NEW RESOURCES

The Herald: Glasgow history project unveils digital maps to city’s past. “Ghost Signs of Glasgow is a volunteer-based project started by the Glasgow Heritage Trust which provides guided tours around the city to discover its past. While lockdown has halted all in-person tours, the group have released digital maps for people to explore Glasgow’s history through fast-disappearing signs across the city.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Fold3: The 456th Bombardment Group in WWII . “We are pleased to announce that we’ve added the unit history of the 456th Bombardment Group (Heavy) to our Fold3 archives. These records contain extensive information on the 456th Bombardment Group which included the 744th, 745th, 746th, and 747th Bomb Squadrons.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 5 Time-Saving Websites & Apps for the Best Shortcuts. “Technology is all about speed, isn’t it? It helps us do things faster, or enables shortcuts that get the more done in less time. The internet is here to help you gain information faster by summarizing books or YouTube videos, or level-up your computer usage by learning keyboard shortcuts. It’s all about saving time and making the best use of it.”

Boing Boing: Download these free D&D character sheets designed to help players with dyslexia. “Redditor Inuyasharuls is a Dungeon Master who runs campaigns for several players with dyslexia. With help from another Redditor and gamer, Axelle123, they created this colorful character sheet alternative, using Comic Sans instead of the standard font found on D&D materials, to make life easier for everyone. Or, well, maybe not everyone, but still for some people.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Motherboard: Silicon Valley Elite Discuss Journalists Having Too Much Power in Private App. “During a conversation held Wednesday night on the invite-only Clubhouse app—an audio social network popular with venture capitalists and celebrities—entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, several Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalists, and, for some reason, television personality Roland Martin spent at least an hour talking about how journalists have too much power to ‘cancel’ people and wondering what they, the titans of Silicon Valley, could do about it.”

The Guardian: Wanted dead or archive: how film-makers repurpose old footage. “A child sits on a rock ledge buckling his shoe. The camera zooms towards a mysterious dark shape behind him as the boy scampers towards us in fright. A black bear has just lumbered into view. We may never know how this scene played out, who shot it, or why. These grainy images unfurl from a dusty film canister found in a charity shop. Around the world, limitless hours of undiscovered footage like this lie waiting for a new audience; from forgotten newsreels to public information films, astral visions shot by astronauts to ‘found footage’ home movies. Welcome to the rich world of archive film-making.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Register: Barclays Bank appeared to be using the Wayback Machine as a ‘CDN’ for some Javascript. “Barclays Bank appears to have been using no less than the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine as a ‘content distribution network’ to serve up a Javascript file.”

InfoSecurity: Global Dating App Users Exposed in Multiple Security Snafus. “Security researchers have discovered five dating apps in the US and East Asia which are leaking millions of customer records thanks to misconfigured cloud databases. A team from WizCase led by Avishai Efrat explained that the Elasticsearch servers, MongoDB databases and AWS buckets they found were left publicly accessible with no password.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Mashable: Instagram and WhatsApp are tainted by Facebook’s BS. Delete them.. “So you’ve deleted your Facebook account. Good. Now let’s talk about Instagram and WhatsApp. The two Facebook-owned services often get a pass whenever hate speech, misinformation, right-wing propaganda, privacy abuses, and self-mythologizing nonsense make the news — which, because of Facebook, is often. Overlooking WhatsApp and Instagram, however, would be a mistake. These services feed the Facebook beast and you should absolutely delete your accounts with Mark Zuckerberg’s seemingly less-tainted platforms, too.”

TechCrunch: We need a new field of AI to combat racial bias. “Since widespread protests over racial inequality began, IBM announced it would cancel its facial recognition programs to advance racial equity in law enforcement. Amazon suspended police use of its Rekognition software for one year to ‘put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology.’ But we need more than regulatory change; the entire field of artificial intelligence (AI) must mature out of the computer science lab and accept the embrace of the entire community.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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