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Who is Rhone Talsma? On January 26, Talsma earned a spot in Jeopardy! history when he unseated fellow contestant Amy Schneider, who had racked up a 40-game winning streak, the second highest on the iconic game show. Talsma, multimedia librarian at Chicago Ridge (Ill.) Public Library, was the most recent in an impressive line of […]
January 2022 LC LABS LETTERA Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team News from the Connecting Communities Digital Initiative Marya McQuirter joins the Library of Congress as Director of the Connecting Communities Digital Initiative Marya McQuirter has joined the Digital Strategy Directorate as Director of the Connecting Communities Digital Initiative (CCDI). […]
One of the most well-written podcasts (oh, and I guess it’s a radio show too) out there is Terry O’Reilly’s Under The Influence. Terry tells stories of how marketing works (and sometimes doesn’t), and it’s always an entertaining and fascinating half-hour. His most recent episode, Season 11, episode 3, is Long Overdue: The Creative Boom […]
Several articles here have delved into the history of John Bernard, the pseudonym used by a fake billionaire technology investor who tricked dozens of startups into giving him tens of millions of dollars. Bernard’s latest victim — a Norwegian company hoping to build a fleet of environmentally friendly shipping vessels — is now embroiled in […]
I have never given a second thought to ensuring I’ve chosen the correct/most recent version of a creative commons license. That’s changed, because I just finished reading Cory Doctorow‘s post, A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator. In it, he outlines the emergence of the Copyleft troll, someone […]
In December 2021, researchers discovered a new ransomware-as-a-service named ALPHV (a.k.a. “BlackCat“), considered to be the first professional cybercrime group to create and use a ransomware strain written in the Rust programming language. In this post, we’ll explore some of the clues left behind by a developer who was reputedly hired to code the ransomware […]
2020 was quite different from the norm. Nobody ever thought that a situation which pauses the whole world would arise. What started over two years ago, has changed everyone’s daily life, routine, and habits from before the pandemic. As Covid-19 started to go wild and crazy, the world was shutting down, borders were closing between […]
What’s worse than finding out that identity thieves took out a 546 percent interest payday loan in your name? How about a 900 percent interest loan? Or how about not learning of the fraudulent loan until it gets handed off to collection agents? One reader’s nightmare experience spotlights what can happen when ID thieves and […]
Up for the “Most Meta Cybercrime Offering” award this year is Accountz Club, a new cybercrime store that sells access to purloined accounts at services built for cybercriminals, including shops peddling stolen payment cards and identities, spamming tools, email and phone bombing services, and those selling authentication cookies for a slew of popular websites. Criminals […]
One of my more popular posts from the past few years was Thoughts on building my first bar chart race with Flourish, so HT to @ResearchBuzz, who recently pointed to this post on Hongkiat: 5 Tools to Create Bar Chart Race Without Coding. They mention Flourish, but there are four more you might explore. They […]
New year, same love for libraries! We cannot wait to continue to share informative, useful, and interesting library posts with you all in 2022. We thought it would be nice to reflect on the top 5 posts from 2021, before we continue our Princh Library Blog journey in 2022! In this post we will share […]
If you created an online account to manage your tax records with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), those login credentials will cease to work later this year. The agency says that by the summer of 2022, the only way to log in to irs.gov will be through ID.me, an online identity verification service that […]
Interested in learning more about what’s new in the Library of Congress’ digital collections? The Signal will now be sharing out semi-regularly about new additions to publicly-available digital collections and we can’t wait to show off all the hard work from our colleagues from across the Library. Read on for a sample of what’s been […]
The Russian government said today it arrested 14 people accused of working for “REvil,” a particularly aggressive ransomware group that has extorted hundreds of millions of dollars from victim organizations. The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said the actions were taken in response to a request from U.S. officials, but many experts believe the crackdown […]
What did people read during 2021? On this week’s Princh Library Blog we share a fun infographic, created by Global English Editing and The Expert Editor, that will provide you with interesting bits from the reading habits around the world. Check out the infographic below. The infographic originally appeared on Global English Editing’s website, you […]
We are delighted to introduce Victoria (Tori) Scheppele, a Library Technician in the Prints & Photographs Division who has joined us temporarily to work on the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud (CCHC) initiative. Victoria Scheppele. Tori is working on the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud (CCHC) initiative. The CCHC initiative is supported by […]
In a great many ransomware attacks, the criminals who pillage the victim’s network are not the same crooks who gained the initial access to the victim organization. More commonly, the infected PC or stolen VPN credentials the gang used to break in were purchased from a cybercriminal middleman known as an initial access broker. This […]
Microsoft today released updates to plug nearly 120 security holes in Windows and supported software. Six of the vulnerabilities were publicly detailed already, potentially giving attackers a head start in figuring out how to exploit them in unpatched systems. More concerning, Microsoft warns that one of the flaws fixed this month is “wormable,” meaning no […]
Many readers were surprised to learn recently that the popular Norton 360 antivirus suite now ships with a program which lets customers make money mining virtual currency. But Norton 360 isn’t alone in this dubious endeavor: Avira antivirus — which has built a base of 500 million users worldwide largely by making the product free […]
Norton 360, one of the most popular antivirus products on the market today, has installed a cryptocurrency mining program on its customers’ computers. Norton’s parent firm says the cloud-based service that activates the program and allows customers to profit from the scheme — in which the company keeps 15 percent of any currencies mined — […]
