NEW RESOURCES

DigitalNC: Yearbooks from the North Carolina School for the Deaf Now Online. “DigitalNC is happy to announce 35 yearbooks from our new partner, the North Carolina School for the Deaf. All of these yearbooks are from said school and cover years between 1915-1971. The North Carolina School for the Deaf was founded in 1891 in Morganton, NC, located in the western part of the state.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Brisbane Times (Australia): Donations pour in to Archives as historians decry decay of ‘national memory bank’. “The National Archives has raised almost $100,000 in donations in a bid to save its most at-risk records as some of the nation’s pre-eminent historians argue it should never have been forced into a public appeal for funding. In the four weeks since the Archives launched a membership program, which asks $40 a person or $60 a household, the number of people backing it has swelled seven-fold to more than 700.”

Engadget: Google makes it easier to find businesses with gender-neutral restrooms. “With Pride Month underway, Google is adding a small but handy feature in Maps and Search to help transgender, nonbinary and gender non-conforming individuals. Local listings can now include a mention of whether a business has gender-neutral restrooms.”

USEFUL STUFF

Mashable: Want to skywatch for Starlink satellites? There’s a website that will help you.. “There isn’t a constellation quite like the image a line of Starlink satellites cuts across Earth’s skies. And now there’s an easy way to figure out when you can see them. The SpaceX-operated gear is meant to one day provide high speed, satellite-powered internet all around the world. It’s already semi-functional and open for live testing (at quite a cost), but the eventual orbital network, which is already approved by the FCC, will consist of 12,000 satellites in all.”

MakeUseOf: 6 Ways You Can Use Microsoft Office for Free. “Numbers don’t lie. Microsoft Office has a 47.5 percent market share for productivity software. There’s also 1.3 billion Windows 10 devices in use. It stands to reason that a sizeable percentage of these people would rather use Microsoft Office for free – if you’re one, don’t feel alone. Even Microsoft has created many loopholes to help you achieve this goal. Let’s examine all six ways you can use Microsoft Office for free.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Guardian: Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats. “In an apparent attempt to split the Democratic vote in a number of close races, the ads purported to come from an organization called America Progress Now (APN) and used socialist memes and rhetoric to urge leftwing voters to support Green party candidates. Facebook was aware of the true identity of the advertiser – the conservative marketing firm Rally Forge – and the deceptive nature of the ads, documents seen by the Guardian show, but the company determined that they did not violate its policies.”

VentureBeat: USC and Stanford launch Starling Lab to protect human rights with decentralization. “The University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation and Stanford University have partnered on The Starling Lab, which will be dedicated to using decentralized tools based on cryptography and blockchain to advance the cause of human rights.”

Maui Now: 12 Native Hawaiian Programs Awarded $1.18 Million in Federal Grants. “Twelve Native Hawaiian programs based in Hawaiʻi have been awarded federal grants totaling $1,181,486 to help preserve the indigenous history, heritage and culture of Hawaiʻi, US representatives Ed Case (HI-01) and Kaialiʻi Kahele (HI-02) announced today.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TechSpot: Malware-packed pirated games infected millions of PCs, stealing data and hijacking webcams to photograph users. “If you’re ever tempted to download a pirated game or app, remember that in addition to being illegal, there’s the risk of it containing some nasty malware. Millions of PCs were infected with a trojan virus using this method, leading to the theft of over 1TB of data, including email addresses, login credentials, and documents. It was even able to hijack a webcam and photograph users.”

New York Times: China’s Censorship Widens to Hong Kong’s Vaunted Film Industry, With Global Implications. “The city’s government on Friday said it would begin blocking the distribution of films that are deemed to undermine national security, marking the official arrival of mainland Chinese-style censorship in one of Asia’s most celebrated filmmaking hubs.”

BBC: EA: Gaming giant hacked and source code stolen. “The attackers claimed to have downloaded source code for games such as FIFA 21 and for the proprietary Frostbite game engine used as the base for many other high-profile games. News of the hack was first reported by news site Vice, which said some 780GB of data was stolen.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Arizona State University: ASU alum publishes graphic novel on computer generated images, machine learning. “[Jennifer] Weiler, who was influenced by her work at ASU as a student in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering, has been working intensely over the last year to create and publish her first comic book, ‘Creating with Code: A Fun Exploration of Computer-Generated Images and Machine Learning.’ She said she made the comic to educate people about how to effectively utilize coding to construct stylistic computer-generated images and apply methodologies of machine learning in the process.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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