Archives New Zealand has indefinitely removed access to its widely used online search system for its collections after restricted records containing private information became publicly visible.

Now the only way people can access Archives’ collections is by going into physical Archives offices and requesting physical copies of records.

On Friday, the Government record-keeping authority discovered that brief record titles containing private information were publicly visible. The full records were not available digitally and have never been accessible to the public.

“We take the privacy of the material we hold very seriously,” chief archivist Anahera Morehu said in a statement.

You can read more in an article by André Chumko published in the stuff.co.nz web site at https://www.stuff.co.nz/about-stuff/94800421/contact-details-for-stuffs-newsrooms-and-editors .

If you are a Facebook (now called Meta) user, you might be interested in this:

This week, a federal judge in California gave final approval to a $90 million privacy settlement granted to Facebook users in a decade-old class action suit. The case, originally filed in 2011, claimed that Facebook tracked the activity of users via a “Like” button installed on countless pages around the web.

The suit also claimed that this tracking violated the Wiretap Act, the Stored Communications Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and several other California laws. However, while the case was filed in California, it consolidated similar complaints from users in 10 other states. Notably, the class includes all Facebook users who visited non-Facebook websites between April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, that displayed the Facebook “Like” button. That means that millions of people could potentially benefit from this action. The lead counsels for this privacy class, David Straite and Stephen Grygiel, echoed that point, noting that the suit “benefits all class members whether or not they also submitted a claim for a portion of the $90 million settlement fund.”

You can read more at: https://facecrooks.com/Internet-Safety-Privacy/90-million-facebook-privacy-settlement-approved-by-judge.html. 

The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) has digitized and is making accessible through its online library catalogue a collection of more than 100 rare and fascinating taregirks (տարեգիրք) or “yearbooks” and taretsoyts (տարեցօյց) or “almanacs” from the holdings of its Mardigian Library. This project was undertaken through the generous support of the SJS Charitable Trust.

The collection of digitized volumes spans from the 1890s to the 1960s and includes titles published in Alexandria, Athens, Beirut, Boston, Constantinople, Paris, Tehran, Venice and elsewhere. NAASR has one of the most substantial collections of these extraordinary publications outside of university libraries, which are often not available to the public. NAASR selected these as priorities for digitization because they are a treasure trove of information, written to inform Armenians at the time about what was going on in various communities both politically and culturally.  These yearbooks serve as important resources for any scholar or member of the public looking into a particular time and place in Armenian history.

The terms “yearbook” and “almanac” do not fully convey the significance of these publications, which are vital sources of information on the affairs of particular communities and contain important literary and artistic works often not otherwise available elsewhere. Many of them are also strikingly designed and impressive visual works in their own right. For example, the still little-studied Gavrosh (Կավռօշ) yearbooks, published between 1906 and 1933 in Constantinople and Paris by Yervant Tolayan, was a feast for the eyes and specialized in humor. Navasard (Նաւասարդ), a Yearbook of Literary and Fine Arts published in Constantinople in 1914 and overseen by Daniel Varoujan and Hagop Siruni, is both beautiful and loaded with writings from some of the leading Armenian writers of the time and also contains translations into Armenian of works by Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) and Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855). Many others are more prosaic in appearance but no less rich in information.

You can read more in an article in the Armenian Weekly at: https://armenianweekly.com/2022/11/14/naasr-digitizes-collection-of-yearbooks/

Each year, thousands of researchers look for records, photographs, and maps that tell Michigan’s accounts to tour the Archives of Michigan in Lansing, which is part of the Department of Natural Resources Michigan History Center. In addition, tens of thousands of guests visit the archives’ online collections. This year Michigan genealogy got a huge boost with a new archival website that has gone online this fall. 

The archives launched Michiganology.org, a new Michigan genealogy website that makes more than 10 million records available online, free of charge. These documents include death and naturalization records, which family researchers use to learn more about their family’s history.

Replaces Popular “Seeking Michigan” Website

The new website replaces “Seeking Michigan,” the archives’ first online platform for sharing digital records. SeekingMichigan.org went live in March 2009 with nearly 1 million records.

