NEW RESOURCES

The Meridian Star: Documents digitized in Governors’ Letters Project, volunteers needed. “A documentary project led by a University of Southern Mississippi history professor that is digitizing more than 20,000 letters written to Mississippi governors during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods has launched its first 2,000 documents online. The project, which is a feature of USM’s prestigious Dale Center for the Study of War & Society, is also seeking volunteers for assistance with transcription of original documents.”

Google Blog, and I know it’s dated tomorrow, I’m time-travelling like that: Kick like a pro with Footy Skills Lab. “Three years ago, the [Australian Football League] and Google first teamed up to help footy fans better connect with the games and players they love. Since then, we’ve been thinking about ways we could improve access to Aussie Rules coaching and community participation – regardless of ability, gender, location, culture or socio-economic background. Today, we’re thrilled to launch Footy Skills Lab to help budding footy players in Australia and all around the world sharpen their AFL skills – straight from their smartphone.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Google celebrates Legally Blonde’s 20th birthday with stylish Easter egg. “It’s been 20 years since Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods blessed audiences with her bubbly personality, solid determination and undeniable style. Ahead of the July 13 anniversary of the film, Google is marking the occasion with what’s surely an Elle-approved Easter egg: her signature pink purse.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 10 Free Data Recovery Tools For Windows PC. “When you delete a file, you don’t actually ‘delete’ it. The system marks the area the file resides as reusable, removing the file from its index. This means that there is a period where it is possible to restore the file. To help you with your deleted data dilemma, we have for you 10 free data recovery tools for Windows, which will help from simple file recovery to a total partition rescue.”

Larry Ferlazzo: A Few Of The Best Resources For Lesson Planning. “The Internet is awash with lesson-planning resources. I thought that readers might appreciate a select few recommendations from me – resources that I think provide the most helpful overall guidelines. Let me know what you think I’m missing!”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Poynter: She was an intelligence analyst at the CIA. Now she writes about the dangers of ‘fake news.’. “As an intelligence analyst at the CIA, Cindy Otis was trained to assess how our country’s foreign adversaries deploy divisive rumors, destructive conspiracy theories and other kinds of disinformation against us. Several months after the 2016 presidential election — which saw both the concerted Russian campaign to undermine trust in democracy and a surge in domestically created false content — she decided to leave the agency and deploy her skills on a different front.”

Techdirt: Facebook Is Banning Anyone Charged With Participating In Capitol Hill Insurrection . “At the very least, this does raise some questions. Since it’s just based on charging, and not on conviction, what happens if the charges are dropped or the person is acquitted? That may be unlikely with many (if not all) of the January 6th folks, but it does raise some questions. And is the ban permanent? So far, the initial January 6th cases, against those who didn’t seem to do that much once in the Capitol, have involved relatively mild sanctions. Will that also include a lifetime ban from Facebook? Should it?”

Search Engine Journal: Google’s John Mueller Doesn’t See SEO Becoming Obsolete. “If Google’s machine learning algorithms could understand everything about websites on their own, there would be no need for SEO. Mueller doesn’t see the future of search headed in that direction, however. Here’s his full response.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Verge: Russian hackers reportedly attacked GOP computer systems. “Russian state hackers affiliated with the group Cozy Bear were reportedly behind an attack last week on Synnex, a contractor that provides IT services for the Republican National Committee (RNC), Bloomberg writes. The attack may have exposed the organization’s information. When asked by Bloomberg, a spokesperson for the RNC denied the organization’s systems had been hacked, but confirmed that one of its IT providers Synnex, had been exposed.”

The Register: Kaspersky Password Manager’s random password generator was about as random as your wall clock . “In March 2019, security biz Kaspersky Lab shipped an update to [Kaspersky Password Manager], promising that the application could identify weak passwords and generate strong replacements. Three months later, a team from security consultancy Donjon found that KPM didn’t manage either task particularly well – the software used a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) that was insufficiently random to create strong passwords. From that time until the last few months of 2020, KPM was suggesting passwords that could be easily cracked, without flagging the weak passwords for users.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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