NEW RESOURCES

Google Blog: 50 years of film with NFTS and Google Arts & Culture. “The National Film and Television School (NFTS) is an internationally respected institution for education and creativity, launching the careers of many directors, producers, cinematographers, animators and more. Many of whom have gone on to become household names, and earn multiple BAFTAs and Oscars, making NFTS the most awarded film school globally. To celebrate their 50th anniversary, for the first time in the school’s history, online audiences will be able to explore a new digital archive of over 200 graduate films from alumni of the school.”

Library of Congress: Library of Congress Releases Data for Free Download and Discovery. “The Library of Congress announced today its third release of records in its online catalog for free bulk download for research and discovery. The release supports the Library’s effort to continuously expand open access to its vast collections. This MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging Records) release surpasses previous releases and adds more than 200,000 new records to the existing 25 million record database.”

Greenfield Recorder: Photographer Terri Cappucci salvages glass-plate negatives from another era. “The images that Cappucci has so far unearthed show remarkable detail, considering how photographers in the earliest days had to labor with air-conditioner-sized cameras, long exposures and dark-room development techniques. Besides bygone farms and rustic homesteads, these black-and-white images show people in both ragged clothes and finery, who seem unaccustomed to posing for photos, unlike most of us in today’s smartphone photography age.” There is not a huge selection of photography to see yet, but the level of detail and the photographs themselves are phenomenal. It’s easy to tell that they have been cleaned and restored by someone who knows what they’re doing. Go look.

EVENTS

Getty: Art and the Black Power Movement. “In 2017–2019, the landmark traveling exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, shone a light on Black artists from the early 60s to the early 80s. A new expansive book conceived as a companion to this exhibition compiles hundreds of important texts from the era reflecting on the influence and power of Black art…. On September 9, the book’s editors, Mark Godfrey and Allie Biswas, will join Getty curator LeRonn P. Brooks for an online discussion about this cultural dialogue. They will explore the powerful ideas put forth by artists and writers who confronted questions of Black identity, activism, art, and social responsibility during the Black Power era.” Free and virtual (Zoom)

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Twitter might let users archive tweets and remove followers, report says. “Twitter is working on a slate of privacy tools aimed at helping users manage their interactions on the platform, according to a Thursday report from Bloomberg. The tools could include the ability to leave a conversation, hide likes, remove followers and archive older tweets.”

CNN: Black and LGBTQ streamers on Twitch boycotted the platform after repeated ‘hate raids’. “One preliminary report from Twitch journalist Zach Bussey showed at one point Wednesday that 5,000 fewer users were streaming and 500,000 fewer viewers were watching than at the same time just one week earlier. Now, the organizers are hoping that Twitch heeds their demands and enacts new policies to protect them.”

SiliconANGLE: Tableau’s latest release adds new tools for scaling up data analytics. “The company is framing Tableau 2021.3 as a major new release that’s meant to help organizations better manage the ‘data chaos’ that exists today and ensure superior governance of data as they expand their operations. There are a number of new features meant to ensure analytics can scale with enterprise demand, Tableau said.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Evening Standard: Protesters dressed as giant breasts march outside Facebook’s London office. “Medical tattooists and breast cancer survivors dressed up as giant breasts at the headquarters near Oxford Circus. Some claim their pictures have been removed and their accounts blocked. This prevents breast cancer survivors from learning about possible treatments. The campaigners said they should be able to post images of their experience without being wrongly sexualised.”

TechCrunch: Callin, David Sacks’ ‘social podcasting’ app, launches and announces a $12M Series A round. “As live audio becomes more and more popular, co-founders David Sacks (former COO of PayPal and CEO of Yammer) and Axel Ericsson sought to combine social audio and podcasting into one seamless app. The resulting app — Callin — launches today on iOS with an announcement of $12 million in Series A funding co-led by Sequoia, Goldcrest and Craft Ventures, where Sacks is a founder and partner.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Search Engine Journal: WordPress Gutenberg Template Library Plugin Vulnerability Affects +1 Million Sites. “A third party WordPress Gutenberg Template Library plugin with over a million users was discovered to have two vulnerabilities. Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could create an indirect path toward a total site takeover.”

New York Times: Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down. “Locast, a nonprofit streaming service that piped local broadcast signals over the internet, is shutting down after a federal judge ruled against the organization in a rare case tackling the legality of network content delivered online. The organization said it was ‘suspending operations, effective immediately,’ and it added that Locast was meant to “operate in accordance with the strict letter of the law,” but had to comply with the ruling, with which it disagreed.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Register: Imaginary numbers help AIs solve the very real problem of adversarial imagery. “Boffins from Duke University say they have figured out a way to help protect artificial intelligences from adversarial image-modification attacks: by throwing a few imaginary numbers their way.”

University of Exeter: Giving performers copyright over their work could protect them from deepfake technology, study shows. “Regulating the abusive use of deepfake technology is challenging because it was unforeseen by intellectual property policy-makers at the time current laws were designed. Currently performers are legally entitled to control the records made of their work, but this doesn’t apply to digital impersonation such as those generated by deepfakes. New research by Dr Mathilde Pavis, from the University of Exeter Law School, suggests existing performers’ legal rights should be reformed, so they have copyright over their performances instead.” Good morning, Internet…

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