NEW RESOURCES

Batchelor Institute: First Nations Digital Language Archive Launched . “An exciting new website and digitisation project for collecting and archiving of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language materials has been launched at Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education June 29th. Known as the CALL Collection and jointly managed by Batchelor Institute’s Centre for Australian Languages and Linguistics (CALL) and the Batchelor Library, the archive includes materials that have been collected over the past 40 years by communities, students and staff.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

9 to 5 Google: Google Drive’s new ‘Backup and Sync’ tool was quietly delayed w/ no firm release date. “Google announced a new tool for Google Drive users a few weeks ago called ‘Backup and Sync.’ The new tool, set to replace Google Drive’s current desktop uploader was set to release last week, but the company quietly pushed that back with an update to its original post.”

TechCrunch: Twitch’s mobile app is adding live streaming, dark mode and more. “Amazon-owned game-streaming site Twitch today announced a series of changes coming soon to its mobile application, the most notable of which is the ability for broadcasters to stream directly to their channel from the app itself. That doesn’t mean you can live stream gameplay as of yet, though.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Restore Recovered Photos Using EXIF Metadata. “Data loss is a massive blow, but once you’ve recovered your missing data, sorting it out is invariably time consuming. If the data loss was due to an accidental partition deletion on your computer’s hard disk drive (HDD) you’ll typically have hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of images to filter…. But will it be as bad as you think? When it comes to digital photos, probably not. Thanks to EXIF metadata stored in the image file, it’s possible to sort through all of the recovered images to find what you’re looking for relatively quickly.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: Baseball Challenged by Social Media Accusations of Domestic Violence. “When Major League Baseball began two domestic-violence investigations last month, allegations against Chicago Cubs shortstop Addison Russell and Tampa Bay Rays catcher Derek Norris did not come from the usual source — a police report, or video, or court testimony. Instead, they came from social media.”

The Verge: Nest’s new home camera is an interesting toy. “I’ve never understood the fascination with connected home cameras, such as Canary, the Nest Cam, and others. They’ve always been a gimmick in my experience: not reliable enough for a proper security system, not practical enough to be a baby monitor. But a lot of people really like them, so I spent the last week with the new Nest Cam IQ to see if it could change my opinion.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Sky News: NHS patients’ data was illegally transferred to Google DeepMind. “The transfer of 1.6 million NHS patients’ personally identifying data to Google was illegal, according to the UK’s data watchdog. The Royal Free NHS Trust gave the data to Google DeepMind, the artificial intelligence arm of Google, for the purpose of testing a smartphone app called Streams – and did so without requesting the patients’ permission.”

TorrentFreak: Putin Signs Law to Remove Pirate Proxies From Search Engines. “Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a new law that will enable pirate mirror, proxy and other derivative sites to be blocked quickly by ISPs. Sites will be approved for blocking by the government and the local telecoms watchdog, and ISPs will be given 24 hours to block all access. Search engines will also be compelled to remove all variants from results.”

Wired: Researchers Found They Could Hack Entire Wind Farms. “For the past two years, [Jason] Staggs and his fellow researchers at the University of Tulsa have been systematically hacking wind farms around the United States to demonstrate the little-known digital vulnerabilities of an increasingly popular form of American energy production. With the permission of wind energy companies, they’ve performed penetration tests on five different wind farms across the central US and West Coast that use the hardware of five wind power equipment manufacturers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics (no kiddin’): Dramatic Growth of Open Access June 30, 2017. (Thanks to Aaron Tay for the heads-up.) “Open access continues to demonstrate robust growth on a global scale, in terms of works that are made available open access, ongoing growth in infrastructure (new repositories, journals, book publishers), strong growth for new initiatives such as SocArxiv, BioRxiv, the Directory of Open Access Books, SCOAP3, as well as ongoing strong growth in established services such as BASE, PubMed / PubMedCentral, Internet Archive (check out the new Collections including a Trump archive and FactChecker), DOAJ (almost 2.5 million articles searchable at the article level), RePEC and arXiv. Ongoing growth in infrastructure and OA policy give every reason to expect this growth to be ongoing.”

Phys.org: 3-D scanning fossils to help researchers around the world study mastodons. “Boxes upon boxes filled with the fossilized remains of a mastodon that died in Virginia more than 18,000 years ago are being hauled up the steps to Virginia Commonwealth University’s Virtual Curation Laboratory, where the massive Ice Age animal’s fossils—including the tip of a tusk, a very worn tooth, toe bones, a rib bone and a mandible—are slated to be 3-D scanned.”

MIT Technology Review: Virtual Trolls. “We are in the early stages of VR, much like the Internet in the 1990s. There are no rules and no law of the land. We are all learning what is okay and what isn’t. And as in those early Internet days, we’re learning that anonymity causes a degree of chaos and undesirable behaviors. It removes accountability.” Good morning, Internet…

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