A co-worker alerted me to this news story in the United Kingdom about an external contractor who lost a flash drive containing sensitive personal information. The article begins this way: Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, was today accused of being worse than “the Keystone Cops” at keeping data safe following the loss a memory stick [...]
I was impressed with WALL-E‘s analog preservation skills. He or it knew enough to bake a VHS tape so it could be played. Not so impressive was its treatment of objects that once contained digital data. His abode contained hanging compact discs or DVDs. Interesting too that when WALL-E ended up being fried his main [...]
How well would you do in a zombie apocalypse? 64% Created by OnePlusYou Warning: Zombies Ahead (and All Around) by David Mattison, a UMapper.com Map
Information Zen is the very cleverly named social/business networking water cooler created by AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) for anyone in the information management, records management and enterprise content management fields. AIIM is also rebranding its online E-DOC Magazine to Infonomics. One of AIIM’s recent marketing tools, “What’s In Your Digital Landfill?”, a [...]
Truly a very funny one-page paradox of Second Life, check out Get a First Life, dude, from Darren Barefoot who lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
While visiting Kate Theimer’s ArchivesNext blog, I also noticed her post Documents gone wild! about “web sites that feature innovative uses of documents in non-archival settings.” Adding to her list of The Smoking Gun, PostSecret, Found Magazine and Strange Maps, I’d have to include Paleo-Future, which I came across as a link on Strange Maps. [...]
Marie Cooley, a resident of Jacksonville, Florida, thought she was going to lose her job Steven E. Hutchins Architects when she read a help wanted ad. So she snuck into her workplace one day and deleted an estimated $2.5 million worth of electronic records. Having confessed to the crime, she faces possible jail time. With [...]
Somehow I made an inaugural list compiled by Bill Belew at The Biz of Knowledge of the Top 100 Prolific Bloggers; I’m number 48. His chief criteria was the quantity of posts, along with longevity and some sort of subjective assessment of contribution to the “knowledge base in the blogosphere.” This combination of criteria has [...]
A telemarketing firm’s automated dialer reached my number. I was expecting a call, so I picked up the phone and said “Hello”. “That was an invalid response,” came the female automated recording, “press one to lower your interest rates now.” Obviously this company needs some strategic guidance in proper CRM (Customer Relationship Management) if they [...]
Canada’s National Archival Appraisal Board has launched its Web site. The United States would do well to emulate the model we follow in order to encourage the donation and preservation of archival and other kinds of cultural property. A federal agency called the Canadian Cultural Property Export Board also assists in the process of granting [...]
Imagine if your home office and computer equipment were abandoned for more than 150 years? How much information would future historians be able to glean from your machine? The news story of the abandoned darkroom used by amateur French photographer Joseph Fortuné Petiot-Groffier (d. 1855), whose preservation will be handled by the Nicéphore Niépce House, [...]
I’m not quite sure what the purpose or intent is behind Forbes.com’s Corporate Org Chart Wiki, but if you like taking virutal action against corporate hegemony and injustices, you can have some serious fun moving around the boards of directors and senior executives of all the publicly traded companies in the United States.
This story’s been making the rounds on the e-mail circuit: “Computer technician accidentally wipes out info on Alaska’s $38 billion fund” (International Herald Tribune via Associated Press, 02007 03 20). The story begins “Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroys hours of work. Now imagine wiping out a disk drive [...]
“History 1980-2000 has disappeared into the ether. Sorry” is the title of an article by Ben Macintyre for the Times (London) published on March 23, 02007. Let’s see how long TimesOnline keeps the article online before it too, sorry, disappears into the ether.
Thanks to Bob Shuster on the ARCHIVES & ARCHIVISTS mailing list (02007 03 01) for posting a reminder about “The Digital Ice Age” by Brad Regan, Popular Mechanics, December 02006. No telling how long that URL will be active.
For a different kind of sightseeing adventure, give Google Sightseeing a whirl. One of the funniest entries is about the secret development of the world’s largest plasma screen TV.
