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Promising Jobs at the U.S. Pos1

A sprawling online company based in Georgia that has made tens of millions of dollars purporting to sell access to jobs at the United States Postal Service (USPS) has exposed its internal IT operations and database of nearly 900,000 customers. The leaked records indicate the network’s chief technology officer in Pakistan has been hacked for […]

Just Wheeled into the Lab: The1

This post was written by Mark Jefferson, Lab Assistant at Stanford’s Born-Digital Preservation Lab.      We here at the Born Digital Preservation Lab (BDPL) receive a number of unique and interesting collections from donors. These collections are often contained within obsolete physical media formats such as 3.5/5.25” Floppies, Zip disks, CDs/DVDs, and actual hard […]

2023 Library Systems Report

Illustration: ©Good Studio/Adobe Stock In recent years, business acquisitions have brought high-stakes changes to the library technology industry, creating seismic shifts in the balance of power. But other events in 2022—primarily advances in open source software—have even bigger implications for the market. Although proprietary products continue to dominate, open source alternatives are becoming increasingly competitive. […]

Meeting The Challenge

Ava Kirtley raised money to purchase books from frequently banned lists and gave them away to teens in Walla Walla, Washington. Ava Kirtley was a high school junior when she first learned about attempts to ban books at her school library in Walla Walla, Washington. In summer 2021, several parents and community members challenged a […]

Let’s Talk about It

Illustration: ©Alina.Alina/Adobe Stock When I have connected with public librarians about sharing sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information, a common refrain has been that patrons do not come to the reference desk for this information. This isn’t surprising. How comfortable would you be going up to a stranger and asking them a question about your […]

Flower Power

Certified ikebana instructor Huimei Lai (seated) provides feedback to a student during a February class for older adults at Scripps Miramar Ranch Library in San Diego.Photo: Meiling Yueh Ikebana—the ancient Japanese art of flower arranging—is finding new fans among library patrons. Through online and in-person workshops and exhibitions, many participants find that it brings them […]

Sit and Surf

In Oklahoma, Pioneer Library System’s Wi-Fi benches advertise library resources via QR codes. Photo: Pioneer Library System On a bright, sunny day in Norman, Oklahoma, patrons of Pioneer Library System (PLS) are browsing available titles, messaging friends and family, and powering up personal devices. The twist? Those patrons are doing this all outside while sitting […]

Opioid Outreach

A pilot program at Banff (Alberta) Public Library offers fentanyl test strips to detect the presence of the potent synthetic opioid in drugs.Photo: Banff Public Library Opioid overdoses remain a significant health crisis not just in the US but also Canada. An estimated 32,630 Canadians died from an apparent opioid-related overdose between 2016 and 2022, […]

Newsmaker: Angie Thomas

Photo: Imani Khayyam Soon after Angie Thomas released her debut young adult novel, The Hate U Give, in 2017, the book became a common target for challenges in schools and libraries across the US. But the novel also helped change the landscape of the publishing industry, at a time when authors and readers were calling […]

Bookend: A Library of Laughs

Jenny Robb at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University in Columbus. Photo: Stephen Takacs Jenny Robb says we are living in the golden age of cartoons and comics. “When I was growing up, we didn’t have graphic novels for a children’s audience,” says Robb, head curator of the Billy Ireland […]

Reading for Our Lives

In mid-March, I spoke on a panel at the South by Southwest EDU conference in Texas to discuss the alarming and increasingly weaponized attempts to ban and remove books from public and school libraries. Joining me on the panel were Carolyn Foote, retired school librarian and FReadom Fighters cofounder; Kelvin Watson, executive director of Las […]

Newsmaker: Kelly Yang

Kelly Yang Photo: Jessica Sample As a kid, the library was the first place Kelly Yang felt invited to “dream bigger.” Yang, now a bestselling and award-winning middle-grade and YA author, spent her childhood moving from city to city, making it difficult to find her footing. But everywhere she went, she could find familiar stories […]

Many Public Salesforce Sites a1

A shocking number of organizations — including banks and healthcare providers — are leaking private and sensitive information from their public Salesforce Community websites, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The data exposures all stem from a misconfiguration in Salesforce Community that allows an unauthenticated user to access records that should only be available after logging in. A […]

Have you trained an AI?

Thanks to Mita Williams for pointing to this Washington Post article that makes it trivial to search and see whether any sites you’re affiliated with have been used to train “Google’s C4 data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called […]

3CX Breach Was a Double Supply1

We learned some remarkable new details this week about the recent supply-chain attack on VoIP software provider 3CX. The lengthy, complex intrusion has all the makings of a cyberpunk spy novel: North Korean hackers using legions of fake executive accounts on LinkedIn to lure people into opening malware disguised as a job offer; malware targeting Mac […]

Giving a Face to the Malware P1

For the past seven years, a malware-based proxy service known as “Faceless” has sold anonymity to countless cybercriminals. For less than a dollar per day, Faceless customers can route their malicious traffic through tens of thousands of compromised systems advertised on the service. In this post we’ll examine clues left behind over the past decade […]