NEW RESOURCES

Internet Archive Blog: Search Scholarly Materials Preserved in the Internet Archive. “IA Scholar is a simple, access-oriented interface to content identified across several Internet Archive collections, including web archives, archive.org files, and digitized print materials. The full text of articles is searchable for users that are hunting for particular phrases or keywords. This complements our existing full-text search index of millions of digitized books and other documents on archive.org. The service builds on Fatcat, an open catalog we have developed to identify at-risk and web-published open scholarly outputs that can benefit from long-term preservation, additional metadata, and perpetual access.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ubergizmo: Instagram Introduces Automatic Captioning For Stories. “Having captions in videos is useful and is a great accessibility feature. We’ve seen similar features offered in video platforms such as YouTube, and now it looks like Facebook-owned Instagram is hoping to introduce something similar as well to its Stories feature. This is according to a discovery by Matt Navarra who shared his findings on Twitter.”

BetaNews: Linux Foundation launches free service to verify software authenticity. “The Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization enabling innovation through open source, has announced a new service to improve the security of the software supply chain by enabling the easy adoption of cryptographic software signing.”

USEFUL STUFF

ZDNet: Best cloud storage service in 2021. “Personal cloud storage all started in 2007, when Drew Houston, Dropbox’s CEO, got sick and tired of losing his USB drive. So, he created the first individual, small business cloud storage service. It was a radical idea in its time, and everyone loved it. Today, there are dozens of cheap or free cloud storage services. But — beyond giving you storage — they’re very different.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Washington Post: Want to borrow that e-book from the library? Sorry, Amazon won’t let you.. “You probably think of Amazon as the largest online bookstore. Amazon helped make e-books popular with the Kindle, now the dominant e-reader…. Amazon is a beast with many tentacles: It’s got the store, the reading devices and, increasingly, the words that go on them. Librarians have been no match for the beast. When authors sign up with a publisher, it decides how to distribute their work. With other big publishers, selling e-books and audiobooks to libraries is part of the mix — that’s why you’re able to digitally check out bestsellers like Barack Obama’s ‘A Promised Land.’ Amazon is the only big publisher that flat-out blocks library digital collections. Search your local library’s website, and you won’t find recent e-books by Amazon authors Kaling, Dean Koontz or Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Nor will you find downloadable audiobooks for Trevor Noah’s ‘Born a Crime,’ Andy Weir’s ‘The Martian’ and Michael Pollan’s ‘Caffeine.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Verge: Security startup Verkada hack exposes 150,000 security cameras in Tesla factories, jails, and more. “Verkada, a Silicon Valley security startup that provides cloud-based security camera services, has suffered a major security breach. Hackers gained access to over 150,000 of the company’s cameras, including cameras in Tesla factories and warehouses, Cloudflare offices, Equinox gyms, hospitals, jails, schools, police stations, and Verkada’s own offices, Bloomberg reports.”

Ars Technica: T-Mobile will sell your web-usage data to advertisers unless you opt out. “T-Mobile next month will start a new program that gives customers’ web-browsing and device-usage data to advertisers unless customers opt out of the data sharing.”

Texas Tribune: Twitter sues Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, asks court to halt his investigation of the social media company. “Beleaguered Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who attended the pro-Donald Trump rally that preceded the U.S. Capitol siege, issued civil investigative demands to Twitter after the company banned the former president from its platform.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Food Business News: Nestle expands AI efforts with ‘cookie coach’. “Using artificial intelligence (AI), Nestle has debuted the ‘cookie coach,’ a lifelike virtual avatar that uses natural language AI and autonomous animation to answer basic questions about the company’s Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe. The ‘coach’s’ name is Ruth, in honor of Toll House Inn founder Ruth Wakefield, and can interpret and respond to a range of written or spoken queries.”

BBC: In pictures: 3D return for Bamiyan Buddha destroyed by Taliban. “The ancient sandstone carvings in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan valley were once the world’s tallest Buddhas – but they were lost forever when the Taliban blew them up 20 years ago. One made a poignant return on Tuesday night in the form of a 3D projection, glowing in the rocky alcove where it used to stand.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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