NEW RESOURCES

Vail Daily: Old Vail Trail editions are now digitized through July 1992. “Vail in the 1980s can now be relived by locals online as ColoradoHistoricNewspapers.org has digitized the Vail Trail newspaper’s weekly collection through July of 1992. The newspaper is now searchable through the free website, which is a service of the Colorado State Library.”

Google Blog: The Blobs are back and teaming up with Beethoven. “Beethoven Beats, created in partnership with Deutsche Grammophon, celebrates Beethoven’s musical genius with a completely new way to discover his famous piano sonatas. You are invited to tap out a rhythm, which, through the application of machine learning, will be answered by the closest matching work from Beethoven’s extensive piano sonata collection.”

Google Search Central: Introducing the Google Search Status Dashboard . “As we head into 2023, we want to introduce another tool for the public to understand the most current status of systems which impact Search—crawling, indexing, and serving. While system disruptions are extremely rare, we want to be transparent when they do happen. In the past, we’ve worked with our Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) to externalize these disruptions on our Google Search Central Twitter account. Today, we’re introducing the Google Search Status Dashboard to communicate the status of Search going forward.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ghost Cult: Metallica Adds More Content to “The Art of Metallica” Virtual Exhibition to the Metallica Black Box. “It’s been one year since The Metallica Black Box opened its doors with the first exhibition taking a deep dive into The Black Album, followed with 40 Years of Metallica. This latest exhibition digs into the band’s personal collection of artwork and includes rarely-seen drafts of album art, classic t-shirt images, gig posters, fan tributes, video storyboards, Hetfield sketches, and much more.”

Engadget: TikTok is testing full screen horizontal videos. “The company has confirmed to TechCrunch that users chosen to be part of this test will see a button on square or rectangle videos in their feed. If they tap on that button, the video will expand horizontally to take up the whole screen.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

9to5 Google: Google kicks off ARCore Geospatial API Challenge with $50,000 in prizes for AR apps. “ARCore gained a Geospatial API at Google I/O 2022 to let developers more easily place virtual content in the real world. To encourage adoption, Google is starting the ARCore Geospatial API Challenge. This addition to ARCore lets third-party apps use the same global localization technology powering Google Maps Live View to add virtual content to real world coordinates and elevations in over 100 countries.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: House committee asks National Archives to review Trump storage unit. “The House Oversight Committee sent a letter to the National Archives on Tuesday requesting a review to determine whether former president Donald Trump has retained any additional presidential records at his storage facility in Florida.”

Ars Technica: TikTok would be banned from US “for good” under bipartisan bill. The bill—officially known as the ‘Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act’ or the ‘ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act’—is designed to block and prohibit all transactions by social media companies controlled or influenced by “countries of concern.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Georgia: New facial recognition technology scans your ear. “The ear is one of the few body parts that remains relatively unchanged over time, making it a useful alternative for technology requiring face or fingerprint recognition, said Thirimachos Bourlai, lead author of the study and an associate professor in the UGA College of Engineering. The ear recognition system Bourlai’s team developed correctly authenticates individuals with up to 99% accuracy, according to the new study (depending on the dataset and model used for testing).”

Hackaday: VHS-Decode Project Could Help Archival Efforts. “Archiving data from old storage media can be a highly complex process. It can be as simple as putting a disk in an old drive and reading out the contents. These days, though, the state of the art is more complex, with advanced techniques helping to recover the most data possible. The VHS-Decode project is an effort to improve the archiving of old analog video tapes.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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