I’ve unleashed a new bot onto the Twitter timeline today: @pomological tweets an image and description from the Pomological Watercolor Collection in the USDA’s National Agricultural Library. (As all of my friends and anybody unfortunate to stand near me at parties knows, I’ve worked extensively on bringing these watercolors to the public.) These are beautiful images with serious historical significance, so it’s fun to slip them in between everything else happening on Twitter. You should follow! Here’s the first automated tweet from the account:
The New York Times has reported that, despite the long-standing traditional meaning of the name, people named Isis have faced issues ranging from inconveniences to major discrimination in the past several years on the basis of their name. This problem disproportionately affects women, and it’s not just a few cases. What is the scale of people who may be affected?
The incredible botmaster Darius Kazemi has a popular GitHub repository called “corpora“, which contains, well, collections of all kinds of things. It can be really handy to have access to a list of words that all fall into a certain group, and so Kazemi makes it available completely freely and with a CC0 waiver to place it in the public domain.
Over on Techdirt, I wrote a short piece about how uncertainty surrounding ridiculously long copyright terms is likely keeping newspapers from the 1920s onward out of major archives. We’re very likely in the midst of a sea change in journalism, but future generations may not be able to study what we’re producing and exploring as likely business shifts make the copyright question even thornier. From the article:
I spoke last weekend at Wikicon USA about the several months I’ve spent learning about—and making more publicly available—the pomological watercolor collection I wrote about in these pages last April. The talk is now online, and is about 20 minutes (and a bit frenetic).
I’m a Firefox user, but I was very interested to read Chris Palmer’s guide to privacy and security settings in Chrome. One thing he did that really intrigued me was enabling Javascript only on secure sites. It ends up being a pretty good default not just because it prevents attacks that rely on Javascript injection—like the ads that Comcast and AT&T have inserted into pages accessed on their hotspots, or the massive man-on-the-side attack the government of China apparently conducted against Github—but also because a site going through the effort to authenticate itself is also a reasonable proxy for the kind of stuff I’d allow anyway.
There was a major order in the Uber class action case today: the class was certified, which means that the suit can be on behalf of 160,000 drivers, instead of just the handful putting their names on the documents. Big deal!
