Many of the same shadowy organizations that pay people to promote male erectile dysfunction drugs via spam and hacked websites recently have enjoyed a surge in demand for medicines used to fight malaria, lupus and arthritis, thanks largely to unfounded suggestions that these therapies can help combat the COVID-19 pandemic. A review of the sales figures […]
Many security-conscious people probably think they’d never fall for a phone-based phishing scam. But if your response to such a scam involves anything other than hanging up and calling back the entity that claims to be calling, you may be in for a rude awakening. Here’s how one security and tech-savvy reader got taken for […]
This site has undergone quite a change over the last couple of weeks, and for the purposes of me remembering and for the 2 people in the world who might be interested, here’s a quick summary of what I’ve done. As part of moving servers, it became obvious that I needed to simplify my online […]
This is a guest post by Jennifer “JJ” Harbster, Head of the Science Reference Section in the Library’s Science, Technology and Business Division. She had her first taste of web archiving with the Internet Archive’s collaborative project documenting Hurricane Katrina and went on to lead the Science Blogs Web Archive. On April 22, 2020 we […]
The Princh Library blog provides library stories and insights from around the globe. The blog is brought to you by Princh, the only printing solution designed specifically for – and with – libraries! Our user-friendly printing solution makes it easy for library users to print and pay from their own device. Try out our solution […]
Although Library of Congress buildings are closed to the public, projects like Newspaper Navigator are busy unlocking even more digital content for members of the public to access from home! On May 7th at 2pm EST, Innovator in Residence Ben Lee will host a virtual data jam to experiment and play with thousands of images—including […]
The past few weeks have seen a large number of new domain registrations beginning with the word “reopen” and ending with U.S. city or state names. The largest number of them were created just hours after President Trump sent a series of all-caps tweets urging citizens to “liberate” themselves from new gun control measures and […]
After a wonderful decade or more happily paying Blake Carver to host my sites at LISHost, he decided last year to pull the plug on that service. I certainly took long enough, but I’ve finally moved things over to Linode and have everything seemingly running. There’s still tons of broken images, and I’m double checking […]
Security experts are poring over thousands of new Coronavirus-themed domain names registered each day, but this often manual effort struggles to keep pace with the flood of domains invoking the virus to promote malware and phishing sites, as well as non-existent healthcare products and charities. As a result, domain name registrars are under increasing pressure […]
Today’s guest blog post is from Gina Jones and Abbie Grotke, both of the Web Archiving Team. As a part of our series looking back at some of the people and stories around our 20th Anniversary of Web Archiving, I wanted to share with you an interview with a person who has been working on […]
The Coronavirus has prompted thousands of information security professionals to volunteer their skills in upstart collaborative efforts aimed at frustrating cybercriminals who are seeking to exploit the crisis for financial gain. Whether it’s helping hospitals avoid becoming the next ransomware victim or kneecapping new COVID-19-themed scam websites, these nascent partnerships may well end up saving […]
Microsoft today released updates to fix 113 security vulnerabilities in its various Windows operating systems and related software. Those include at least three flaws that are actively being exploited, as well as two others which were publicly detailed prior to today, potentially giving attackers a head start in figuring out how to exploit the bugs. […]
Digital scholarship takes advantage of the availability of digital collections and a changing landscape of tools, resources and methodologies to produce new forms of research and engagement. Digital scholarship projects and centers are common at research universities. They serve faculty and student needs by supporting digital skill development and sharing best practices in digital research […]
Attack vectors, tools and techniques are constantly evolving. And because standard security practices have been around for a long time, crackers have been around just as long—and have figured out how to circumvent those defenses. Any unknown threat or zero-day your defenses can’t protect you from can lead to malicious actors making their way into […]
What’s new in library tech! Welcome to our monthly collection of fun and hopefully useful news items from our great twitter feed and wherever else we find them. It’s pandemic time, and quite possibly, your library is closed. We’ve compiled some newsbytes we hope will be useful to you at home or wherever you are. […]
The U.S. federal government is now in the process of sending Economic Impact Payments by direct deposit to millions of Americans. Most who are eligible for payments can expect to have funds direct-deposited into the same bank accounts listed on previous years’ tax filings sometime next week. Today, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) stood up […]
We’re excited to announce a June Library 2.0 mini-conference that is being co-organized by TechSoup. It is “Small, Rural, and Independent Libraries,” which will be held online (and for free) on Wednesday, June 17, from 12 to 3 p.m., U.S. Pacific time. Register for this free event here. This mini-conference will focus on innovation and […]
Every few months I get an email from someone looking for some help with the Hydrator tool I wrote about back in 2017. Hydrator is a simple tool to rehydrate twitter ids into full tweets. From the Hydrator GitHub page, “Twitter’s Terms of Service do not allow the full JSON for datasets of tweets to […]
The popular Microsoft Office 2010 is soon going to reach its end of support. To avoid security risks, it’s time to upgrade to a newer version of Office. The good news is that your library can get the cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 for your administrative PCs from Microsoft Academic, or you can get donated on-premises […]
In February, KrebsOnSecurity told the story of a private citizen auctioning off the dangerous domain corp.com for the starting price of $1.7 million. Domain experts called corp.com dangerous because years of testing showed whoever wields it would have access to an unending stream of passwords, email and other sensitive data from hundreds of thousands of […]
