NEW RESOURCES

Online Historical Directories: New Pages: Farm and Farmers Directories. “I’ve spent much of this month adding links to the site to farm and farmer’s directories on the Internet Archive. There are 59 new pages and 89 updated pages as a result! Be on the look out for a blog post on how to find and use rural directories in your research, coming soon to this blog.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Internet Archive: The Mueller Report – Now with Linked Footnotes and Accessible.. “The Mueller Report, orginally released as a scanned image PDF, is now available as a text-based EPUB document with 747 live footnotes and is conformant with both Web and EPUB accessibility requirements.”

USEFUL STUFF

Kawartha News: Find a tick? A new website can tell you if it’s the kind that carries Lyme disease. “But not every one of the 40 species of ticks in Canada carries Lyme disease so, if you find a tick, the first step is to identify what species it is. There’s where a new website comes in…. you can submit a photo of any tick you find and get confirmation if it belongs to the species that carry Lyme bacteria. The website also includes real-time mapping of tick submissions, and a free mobile app will be launching in the fall.”

Make Tech Easier: How to Back Up Google Photos to Your Computer. “Backup and Sync works on any folder, which makes it possible to back up all your files from an SD card, USB drive, or the whole system if you like. It can also act as a redundant backup for files in other cloud storage platforms like OneDrive and Dropbox. We’re going to show you how to use the new unified app to back up Google photos and download them to your Windows PC or Mac.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

XDA Developers: WeNote is a Google Keep alternative with a built-in calendar and Google Drive sync. “There are a bunch of different note-taking apps on the Google Play Store, but most people probably gravitate towards the big names like Google Keep, Evernote, or Microsoft OneNote. If you’re looking to try something new, check out WeNote by XDA Member yccheok. It’s an app for all your notes, to-do lists, reminders, etc. just like all the rest, but it’s full of features like icon customization for notes, locking notes behind passwords, stickying notes to your status bar, and much more.”

ABC News Australia: Here’s how a Melbourne genealogist found the author of a 50-year-old message in a bottle. “It has come as a shock to many people, including social media users, how quickly Mr [Paul] Gilmore was found. What they do not know is, it was old-school techniques that helped crack the case so quickly. As ABC journalists furiously messaged almost every Paul Gilmore listed on Facebook — including one living in Kazakhstan — they received an email from Sue McBeth.”

Quartz: The early internet is breaking—meet the people saving it. “In 1999, Olia Lialina taught web design in Germany. In class, she’d use amateur sites as examples of what not to do. But then, Lialina realized that those pages were disappearing. So she began to collect, and, eventually, study them to understand the values embedded within the early web’s ever-present starry night backgrounds, Mail Me buttons, and welcome signs.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Krebs on Security: QuickBooks Cloud Hosting Firm iNSYNQ Hit in Ransomware Attack. “Cloud hosting provider iNSYNQ says it is trying to recover from a ransomware attack that shut down its network and has left customers unable to access their accounting data for the past three days. Unfortunately for iNSYNQ, the company appears to be turning a deaf ear to the increasingly anxious cries from its users for more information about the incident.”

Neowin: UK ISPs stop issuing educational copyright infringement notices . “A little over two years ago, internet service providers (ISPs) began issuing educational copyright infringement notices to users suspected of engaging in digital piracy to push them towards using legal services such as Netflix and Spotify. Now, notices under the Creative Content UK (CCUK) initiative have stopped being sent to copyright infringers.”

Wired: Adware Is The Malware You Should Actually Worry About. “WHEN YOU THINK of malware, it’s understandable if your mind first goes to elite hackers launching sophisticated dragnets. But unless you’re being targeted by a nation-state or advanced crime syndicate, you’re unlikely to encounter these ultra-technical threats yourself. Run-of-the-mill profit-generating malware, on the other hand, is rampant. And the type you’re most likely to encounter is adware.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Newswise: Machine-learning competition boosts earthquake prediction capabilities. “Three teams who applied novel machine learning methods to successfully predict the timing of earthquakes from historic seismic data are splitting $50,000 in prize money from an open, online Kaggle competition hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory and its partners.”

The Next Web: Pro baseball league uses AI umpire for the first time, coach gets ejected for arguing with it. “You’re outta here! Professional baseball‘s first AI umpire – in the form of an automated strike zone – didn’t take long to chalk up its first ejection after 1988 Cy Young winner and current pitching coach of the Atlantic League’s Highpoint Rockers, Frank Viola Jr., was tossed for his profanity-laced disagreement with the machine’s ruling.” Good morning, Internet…

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