NEW RESOURCES

Phys .org: Relics from Shakespeare’s home shared in new virtual exhibition. “Archaeological discoveries which shed light on the life and times of William Shakespeare are being showcased in a new free to access virtual exhibition. 3-D-scanned artifacts recovered from the site of the Bard’s family home New Place feature in Searching for Shakespeare, an online museum exhibition curated by the Centre of Archaeology at Staffordshire University in collaboration with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.”

AD PRO: This Digital Library Is Bringing Overdue Recognition to Marginalized Designers. “…while they may all look different, [Pascale] Sablan’s hats are cut from the same cloth: Her universal goal is to engage the greater community through architecture and advocate for equitable and diverse environments. One of the many ways she’s achieving that is by building the Great Diverse Designers Library, which Sablan started earlier this year. The virtual resource, which features more than 400 women and people of color, is an ever-evolving repository of great talent with the aim of providing long-overdue recognition for marginalized groups.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

State Archives of North Carolina: Updates Coming to State Archives Website. “On Tuesday, Dec. 29 we will be moving to an updated version of our website. Although the primary address (https://archives.ncdcr.gov/) will remain the same, there will be some changes to web addresses deeper within the site, primarily to pages that host documents like lesson plans, finding aids, guidance documentation, and record schedules.”

USEFUL STUFF

Consequence of Sound: Neil Young Makes Online Archive Free Through Holidays. “The holiday season is upon us and Neil Young is in a charitable mood. Through the end of the year, the legendary songwriter has removed the paywall in front of his formidable online archives and announced that the forthcoming concert film Timeless Orpheum will also be streaming free.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BuzzFeed News: “Facebook Gets Paid” . “Facebook’s Global Ad Machine Is The Company’s $80 Billion Annual Lifeblood. Workers Say It Puts Profits Over People. Facebook is on track for record ad revenue this year. That’s partly due to its lax approach to stopping scammers, hackers, and disinformation peddlers who buy ads that rip off and manipulate people, say former and current workers.” I’ve been bitching about this for years.)

New York Times: Google Dominates Thanks to an Unrivaled View of the Web. “Understanding how Google’s search works is a key to figuring out why so many companies find it nearly impossible to compete and, in fact, go out of their way to cater to its needs. Every search request provides Google with more data to make its search algorithm smarter. Google has performed so many more searches than any other search engine that it has established a huge advantage over rivals in understanding what consumers are looking for. That lead only continues to widen, since Google has a market share of about 90 percent.”

ZDNet: Internet 2021: Here’s what the new year will (and won’t) bring. “I’m lucky. I have decent cable internet to my home office. It’s not cable gigabit, which is not the same thing as real fiber gigabit, but at 300Mbps, it’s more than good enough. But, most people aren’t so lucky. The FCC official broadband definition is a mere 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. Soon to be out of office FCC chairman Ajit Pai would like to have reduced that number to 10 Mbps in 2018. That’s not enough speed for the 2010s, never mind the 2020s. Today, and well into 2021, many of us will still work from home, go to school virtually, and the only movies we’ll be watching will be the ones we’re streaming. That takes up a lot of bandwidth.”

Christian Science Monitor: From streets to museums: Artists archive 2020 summer of protest. “As Black Lives Matter protests wane and protest murals fade, citizens, academics, and arts groups seeking to preserve the past for future generations are archiving art from this summer’s historic George Floyd protests in a myriad of physical and digital ways.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

US Courts: Federal Courts Participate in Audio Livestream Pilot. “Thirteen district courts around the country will livestream audio of select proceedings in civil cases of public interest next year as part of a two-year pilot program. Some of the courts already have begun making proceedings available via audio livestreams. The Northern District of Georgia on Dec. 7 streamed audio of a hearing on a presidential election-related lawsuit, which drew over 42,000 listeners. In September, the Eastern District of Missouri streamed audio of a status conference in the case of U.S. v. City of Ferguson. The remaining courts will be livestreaming by February 2021.”

TechCrunch: U.S. government appeals the injunction against its TikTok ban. “The U.S. government is appealing the ruling that blocked the Trump administration’s TikTok ban, according to a new court filing. On December 7, 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols in Washington became the second U.S. judge to block the Commerce Department’s attempt to stop the TikTok app from being downloaded from U.S. app stores, citing threats to national security.”

Washington Post: The U.S. government spent billions on a system for detecting hacks. The Russians outsmarted it.. “When Russian hackers first slipped their digital Trojan horses into federal government computer systems, probably sometime in the spring, they sat dormant for days, doing nothing but hiding. Then the malicious code sprang into action and began communicating with the outside world…. Why then, when computer networks at the State Department and other federal agencies started signaling to Russian servers, did nobody in the U.S. government notice that something odd was afoot? The answer is part Russian skill, part federal government blind spot.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT Technology Review: “I started crying”: Inside Timnit Gebru’s last days at Google—and what happens next. “On Monday, December 14, I caught up with Gebru via Zoom. She recounted what happened during her time at Google, reflected on what it meant for the field and AI ethics research, and gave parting words of advice to those who want to keep holding tech companies accountable. You can also listen to a special episode of our podcast, In Machines We Trust, for highlights from the interview. (Google declined a request for comment on the contents of this interview.)” Good morning, Internet…

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