NEW RESOURCES

eMissourian: Missourian launches online photo archive, Lens of Time. “The Missourian has chronicled Franklin County’s rich history since the late 1800s. It has an unmatched collection of the region’s stories, as well as the photographs that ran with those stories. Now, the paper’s deep photo archive is becoming available to the public. This weekend, The Missourian’s ‘Lens of Time,’ an online archive of photographs that appeared in the pages of the newspaper since the late 1930s, will make its debut.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Blog: New designs for Chrome and Chrome OS, by Latino artists. “This year Chrome partnered with Latino artists to create a collection of themes that celebrate our heritage. You can use them to customize your Chrome browser and Chromebook wallpapers. The work reflects a variety of meaningful subjects, from family to the subtle ways we all stay connected. This collection continues our work commissioning contemporary artists to visually show how people use Chrome and Chromebooks to get things done, explore, find and connect.”

CBS News: iPhone iOS 15 launches today: These are the best new privacy features and other upgrades. “Apple’s latest iPhone operating system, called iOS 15, launches Monday with new privacy enhancements that help cloak consumers’ web activity and can block email tracking by advertisers and others.”

USEFUL STUFF

ZDNet: Professional speaker secrets: How to give world-class virtual presentations. “As the saying goes, the internet changes everything. And so has the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to the two of them, we now face a future where virtual events will play a much larger part in how we do business. On-site events will return eventually, but everyone from meeting planners to attendees has discovered that while online events aren’t perfect, they can offer a lot of advantages over the traditional hotel ballroom or convention center gatherings.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Magazine Intelligencer: Peter Thiel’s Origin Story: His ideology dominates Silicon Valley. It began to form when he was an angry young man.. “In 2019, while on a trip to Washington to answer questions from Congress about his digital currency, Thiel joined Zuckerberg, Jared Kushner, Trump, and their spouses at the White House. The specifics of the discussion were secret — but, as I report in my book, Thiel later told a confidant that Zuckerberg came to an understanding with Kushner during the meal. Facebook, he promised, would continue to avoid fact-checking po­litical speech — thus allowing the Trump campaign to claim whatever it wanted. If the company followed through on that promise, the Trump administra­tion would lay off on any heavy-handed regulations. After the dinner, Zuckerberg took a hands-off approach to conservative sites.”

Washington Post: Taking Indigenous culture viral. “In the middle of the Amazon forest, along the banks of the Rio Negro, a young woman in face paint was bored. The coronavirus pandemic had cut off the flow of visitors, further isolating this Indigenous village, accessible only by boat. So Cunhaporanga Tatuyo, 22, was passing her days, phone in hand, trying to learn the ways of TikTok. She danced to songs, dubbed videos, wildly distorted her appearance — the full TikTok experience. None of it found much of an audience. Then she held up a wriggly, thick beetle larva to the camera.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ABC News Australia: Online black market bone trade under scrutiny as researchers investigate. “Human remains are being bought and sold online despite efforts to shut down the illegal trade, according to Australian researchers tracking the movement of skulls and skeletons.”

This story has been updated. Daily Dot: ‘Worst I’ve seen in 20 years’: How the Epik hack reveals every secret the far-right tried to hide . “The engineer [anonymous, doing an impact assessment] pointed the Daily Dot to what they described as Epik’s ‘entire primary database,’ which contains hosting account usernames and passwords, SSH keys, and even some credit card numbers—all stored in plaintext. The data also includes Auth-Codes, passcodes that are needed to transfer a domain name between registrars. The engineer stated that with all the data in the leak, which also included admin passwords for WordPress logins, any attacker could easily take over the websites of countless Epik customers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

KUT 90.5: To Save Lives, Researchers Are Creating An Online Library Of Potential Flood Maps . “Imagine it’s 2 in the morning, and you are one of the first responders to the scene of a flood. Your vehicle approaches water on the road. If you try to cross it, you could be washed away. So you stop and watch your headlights cut through the rain. You see there’s water around some nearby houses, but it’s dark and you don’t know how far it reaches or how deep it is. What you decide to do next could save lives — and put your own at risk. This situation is not hypothetical to Harry Evans. He says it could describe many floods he worked during his 30 years with the Austin Fire Department.”

Scientific American: New Encryption Technique Better Protects Photographs in the Cloud. “This year researchers expect the world to snap 1.35 trillion photographs, or about 3.7 billion per day. All those pixels take up a lot of room if they are stored on personal computers or phones, which is one reason why many people stash their images in the cloud. But unlike a hard drive, which can be encrypted to protect its data, cloud storage users have to trust that a tech platform will keep their private pictures safe. Now a team of Columbia University computer scientists has developed a tool to encrypt images stored on many popular cloud services while allowing authorized users to browse and display their photographs as usual.” Good evening, Internet…

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