The U.S. government is reportedly preparing to ban the sale of wireless routers and other networking gear from TP-Link Systems, a tech company that currently enjoys an estimated 50% market share among home users and small businesses. Experts say while the proposed ban may have more to do with TP-Link’s ties to China than any […]
For the past week, domains associated with the massive Aisuru botnet have repeatedly usurped Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft in Cloudflare’s public ranking of the most frequently requested websites. Cloudflare responded by redacting Aisuru domain names from their top websites list. The chief executive at Cloudflare says Aisuru’s overlords are using the botnet to boost […]
Games—whether of the board, video, or trivia variety—help people connect, escape, and learn. Information professionals see the transformative power of games firsthand in their libraries through programs and events, instruction, patron recommendations, and outreach. In honor of International Games Month, held every November, these stories center games and gaming as community-building, teaching, and self-improvement tools. […]
Danielle Costello explains game jams for creating tabletop roleplaying games at the American Library Association’s 2023 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago. Photo: Rebecca Lomax/American Libraries What do you need for a game jam? “Two tables. Done,” says Danielle Costello, student success librarian at University of Georgia Libraries in Athens. While game jams—accelerated game creation […]
Patrons play the videogame Rocket League at an open-house-style Adaptive Arcade event at Deerfield (Ill.) Public Library. Growing up, Steve Spohn’s primary way to connect with others was through videogames. Diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy as an infant, Spohn spent significant time in the hospital as a child. “The only way to reach out to […]
ALA’s Games and Gaming Round Table (GameRT) announced in April its second cohort of classic titles—games that are more than 10 years old—to be included in the Classics Hall of Fame for its Platinum Play Award (the “Platy”). GameRT’s Awards Committee chose these titles based on their historical and ongoing excellence for library use, whether […]
Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings (left) with contestant Adriana Harmeyer Photo: Disney/Christopher Willard With total earnings of $441,600, Adriana Harmeyer, clinical associate professor and archivist for university history at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, is the winningest library professional ever to have appeared on the legendary game show Jeopardy! Harmeyer—who holds the 12th-longest consecutive winning […]
Traditional professional development plans in libraries may satisfy organizational or certification needs but do not necessarily satisfy employees’ needs, wants, and interests. What if we put employees’ needs and wants center stage by looking at professional development through the lens of an employee well-being program? A well-being program is an investment in the whole person, […]
Sean Sherman, a member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe and founder of the restaurant Owamni in Minneapolis, was not widely known in 2017, when he released his first cookbook, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, with Beth Dooley. But since then, he has become perhaps the most recognizable Indigenous chef in the country, racking up […]
Squash and pepita tartlets, one of the recipes in Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America (November, Clarkson Potter), written by Sean Sherman with Kate Nelson and Kristin Donnelly. Photo: David Alvarado Reprinted with permission from Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America (November, Clarkson […]
Image depicting an early Indy 500 race, held by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway archive. Photo: Indianapolis Motor Speedway 30,000Number of objects—in addition to 40 million pages of documents—held at the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Ralph Wilson Jr. Pro Football Research and Preservation Center in Canton, Ohio. The archive has more than 100 scrapbooks, game […]
A Ukrainian man indicted in 2012 for conspiring with a prolific hacking group to steal tens of millions of dollars from U.S. businesses was arrested in Italy and is now in custody in the United States, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Sources close to the investigation say Yuriy Igorevich Rybtsov, a 41-year-old from the Russia-controlled city of […]
Aisuru, the botnet responsible for a series of record-smashing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks this year, recently was overhauled to support a more low-key, lucrative and sustainable business: Renting hundreds of thousands of infected Internet of Things (IoT) devices to proxy services that help cybercriminals anonymize their traffic. Experts say a glut of proxies from Aisuru […]
I am very, very excited to announce that Nov 3 I will be joining the Open Science Hardware Foundation as their inaugural Executive Director. The OSHF is a US based non-profit with a global community that works to advance open scientific instrumentation to accelerate science and benefit society. We do this through collaboration, policy, advocacy, and […]
New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. The CBC and Radio-Canada were participating organizations. The actual report is […]
Financial regulators in Canada this week levied $176 million in fines against Cryptomus, a digital payments platform that supports dozens of Russian cryptocurrency exchanges and websites hawking cybercrime services. The penalties for violating Canada’s anti money-laundering laws come ten months after KrebsOnSecurity noted that Cryptomus’s Vancouver street address was home to dozens of foreign currency […]
I was extremely happy to be invited to deliver the opening keynote at AspenCon 2025…speaking to a room full of people excited to be a part of open source development in libraries is always a great time. I was feeling reflective when I was asked to come up with a topic, and decided to look […]
In this new online column, American Library Association (ALA) Senior Endowment Trustee Brett Bonfield will update members about the ALA Endowment Fund, its role in ALA finances, and additional topics related to investment decisions and how they are made. ALA’s endowment is a major component of the Association’s finances, contributing millions of dollars each year […]
Cybercriminals are abusing a widespread lack of authentication in the customer service platform Zendesk to flood targeted email inboxes with menacing messages that come from hundreds of Zendesk corporate customers simultaneously. Zendesk is an automated help desk service designed to make it simple for people to contact companies for customer support issues. Earlier this week, […]
The pop-up Star Wars Library at Singapore’s Changi Airport. Chile Librarians at the National Library of Chile in Santiago discovered a cache of hidden texts from the government of 1970–1973 President Salvador Allende, the Latin American Post reported. After the September 11, 1973, military coup, dictator Augusto Pinochet sought to destroy “dangerous” texts, including leftist […]
