NEW RESOURCES

Library of Congress / Unsplash Guest Post: The March on Washington in Color. “[August 28] marks the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington—when a quarter-million people came together to draw attention to the continued challenges and inequalities faced by Black Americans. The two dozen or so color photographs from that day and its leaders are locked down under expensive licenses, inaccessible to the general public, limiting the usage and awareness of one of the most defining moments in American history. Today, we fix this. With the help of the team at the Library and visual historian Jordan Lloyd, we’ve assembled a set of images with no known restrictions from the March, its leaders and segregated America.”

University of Nevada, Reno: New Library Digital Collection: Consolidated Copper Photo Albums. “The University Libraries has recently added close to 1,000 images from the Nevada Consolidated Copper Records collection to its digital archive. These images date from the 1920s and 1930s and were digitized from 11 photo albums with cyanotype and black & white photographs. The Chief Engineer’s Office for the company captured these historic images, which depict mining operations, equipment, and progress from within the mining pits.”

Rapid City Journal: New website lets public search SD court dates. “A new government website allows the public to use any computer to search for upcoming court dates and other information about South Dakota criminal and civil cases…. Before the creation of the eCourts portal, the public and media had to call a clerk or use a computer at a courthouse to look up court dates and other information.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Android Police: Google Trends introduces portal for tracking US election search topics. “The new ‘US Elections in Search 2020’ page gives a detailed look at which topics, candidates, questions, and parties are searched the most often. Google even offers interactive graphs and maps for which searches are most popular in what regions. For example, Trends is showing unemployment as the most important political issue right now across the entire US, which isn’t too surprising.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

USA Today: Uncut and unedited: Livestreamers have become a key cog in the Louisville protests. “Just before 7 p.m. May 28, Louisville entertainer Montez Jones was in a car on the way to an impromptu protest in the name of Breonna Taylor. He opened his Facebook page and hit ‘go live.’ Within hours, hundreds of people had joined him downtown – the crowd growing as word spread through texts, calls and shares of his livestream. Fast-forward three months, and the protests have continued, with people young and old calling for justice for the unarmed Black woman killed in March at the hands of police.”

New Daily: ‘Heavy-handed threats’: ‘Scare campaign’ could backfire on Facebook and Google in Australia. “Facebook has threatened to pull the plug on Australian news if forced to pay for it, in what experts say is a ‘desperate’ attempt to avoid setting a global precedent. Australians could be barred from sharing local news content on Facebook and Instagram, the firm said, with the threat representing an escalation in Facebook and Google‘s campaign against proposed regulation forcing them to pay for news.”

NPR: In Iraq, Authorities Continue To Fight Uphill Battle Against Antiquities Plunder. “Heritage experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of other objects were looted directly from Iraq’s archaeological sites after Saddam lost control of parts of the country in 1991, following the war to end Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. The looting and illegal trade of its antiquities in international markets continue to this day, Iraqi officials say. Conservationists say the coronavirus pandemic has only increased online sales of looted antiquities on social media sites such as Facebook and other online platforms.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CyberScoop: The FBI’s digital security guide for local police actually has good OPSEC advice. “The instructions include a range of advisories for smaller police agencies, ranging from ways to avoid harassment on Facebook to the best methods for removing personal information from publicly available databases. The 354-page document, titled ‘Digital Exhaust Opt Out Guide,’ was released publicly in June as part of the BlueLeaks data dump, a trove of law enforcement materials made public by transparency activists calling themselves Distributed Denial of Secrets. Federal authorities have distributed the guidelines to local police.”

Reuters: Russian lawmaker tries to curb mobile app payouts for Apple and Google . “A Russian lawmaker submitted draft legislation on Tuesday that would cut and cap the commission on the sale of mobile applications by tech giants Apple and Google. The bill, submitted to Russia’s lower house of parliament by lawmaker Fedot Tumusov, stipulates that commissions on the sale of applications be capped at 20%. Apple currently collects a 30% commission on sales in its App Store.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CanIndia News: Google expands AI-driven flood forecast to all of India, Bangladesh. “As floods wreak havoc in South Asian countries, Google on Tuesday said it is expanding its Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered flood forecasting to all of India and Bangladesh that will provide greater details on timing and water depths in alerts in nine new local languages.”

Internet Archive Blog: Can You Help us Make the 19th Century Searchable?. “What we need is ‘Culture Tech’ (a riff on fintech, or biotech) and Culture Techies to work on important and useful projects–the things we need, but are probably not going to get gushers of private equity interest to fund. There are thousands of professionals taking on similar challenges in the field of digital humanities and we want to complement their work with industrial-scale tech that we can apply to cultural heritage materials.”

Arizona State University: Testing human teammates in Minecraft. “The Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming (CHART), part of the Global Security Initiative, built an entirely virtual training environment in Minecraft as part of an approximate $3 million award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal of the project is to improve the social intelligence of artificial intelligence and make it better able to assist teams of humans working in complex environments, including in national security missions.” Good morning, Internet…

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