NEW RESOURCES

Visual Artists Ireland: Visual Artists Ireland announces new online archive for The Visual Artists News Sheet.. “The Visual Artists News Sheet is an important record of the Visual Arts in Ireland. As well as news and events, the Visual Artists News Sheet offers comment and opinion from key experts in topical areas. The new online edition is accessible to historians, students, artists, and anyone concerned with modern and contemporary art to review opinion and events since 2009. Making this available to the general public for free has long been an ambition.”

Film School Rejects: (Re)introducing The One Perfect Shot Database. Plus: A Video Database, Too! . “You asked for it, we heard you, and now, after months of planning, months of prepping, weeks of formatting and years in the making, the one and only One Perfect Shot Database is here and it’s going to be bigger and better than you ever could have hoped for…. You can search by director, cinematographer, title, year of release, even the type of shot. Got a hankering for extreme close-ups? We got you. Want to see all the films Roger Deakins shot? We got you.”

Philadelphia Inquirer: ‘Fresh Air,’ fresh forever: 30 years as national show, new digital archive. “Fresh Air has been digitized, archived, and put online. As many of the old, old, tapes as possible, going back to the 1970s, have been baked (that’s what you do!), played, and their data turned into WAV and mp3 files and parked at a big catalogue site named WorldCat.org… More than 8,000 segments across more than 7,000 shows are now online.” If this is ringing a bell for you, I mentioned the grant for this project back in 2015.

Launched in early April, I just now heard about it. From the University of Wisconsin-Madison: Internet Atlas maps the physical internet to enhance security. “Despite the internet-dependent nature of our world, a thorough understanding of the internet’s physical makeup has only recently emerged, thanks to painstaking work by University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers and their collaborators. Professor of Computer Sciences Paul Barford, Ph.D. candidate Ramakrishnan (Ram) Durairajan and colleagues have developed Internet Atlas, the first detailed map of the internet’s structure worldwide.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

USA Today: Facebook Live adds closed captioning for deaf and hard of hearing. “Not all Live videos will have closed captions, but if captioning settings are turned on, Facebook users will automatically see closed captions on Live broadcasts when they’re available, Facebook’s director of accessibility Jeffrey Wieland told USA TODAY. Facebook videos that are not live-streamed already had this capability, but only if the publishers offer captions.”

BetaNews: Linux Mint 18.2 ‘Sonya’ BETA Ubuntu-based operating system now available for download. “Today, the upcoming version of Linux Mint, 18.2 ‘Sonya,’ achieves BETA release. It is based on Ubuntu 16.04 and uses Linux kernel 4.8. You can download either the Mate or Cinnamon ISOs now. Yeah, its a pre-release operating system so you should proceed with caution, but historically, these BETA releases have proven quite stable — you will probably be fine./”

TechCrunch: WhatsApp embraces visuals with filters, albums, and reply shortcuts. “The camera is the new keyboard, and WhatsApp refuses to be left behind. While its sister app Instagram dukes it out with Snapchat in the west, WhatsApp is popularizing visual communication around the world.”

USEFUL STUFF

Boing Boing: Beaker: a decentralized, peer-to-peer web browser that lets you create and fork websites. “Beaker is a project from Dat, a ‘grant-funded, open-source, decentralized data sharing tool.’ It’s a browser that lets you easily create websites using Markdown, or fork any existing website to make it suit your needs, and then share those sites peer-to-peer, without the need for servers in the middle.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Washington Post: Amazon, Kickstarter, Reddit and Mozilla are staging a net neutrality online protest. “Some of the Internet’s biggest names are banding together for a ‘day of action’ to oppose the Federal Communications Commission, which is working to undo regulations for Internet providers that it passed during the Obama administration.”

Geopolitical Monitor: Vietnam’s Social Media Shaping New Environmentalism. “[Tran Thi Thuy] Binh, along with 40 million other net-savvy young Vietnamese, appears to be part of a rising tide of environmental nationalism sweeping the nation. What’s most surprising is that Facebook, once banned in Vietnam, has now proven to be an attractive platform for organizing environment rallies. With a population of 93 million and an increasing Internet user base, social media has proven to be the first choice among the educated Vietnamese youth.”

Bitcoin Magazine: OpenTimestamps Has Timestamped the Entire Internet Archive — Here’s How. “OpenTimestamps, a project led by Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd, just made sure the Internet Archive cannot be forged. Well, sort of. In a blog post published last week, the developer and consultant explained how he used his OpenTimestamps project to timestamp all the Internet Archive’s 750,000,000 files onto Bitcoin’s blockchain. This means that no one — not even the Internet Archive itself — can modify this collection of books, videos, images and other records; not unnoticeably.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

TechRepublic: Cybersecurity researchers claim every network router at risk of secretly leaking data. “It is possible for any common network router to secretly leak sensitive information such as employee passwords or company data, according to recent research from experts at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) Cyber Security Research Center (CSRC).” Good morning, Internet…

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