie (me) using whatever tools I had the wherewithal to cobble together (open source software running on a virtual machine server hosted by UCL).”

Recode: Here are all the times Facebook tried to stomp out Snapchat in 2016. “Facebook is worried about Snapchat. Big time. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the most dominant social network on the planet, won’t necessarily say that out loud. But as the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words, and Facebook spent most of 2016 showing us just how much Snapchat is weighing on the minds of those in Menlo Park, Calif.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

If you want to start the New Year feeling completely ripped off, celebrate would-have-been Public Domain Day. “Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate ‘works-for-hire’ are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years—an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1960 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2017, where they would be ‘free as the air to common use.’ Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2056…. And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in other countries are different—thousands of works are entering the public domain in Canada and the EU on January 1.”

Excellent points. From ZDNet: Stop calling everything a “hack”. “Not all disclosures of data are the same. A hack may lead to a breach, but a leak isn’t a hack, nor does a breach always lead to a leak. Confusing — right? Hacking a computer is an illegal act, usually by way of unauthorized access. But when data is sitting on the internet in an unprotected manner, that’s a leak. The two aren’t comparable, but US computer hacking laws are outdated and vague.” Also, calling a data leak a hack confuses where the responsibility for the leak lies – directly on the person who set up the Web server.

What do we have to look forward to in 2017? More ransomware! “As if holding your data hostage and seeking cash payment weren’t harsh enough, security experts foresee the next stage of ransomware to be even worse. Scott Millis, CTO at mobile security company Cyber adAPT, expects ransomware to spin out of control in the year ahead. That is an astounding statement when you consider that there were more than 4,000 ransomware attacks daily in 2016, according to Symantec’s Security Response group…”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

OTHER STUFF I THINK IS COOL

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