NEW RESOURCES

Euromaidan Press: Huge genealogical database of Ukrainians born in 1650–1920 opens online. “The database includes 2.56 mn people and is expected to reach 4 to 5 mn in 2019. The access to its contents is and will remain free of charge. The sources of data are manifold: birth registers, fiscal and parish censuses, lists of nobility, voters, the military, and victims of repressions, address directories, and other documents produced under the Tsardom of Muscovy, Russian and Habsburg Empires, Poland and the Soviet Union. A Roman-letter version of the data index is reportedly to be enabled in the coming months.” The home page was in Ukrainian, but Google Translate handled it okay.

New-to-me, the online New Zealand Fashion Museum. “The online museum brings together a record of the national collection of fashion objects held both in public and private collections, as well as providing a digital home for the pop-up exhibitions and a vehicle for exclusive online exhibitions, such as the current offering, Flash Back, which features the work of 18 fashion photographers working in New Zealand between 1930-2015, showcasing the ways they have contributed to the development and articulation of a unique New Zealand identity.”

University of Warwick: Warwick Nursing Professor helps launch international database aimed at reducing hair loss for chemotherapy patients. “A University of Warwick nursing professor is one of six globally-recognised cancer care experts launching a new database aimed at reducing hair loss in chemotherapy patients. This data will be used to establish best practices around the maximum effectiveness of scalp cooling to help reduce hair loss in patients undergoing chemotherapy.”

NextGov: White House Artifacts To Be Digitized Using Amazon Web Services. “A new mobile app will let users explore the White House from their phones, scanning each room for historical events taking place there. It’s part of the White House Historical Association’s effort to make presidential ephemera accessible to members of the public for free, especially if they aren’t in Washington or can’t physically enter the White House.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ScotlandsPeople: Release of Presbyterian Church Records. “From 26 June 2017, more than 36,000 new presbyterian church records, covering the period 1744 to 1855 have been added to ScotlandsPeople’. The 20,255 births and baptisms (1744-1855), 10,368 marriages and proclamations (1729-1855) and 5,422 death and burial records (1783-1855) may be especially helpful for anyone searching for a person born or baptised, married or died before the introduction of statutory registration in 1855.”

The Register: Verizon!-owned! Yahoo! bins! AT&T! IDs! for! Tumblr! logins! (nothing weird is happening with the headline; when it comes to Yahoo, The Register believes in exclamation points.) “Verizon has moved to unwind an old deal between Yahoo! and AT&T that allowed users to run merged AT&T and Yahoo! e-mail accounts for login to some Yahoo! services. Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo! in 2013 and became a familiar Purple Palace bungle: after splashing US$1.1 billion to buy the blogging platform, it January this year wrote off $482 million of its value in 2016.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Quartz: Selling blood diamonds is as simple as a Facebook post and a WhatsApp message. “The smugglers are young and tech savvy and their international networks are created and maintained over the internet. Finding the smugglers was as simple as tracking their Facebook comments, photos and posts—no complex encryption programs or trawling the deep web required. Like any young person, CAR’s blood diamond smugglers chronicled their lives on Facebook, making them easy to spot.”

Engadget: Custom Spectacles takes snaps under the sea. “Spectacles have made sharing marginally exciting videos on land via Snapchat easier. It also helps that you no longer need to hunt down a vending machine to snag a pair in the US. But a partnership between the social network and Royal Caribbean cruise lines will make it easy to capture footage under the sea.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Quartz: The US government says you shouldn’t be forced to use special characters in your passwords. “It might be getting easier to remember all of your passwords. The standards organization of the United States, NIST, has concluded that many common requirements for passwords, like forcing you to use special characters, are misguided.”

ZDNet: Microsoft says ‘no known ransomware’ runs on Windows 10 S — so we tried to hack it. “The software giant announced the version of Windows earlier this year as the flagship student-focused operating system to ship with its newest Surface Laptop. Microsoft touted the operating system as being less susceptible to ransomware because of its locked-down configuration — to the point where you can’t run any apps outside the protective walled garden of its app store. In order to get an app approved, it has to go through rigorous testing to ensure its integrity. That’s one of several mitigations that helps to protect the operating system to known file-encrypting malware. We wanted to see if such a bold claim could hold up.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Digital Trends: Adobe And Stanford Just Taught AI To Edit Videos — With Impressive Results. “Just one minute of video typically takes several hours of editing — but Stanford and Adobe researchers have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) program that partially automates the editing process, while still giving the user creative control over the final result.”

Tech Xplore: Twitter-monitoring system detects riots far quicker than police reports. “Social media can be an invaluable source of information for police when managing major disruptive events, new research from Cardiff University has shown. An analysis of data taken from the London riots in 2011 showed that computer systems could automatically scan through Twitter and detect serious incidents, such as shops being broken in to and cars being set alight, before they were reported to the Metropolitan Police Service.” Good morning, Internet…

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