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Japan in WWII, Comic Book Creators, WhatsApp, More: Monday Buzz, August 27, 2018

NEW RESOURCES

Kyodo News: Digital archives in Japan keep WWII survivors’ memories alive online. “With memories of World War II fading 73 years after its end as an increasing number of people have no firsthand experience, efforts have been under way to digitize accounts of survivors to keep their memories alive and pass them on to younger generations. Videos of survivors recounting the damage of air raids, their daily lives during wartime and battlefield experiences, have been released online by the Mitaka city government in suburban Tokyo and Yahoo Japan Corp.”

A new Web site aims to connect creators with paying comic book gigs: http://www.creatoradvisor.com/ . From the site’s About page: “One thing that I see a lot of are creators looking for other creators to work with on their various projects. Over the years, I’ve managed to connect with a number of talented people across the industry. I wanted to put that knowledge to use by helping to connect creators with one another for upcoming projects.” This is for paying jobs only.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Next Web: WhatsApp won’t help India monitor messages to stop fake news. “Following a spree of lynchings across India spurred on by misinformation spread through messaging services like WhatsApp, the country’s IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad asked the company to figure out a way to trace these misleading messages back to the original sender earlier this week. But it looks like the Facebook-owned firm won’t play ball.”

Engadget: Instagram is testing virtual communities for college students. “Facebook’s pledge to ‘spark conversations and meaningful interactions’ apparently extends to Instagram. The photo-sharing app has started testing a feature designed to bring college students going to the same university together in a virtual community.”

Denton Record-Chronicle: Texas forever: UNT history prof sets world record (unofficially) for longest history lesson. “Andrew Torget hit his first major obstacle in the ninth hour of his lecture on Texas history. His throat was starting to swell up and it was getting hard for him to speak. He still had at least 15 hours to go. My first obstacle came much earlier and to a much lesser degree. I had run out of coffee and still had at least 22 hours to go.”

USEFUL STUFF

Popular Science: How to manage your digital read-it-later list—before it’s too late. “Most of us have some kind of system for saving online articles we want to read…eventually. Maybe you favorite tweets, employ a dedicated app like Instapaper, add links to a bookmarks folder, or leave a few gazillion tabs open in your web browser. There’s just one problem with this habit: You add stories to your list faster than you can check them off, increasing your roundup with each passing week…. It’s time to finally finish your pile of saved stories—or at least whittle it down to a manageable size.”

Hongkiat: Test Website’s Accessibility Color Rating With Hex Naw. “Looking for a way to improve your accessibility rating? There’s a lot you can do and the topic of accessibility runs deep. But one of the simplest things you can do is alter your site’s color selection. You want a color scheme that matches and blends nicely with a strong contrast for users with color blindness or vision impairment.”

How-To Geek: How to Open (or Convert) a Photoshop File If You Don’t Have Photoshop. “Photoshop is a popular and powerful graphics editing tool, but what do you do if you need to open a PSD file and don’t have Photoshop? We have several solutions for you that don’t involve buying (or renting) an expensive copy of Photoshop.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Verge: Facebook is working on mesh Wi-Fi to possibly bring to developing countries. “Facebook gave an update yesterday on its efforts to expand Express Wi-Fi, an app that lets unserved communities pay for internet service. The company is still working on efforts to reach the 3.8 billion people in the world who don’t have internet access, in order to grow its potential market.”

LSU Now: The Daily Reveille archives to soon be available online. “Soon, 130 years of previously inaccessible information will be available for everyone. The Daily Reveille Digitization Initiative is picking up speed almost a year after the project began. The initiative is to preserve original copies of The Daily Reveille is finishing up its first batch of digitization, with 36,000 pages of early issues of the paper already digitized.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: ROM sites are falling, but a legal loophole could save game emulation. “From a legal standpoint, it’s hard to defend sites that revolve around unlimited downloads of copyrighted games. As attorney Michael Lee put it in a recent blog post, “this is classic infringement; there is no defense to this, at all.” But as Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi tweeted, ‘there is no alternative BUT piracy for, like, 99 percent of video game history’ due to ‘the completely abysmal job the video game industry has done keeping its games available.'”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Atlantic: Welcome to the Age of Privacy Nihilism. “Google and Facebook are easy scapegoats, but companies have been collecting, selling, and reusing your personal data for decades, and now that the public has finally noticed, it’s too late. The personal-data privacy war is long over, and you lost.” Good morning, Internet…

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