NEW RESOURCES

Europeana Pro: Digitally recovering Ireland’s history: Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland connects millions of lost records. “This week sees the launch of the innovative new digital archive, the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, which makes a rich array of historical documents available for research, education and enjoyment.”

BBC: ArtUK: Six strange statues from new photographic database. “The charity ArtUK has created a photographic database of 13,500 works of public art. Queen Victoria is the most honoured person with 175 works dedicated to her. The data also shows 77% of people depicted are male, 17% female and the rest a mixture of the sexes.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: How to See EXIF Metadata in Photos on iPhone. “Every photo you take on your iPhone includes EXIF metadata, which records information about how, when, and where you took the photo. Previously, you needed a special utility to see EXIF metadata on iPhone, but with iOS 15 and up, you can see it directly in the Photos app. Here’s how.”

The Verge: Your internet life needs a Feeds Reboot — here’s how to do it. “Odds are, some of what’s in your feeds — the creators on YouTube, the out-there old friends on Facebook, the inescapable dance crazes on your TikTok For You page — is the result of something you commented on, liked, or just happened to watch many months or years ago. The reboot gives you a chance to start fresh, to declare to the internet that you are no longer the person you once were, and to take more control over the algorithms that run so much of your life.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Slate: False Flag. “[Bob] Heft’s story—which many reputable sources cite as a historical fact—is false. While he did make a 50-star flag for his history class, and [Stanley] Pratt may even have agreed to change the grade if it were accepted by the government, everything else in the usual account is a lie that Heft embellished for nearly half a century. If the origin story of the nation’s most recognizable symbol is untrue, it illustrates how misinformation about the American past can be deliberately invented and uncritically perpetuated. The real question is how and why Heft did it—and why so many people wanted to believe that it was the truth.”

New York Times: Family Recipes Etched in Stone. Gravestone, That Is.. “At his home in Washington, D.C., Charlie McBride often bakes his mother’s recipe for peach cobbler. As he pours the topping over the fruit, he remembers how his mother, aunts and grandmother sat under a tree in Louisiana, cackling at one another’s stories as they peeled peaches to can for the winter. Mr. McBride loved this family recipe so much that when his mother, O’Neal Bogan Watson, died in 2005, he had it etched on her gravestone in New Ebenezer Cemetery in Castor, La., a town of about 230 people.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

US Department of Justice: Justice Department Announces Enforcement Action Charging Six Individuals with Cryptocurrency Fraud Offenses in Cases Involving Over $100 Million in Intended Losses. “The Department of Justice, together with federal law enforcement partners, today announced criminal charges against six defendants in four separate cases for their alleged involvement in cryptocurrency-related fraud, including the largest known Non-Fungible Token (NFT) scheme charged to date, a fraudulent investment fund that purportedly traded on cryptocurrency exchanges, a global Ponzi scheme involving the sale of unregistered crypto securities, and a fraudulent initial coin offering.”

PetaPixel: Photographer Sues Google, Says YouTube Ignores Copyright Theft. “A photographer has sued Google for copyright infringement alleging that YouTube failed to remove his unauthorized images from the website. The lawsuit was filed against Google, LLC by Doniger Burroughs on behalf of photographer Alexander Stross in the U.S. District Court for the Central Court California on June 28.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

ProPublica: How We Fight Back When Officials Resist Releasing Information You Have a Right to Know. “All told, as of June 15, we and our partners at the Texas Tribune had filed about 70 records requests related to the shooting and hadn’t gotten any records back; we’ve gotten a few things since then. We weren’t just denied by the city, but also by Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the U.S. Marshals Service.”

NewsWise: The Art of Getting DNA Out of Decades-Old Pickled Snakes. “Many of these specimens are decades or even centuries old, near-perfectly preserved by a combination of formalin and alcohol. But the process that preserves tissues often destroys or at least makes acquiring DNA for modern studies very difficult, which is bad news for scientists who study genetic relationships between organisms. A new study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, however, reveals new approaches for getting and maximizing usable DNA from decades-old pickled specimens, and uses these techniques to solve a long-standing mystery about a small snake from the island of Borneo.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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