NEW RESOURCES

Spotted via Google Alerts: British Civil Wars Memorial Database. “This database provides information about monuments, including memorials, plaques and information boards, located across the British Isles which relate to events concerning and key figures associated with the British Civil Wars 1639-1660. It also covers monuments located anywhere in the world relating to soldiers who served in the British Isles between 1639-1660.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

British Library UK Web Archive Blog: UK Web Archive Technical Update – Autumn 2023. “The most important achievement over the last quarter has been establishing a replica of the UK Web Archive holdings at the National Library of Scotland (NLS). The five servers we’d filled with data were shipped, and our NLS colleagues kindly unpacked and installed them. We visited a few weeks later, finishing off the configuration of the servers so they can be monitored by the NLS staff and remotely managed by us.”

TechCrunch: Discord kills Gas, the anonymous compliments app it bought nine months ago. “Discord is shutting down Gas, the anonymous compliments-based social media app it acquired back in January for an undisclosed sum. The app will officially shut down on November 7, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The news of the shut down was first reported by The Information.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: Kinsta Unveils Free Hosting for Your Static Sites. “Managed WordPress Hosting company Kinsta announced they are offering free static website hosting that comes with 100 GB bandwidth/month and 1 GB build size limit. Kinsta says that the free hosting tier plan is being given away so that users can experience it for themselves.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

National Genealogical Society: It’s Official! ConferenceKeeper.org Is Now Part of NGS. “As of 1 October 2023, ConferenceKeeper.org is now officially part of the NGS family. ConferenceKeeper is the most complete, entirely free, online calendar of genealogy conferences and events. Created in 2012, ConferenceKeeper was the brainchild of Jen Baldwin. In 2015, Baldwin passed it on to Eowyn Langholf Walker and Tami Osmer Mize. Mize has been its sole manager since 2016 and will continue in this role as a consultant for NGS.”

WIRED: How to Digitize an Entire Government . “From online voting to frictionless taxes, Estonia’s government services can sound like sci-fi to outsiders. Its chief information officer talks about how it works—and what other countries might learn.”

Doncaster Free Press: Mystery of 25-year-old crisps discovered in Doncaster archives with hidden note. “Staff at City of Doncaster Archives made the strange find while sorting through piles of old documents and photos. And as they leafed through a stack of faded items, they found a perfectly flattened bag of Seabrook Cheese and Onion flavour crisps with a best before date of February 1998. Inside the 30g bag were the crushed remains of the crinkle cut crisps, produced by the Bradford-based snack manufacturer more than a quarter of a century ago. A note left with the bag, inside a sealed envelope said: ‘These crisps were left here in December 2009’ having been with their owner for ’15 turbulent years.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Krebs on Security: Hackers Stole Access Tokens from Okta’s Support Unit. “Okta, a company that provides identity tools like multi-factor authentication and single sign-on to thousands of businesses, has suffered a security breach involving a compromise of its customer support unit, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.”

AFP: EU opens disinformation probes into Meta, TikTok. “The EU announced probes Thursday into Facebook owner Meta and TikTok, seeking more details on the measures they have taken to stop the spread of ‘illegal content and disinformation’ after the Hamas attack on Israel.”

Ars Technica: Universal Music sues AI start-up Anthropic for scraping song lyrics. “Universal Music has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic, as the world’s largest music group battles against chatbots that churn out its artists’ lyrics. Universal and two other music companies allege that Anthropic scrapes their songs without permission and uses them to generate ‘identical or nearly identical copies of those lyrics’ via Claude, its rival to ChatGPT.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

KPBS: Scientists say ‘X’ marks the spot where they lose faith in Twitter. “There have been a lot of changes at Twitter. In fact, you’re not even supposed to call it that. It’s been renamed and rebranded as X, the name favored by the platform’s billionaire owner Elon Musk. Despite the changes it’s still widely used and valued by San Diego scientists. But they are seeing less of what they used to like.”

The Messenger: Social Media Traffic to NYT, CNN and Other Top Media Down More Than 40% Since 2020. “As social media platforms have busily severed ties to news organizations, traffic from those apps to high-profile publishers like The New York Times has been nearly halved in three years. In September, the world’s top new sites received just 6.5% of their U.S. web traffic from social media — down from 11.5% in September 2020, according to the Times.” Good morning, Internet…

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