NEW RESOURCES

The Writing University: New Archive: Anthology Poster Collection. “The Writing University is proud to announce a new digital archive: the Anthology Letterpress Poster Collection. The Writing University has created an archival and digital collection to preserve and display the one-of-a-kind posters created for the Anthology Reading Series. The new online collection was created in conjunction with the Center for the Book, the UI Library Special Collections department and the Iowa Digital Library.”

Dev Policy Blog: Elections in Samoa: a new database. “Since becoming an independent state in 1962, Samoa has held fifteen general elections. With the help of many others, we have now brought the results of all these elections into a single place for the first time. This is the Samoan Election Results Database.”

Library of Congress: New Online: Diarist Documents Eventful Times on the Confederate Home Front. “‘A diary, faithfully kept in such eventful times as these, must be interesting to our own children,’ wrote Betty Herndon Maury on June 3, 1861, explaining her purpose in keeping a journal after Maury’s family chose to leave Washington, D.C., to cast its lot with the new Confederate States of America. By October 1861, Maury feared that she already had recorded so much that her diary would be ‘too voluminous’ for her daughter, Nannie Belle, to read later. Fortunately for posterity, Maury continued to write, recognizing that ‘these are such eventful times and there are so many interesting incidents that I do not know which to omit.’ Maury’s two-volume diary is now available online at the Library of Congress.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Mozilla’s Firefox offers VPN service to boost privacy for $10 a month. “Mozilla is experimenting with a VPN (virtual private network) service to get a little financial wiggle room from people willing to spend some money to have their internet traffic encrypted better to thwart internet service providers and others from snooping on their online activity. Mozilla will test the offering with a portion of Firefox users in the US starting Wednesday.”

Los Angeles Times: Oculus’ Brendan Iribe leaves Facebook, following exits of WhatsApp and Instagram leaders. “Facebook Inc. is losing another founder of an acquired company: Brendan Iribe, who was chief executive of Oculus VR when Facebook bought it in 2014. ‘This will be the first real break I’ve taken in over 20 years,’ Iribe wrote on his Facebook page, without giving a specific reason for his departure. ‘It’s time to recharge, reflect and be creative.'”

The Verge: Linus Torvalds returns to Linux development with new code of conduct in place. “Linus Torvalds, the software engineer and outspoken Linux kernel creator, has returned to oversee the open source project following a self-imposed break last month designed to help him adjust his controversial behavior. Torvalds, who has a reputation for being rude and aggressive to other members of the community, said at the time that wanted to address his ‘flippant’ actions and proclivity for personal attacks.”

USEFUL STUFF

Social Media Explorer: How to Create Viral Memes with Some of the Best Meme Makers for Your Blog. “As the popularity of social media just keeps on increasing, memes have as well. These humorous captions of random images keep on entertaining social media users around the world. Just for funsies, I tried to find a serious definition of memes. Wikipedia says that it is a behavior, style, and idea that gets spread from person to person. But as memes are all about fun, I would also classify them, quite seriously of course, as packet of bytes to balance mood swings. The major purpose of a meme is just to spread laughter.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Ars Technica: Google Home Hub review—Awesome hardware for Google’s nascent smart display software. “The latest entry to the Google Home ecosystem is called the Google Home Hub. The Home Hub marries a screen with the Google Assistant-powered voice command system, allowing users to call up recipes, utilize smart home controls, or watch YouTube videos.”

TechCrunch: Fake news ‘threat to democracy’ report gets back-burner response from UK gov’t . “The UK government has rejected a parliamentary committee’s call for a levy on social media firms to fund digital literacy lessons to combat the impact of disinformation online.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Google wants Supreme Court to hear Oracle copyright case – just not quite yet. “The billion-dollar copyright war between Google and Oracle has arrived at the U.S. Supreme Court. Sort of. On Friday, Google filed a request for an extension of its deadline to petition for review of the Federal U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling (886 F.3d 1179) last March that Google did not make fair use of Oracle America’s Java code in creating the Android platform.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: New technology encodes and processes video orders of magnitude faster than current methods . “Computer scientists at the University of California San Diego have developed a new technology that can encode, transform and edit video faster–several orders of magnitude faster–than the current state of the art.”

Princeton University: Virtual Victorians: Using 21st-century technology to evaluate 19th-century texts. “In the 19th century, printing technology changed the way readers experienced texts. Today, students and researchers are using digital technology to access historical literary texts in new ways and finding surprising echoes of the past in their own lives.” Good morning, Internet…

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