NEW RESOURCES

ReliefWeb: CLIMB Database: Human Mobility in the Context of Disasters, Climate Change and Environmental Degradation Database. “This online database compiles over 1578 national policy instruments in 172 countries and over 230 bilateral and/or regional policy instruments containing provisions of relevance to human mobility in the context of disasters, the adverse effects of climate change, and environmental degradation.”

EVENTS

Penn State: Libraries to host virtual, local World Digital Preservation Day events on Nov. 2. “World Digital Preservation Day, held annually on the first Thursday of November, celebrates best practices in archiving and storing digitized and born-digital content. Penn State University Libraries is hosting several virtual and University Park in-person events Thursday, Nov. 2.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

New York Times: Face Search Engine PimEyes Blocks Searches of Children’s Faces. “Concerns about children’s privacy have led PimEyes, the public face search engine, to ban searches of minors. The PimEyes chief executive, Giorgi Gobronidze, who is based in Tbilisi, Georgia, said that technical measures had been put in place to block such searches as part of a ‘no harm policy.'”

USEFUL STUFF

Book Riot: All The Public Libraries Offering Free Access To Banned Books: A Comprehensive Guide. “This list is as comprehensive a roundup as possible of all the U.S. public libraries offering access to banned books. It includes the name of the library, the people who are being granted access to the collections, materials within the collections, as well as any other pertinent or relevant information.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: ‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google. “Reddit isn’t denying that it might block crawlers. ‘In terms of crawlers, we don’t have anything to share on that topic at the moment,’ Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge, clarifying that the company’s earlier “nothing is changing” comment only applied to logins.”

Ars Technica: Thanks to AI, the future of programming may involve YELLING IN ALL CAPS. “Not long after OpenAI first unveiled its DALL-E 3 AI image generator integrated into ChatGPT earlier this month, some users testing the feature began noticing bugs in the ChatGPT app that revealed internal prompts shared between the image generator and the AI assistant. Amusingly to some, the instructions included commands written in all-caps for emphasis, showing that the future of telling computers what to do (including programming) may involve surprisingly human-like communication techniques.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

404 Media: Inside a $30 Million Cash-for-Bitcoin Laundering Ring in the Heart of New York. “The records provide rare insight into an often unseen part of the criminal underworld: how hackers and drug traffickers convert their Bitcoin into cash outside of the online Bitcoin exchanges that ordinary people use. Rather than turning to sites like Coinbase, which often collaborate with and provide records to law enforcement if required, some criminals use underground, IRL Bitcoin exchanges like this gang which are allegedly criminal entities in their own right.”

ABC 7: Online scammers trick OC man into handing over $20,000 in person. “A Southern California family is warning others after their elderly father was apparently scammed of $20,000.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

AVMA Journals: Converting the JAVMA and AJVR archives to digital files—an important ongoing project. “Librarians have long wrestled with how best to fulfill requests for single articles pertinent to a historian’s or veterinary scholar’s work. Indeed, the University of Pennsylvania has received on average 1 request for an archived article per day for the past 6 years. Retrieving and scanning each article is a laborious task, and one that costs considerable staff time and overhead. This is also not ideal for our journals because the important work of our authors is not being cited, and citations are what drive further submissions and impact factor. Since I began as Editor-in-Chief in 2021, my team has been intent on improving access to the back volumes prior to 2000.”

Northeastern News: Apple AirTags can track lost suitcase, but slow to alert for stalking, researchers say. “The researchers looked primarily at how Apple sends notifications to iPhone users when around an AirTag that isn’t theirs. They did this by pairing an AirTag with a master device and leaving said device in one place. They then would bring the AirTag plus an unassociated iPhone around with them to see how long it’d take the notification to kick in. They tested the devices at different times of day and in different locations, like on a remote beach in Nahant, to see if the presence of others affected the alert.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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