From the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Web site visited on January 30, 02007 and “Last updated Friday, January 26, 2007″: “The final report of the ARL Workshop on digital data stewardship, To Stand the Test of Time: Long-term Stewardship of Digital Data Sets in Science and Engineering, is now available via www.arl.org/info/frn/other/ottoc.html.” If you [...]
Archivists in the future may find their appraisal work a tad easier if this self-erasing paper gets into wide circulation. According to this CBC News story, “This message will self-destruct“, Canadian and US researchers have invented a paper that turns blank after a day’s use or being exposed to heat.
The Ms. Dewey search site is a very funny and sophisticated achievement in search engine technology. You’ll be even more surprised that Microsoft sponsored the site. More info on Ms. Dewey at the LibraryThing’s Thing-ology Blog and Forbes.com. Sources: Thanks to Bernie Sloan for pointing this one out on DIG_REF, 02006 10 26
Neil Beagrie posted a note to DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (02006 09 06) about Arkhold, a commercial Web multigenerational hosting service based in Corvallis, Oregon, USA. According to founder Dave Gore, as quoted in Beagrie’s note, the target customer base consists of “artists, musicians, writers and family historians who want to preserve their work online.” Gore added, “A [...]
Update for 02006 07 29: So much for my predicting abilities. The 200,000 comment spam milestone on The Ten Thousand Year Blog came and went yesterday in the space of a few hours. So it actually took just about a month to double in number. There was a definite slowdown after July 4 and then [...]
A huge story this April 1, 02006, the creation of WordPattrn through the merger of WordPress and Textpattern and their acquisition by Flickr.
Maybe TalkToAliens.com, whose transmitter was switched on over a year ago, got zapped by some kind of raygun from outer space. Their site is offline except for a picture of what it’s supposed to look like as they upgrade and enhance it with new “out of this world” features. It’s a toll call, by the [...]
Not content with global mapping domination of the Earth, Google released its latest plan of search conquest, Google Mars, on March 13, 02006, which followed its Google Moon map revealing targets of opportunity for the just plain curious and Googlenauts. Look out for the Martians and the Swiss cheese!
The Society of Qualified Archivists, whose tag line is “Taking British archives forward in the battle against political correctness,” is a great and fun-filled blog as only an archivist can create. There’s also a lot of serious stuff here around the Great Game of politics, records keeping and archives. This is the Atom feed URL.
Making headlines around British Columbia, Canada, today is the story of 41 computer data tapes that were auctioned off for $300 in 02005, with sensitive personal information still on the tapes. The buyer disclosed the error to the Vancover Sun newspaper. The Times-Colonist and Vancouver Sun articles noted that: “Once the files were loaded from [...]
I am quoting this media release from the United Kingdom’s Digital Preservation Coalition in full due to its importance. Similar reports have appeared in the United States. I believe the public and private archives in Canada have yet to conduct a similar digital preservation assessment. Even the Canadian Conservation Institute in its award-winning Preserving My [...]
I remember reading something about the Singularity back in the 1990s. Turns out the Canadian home of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is in Victoria, BC. They only have five members. The idea was popularized by now-retired professor and full-time science fiction author Vernor Vinge in a 1993 essay (“Technology Singularity” by Vernor Vinge, [...]
I’m eagerly awaiting the opportunity to read a library copy of University of Victoria professor Florin Diacu’s The Lost Millennium: History’s Timetables Under Siege, which critically and chiefly from a mathematical perspective examines the controversial theory of Russian mathematician Anatoli T. Fomenko and his colleagues that we are not living in 2005, but in a [...]
It’s been widely reported (Google News link) starting on January 12, 02006 that Peoples’ Bank in Connecticut lost a data tape with customer information. Here’s the bank’s response page, which starts out with this brief summary of the incident: “People’s Bank is notifying approximately 90,000 affected customers that a tape containing confidential data was lost [...]
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