NEW RESOURCES

County Weekly News: Glanmore goes digital. “Queen Victoria would be amused. As the holiday marking her birthday approaches, Belleville’s museum dedicated to the Victorian era is getting a little more modern. Glanmore National Historic Site staff have launched their new online artifact database.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mozilla Blog: Update on Fight for Net Neutrality in U.S. – Senate votes to save net neutrality, now it’s up to the House. “[May 16], the U.S. Senate passed a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to save net neutrality and overturn the FCC’s disastrous order to end net neutrality protections. We’re pleased this resolution passed – it’s a huge step, but the battle to protect net neutrality and reinstate the 2015 rules isn’t over. The next step is for the motion to go to the House of Representatives for a vote before the order is supposed to go into effect on June 11. Unfortunately, the rules in the House will make passage much harder than in the Senate; at this point, it’s not clear when, or if, there will be a vote there.”

Washington Post: Fake Facebook accounts and online lies multiply in hours after Santa Fe school shooting. “In the first hours after the Texas school shooting that left at least 10 dead Friday, online hoaxers moved quickly to spread a viral lie, creating fake Facebook accounts with the suspected shooter’s name and a doctored photo showing him wearing a ‘Hillary 2016’ hat. Several were swiftly flagged by users and deleted by the social network. But others rose rapidly in their place: Chris Sampson, a disinformation analyst for a counterterrorism think tank, said he could see new fakes as they were being created and filled out with false information, including images linking the suspect to the anti-fascist group Antifa.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 3 Easy Ways to Convert Webpages Into PDFs. “Most people know how to save print-friendly versions of webpages for easier reading. They often exclude many of the images and advertisements to save printing time and ink. But what about converting a webpage into a PDF?”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Livemint: Building a reliable database of the Indian economy. “The ministry of statistics and programme implementation (Mospi) is often in the news for all the wrong reasons. It is criticized for the poor quality of data, gaps in the data or delays in the release of data. However, several initiatives are progressively putting the database of the Indian economy on a much firmer footing than in the past. The results should begin to show by the end of this year.”

Columbia Journalism Review: Digital journalism’s disappearing public record, and what to do about it. “Institutions from banks to hospitals struggle with digital record-keeping now that much of the information that used to live on paper exists primarily in digital form. News organizations find it particularly challenging to keep the proverbial first draft of history from vanishing, and to figure out how to keep that draft continuously available to readers. It’s an area in which tech companies and newsrooms need to find common ground, and soon. ‘Publishers aren’t doing archiving,’ says Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, a tool developed by the Internet Archive for preserving Web content. ‘Archiving is simply not a business priority.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Register: US Congress mulls extending copyright yet again – to 144 years. “The US Congress is looking to extend copyright on some sound recordings to a staggering 144 years – making it the twelfth time copyright rules have been extended since the 1970s. The CLASSICS Act being debated in the Senate and House would create a new federal copyright rule for sound recordings made between 1923 and 1972 that would keep them out of the public domain until 2067.” This is nuts.

BuzzFeed: A Double Murder From 1987 Was Just Solved Thanks To The Genealogy Website Used For The Golden State Killer. “Forensic genealogy has cracked a second major case less than a month after the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo, alleged to be the Golden State Killer. At 11 a.m. PT in Washington state, the Snohomish County Sheriff announced the arrest of a 55-year-old man from the Seattle area for the 1987 double murder of a young Canadian couple, Jay Cook and Tanya Van Cuylenborg. He is William Earl Talbott II, a local truck driver.” The man was arrested, and I can see no indication that he confessed – so I’m not sure how this is “solved.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Committee to Protect Journalists: Greater transparency welcome but social media sites should allow independent audits of content takedowns. “In January, the Facebook page for TeleSur, a Venezuela-based public news organization, disappeared for a 24-hour period in what the social media platform referred to as ‘an internal mistake,’ Newsweek reported. Several Palestinian media organizations and journalists whose accounts were suspended, had them reinstated following a social media campaign “#FBcensorsorsPalestine” and questions from other media organizations. “The pages were removed in error and restored as soon as we were able to investigate,” a Facebook spokesperson was cited as saying in The Verge. Tens of thousands of videos removed from the YouTube accounts of Syrian media were also eventually reinstated following worldwide criticism, according to reports…. With enough outcry over the validity of removed content, it is possible to have it reinstated. But what about the media outlets and journalists who don’t have the networks, the language, or the wherewithal to prompt a global backlash?”

The Conversation: War on fake news could be won with the help of behavioral science. “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged his company’s responsibility in helping create the enormous amount of fake news that plagued the 2016 election – after earlier denials. Yet he offered no concrete details on what Facebook could do about it. Fortunately, there’s a way to fight fake news that already exists and has behavioral science on its side: the Pro-Truth Pledge project.”

Government Technology: Little Vermont Uses Big Data to Predict Bridge Repairs and Traffic Jams. “Vermont may be a land of bucolic country roads. It is also a land of big data. State transportation engineers are using artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and even wonkier-sounding neural networks to better understand how roads and bridges might be deteriorating and in need of maintenance.” Good morning, Internet…

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