Over the past ten years, the software used to develop the Seeking Michigan website has become obsolete and difficult to update. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of new digital records overloaded the system. The archives team determined that although Seeking Michigan was unique, it was time to create a new system with more capacity to better serve the public.

You can read still more in an article in the Thumbwind.com web site at: https://thumbwind.com/2022/11/13/michigan-genealogy/.

What is Mastodon? The 'Twitter Killer' attracting hundreds of thousands after Musk's takeover of Twitter.

mastodon

mas·​to·​don ˈma-stə-ˌdän  -dən

1: any of various extinct mammals (genus Mammut synonym Mastodon) of the elephant family existing from the Miocene through the Pleistocene that are distinguished from the related mammoths chiefly by molar teeth with cone-shaped cusps

2: one that is unusually large

After Tesla (TSLA) boss Elon Musk officially took over Twitter on 27 October, dozens of changes were made to the platform, hundreds of employees were abruptly laid off, and thousands of twitter customers have rebelled and moved elsewhere. Most of the rebels have moved to fringe social media network Mastodon.

Mastodon is a non-profit micro-blogging site that was founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko. Rochko's original concept was to build a “user-friendly microblogging product that would not belong to any central authority.”

Mastodon claims to be a decentralised social media network. This means the code that runs the application is open source, so anyone can set up a Mastodon server and run the application and store user data. This means that there is no one server, company, organisation or individual running Mastodon, making it the opposite of Twitter, which is defacto controlled by Musk.

Once Elon Musk started making changes to Twitter, many free-speech advocates reacted with dismay to the prospect of the world's "town square" being controlled by one person and started looking for other options.

For the most part, Mastodon looks like Twitter, with hashtags, political back-and-forth and tech banter jostling for space with cat pictures. But while Twitter and Facebook are controlled by one authority - a company - Mastodon is installed on thousands of computer servers, largely run by volunteer administrators who join their systems together in a federation. Everything on Mastodon os available free of charge. While each "instance" is owned by various individuals who control their own server(s), there is no one person or organization in charge of all servers.

Anyone can create their own Mastodon server and have control over it, giving it its own set of rules, not unlike Reddit sub-pages, but without the overall control of a parent company.

The result is a new social media that works in a very different manner from Twitter but yet has much of the same functionality of Twitter. 

Mastodon servers are called "instances." All instances are owned, operated and moderated by the community that creates them, and not some large corporation which tracks your data to sell to advertisers. In most cases, Mastodon instances are crowdfunded, not financed.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter on October 27, Mastodon has drawn 489,003 new users (as of a few days ago and undoubtedly even more as of today). Total monthly active users on Mastodon are now much more than 1 million, 

"It's a great opportunity for people to finally see that social media can be done differently, that it can be a protocol not under control of any single company," said Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko.

Eugen Rochko was asked about Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter during an interview. He said Musk "is not entirely comprehensible" and must now "deal with the fallout" of his purchase.

Are you dismayed by all the recent changes to Twitter? Are you thinking of signing up for Mastodon? If so, here are some web sites to read. (Warning: Mastodon is somewhat more difficult to understand and use.)

The first Mastodon web site and the one that still serves as "the hub" for everything: https://mastodon.social.

How to use Mastodon: create your account, join servers, and more. “The best part about Mastodon is that you can follow users in other Mastodon instances, even if you are not a member of that instance. Think of it as being able to talk with a person in a Facebook Group or a WhatsApp group chat without having to join that group. The rest is a familiar affair. You can write posts worth up to 500 characters in length, share photos and videos, repost someone’s else content, and more.” at https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/mastodon-how-to-sign-up-join-server-twitter-alternative/

An intro to Mastodon from a relative newcomer! at https://skullsinthestars.com/2022/11/07/an-intro-to-mastodon-from-a-relative-newcomer/

Tara Calishain put together a list of information about Mastodon at: Mastodon Tools Part II at https://researchbuzz.me/2022/11/05/a-big-list-of-mastodon-resources/.

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.

Are you using the latest and most convenient technology available today? Or are you using an ancient Windowsaurus (an old personal computing device, from the paleo-vista era)?

The history of the Internet began with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. The US Department of Defense awarded contracts as early as the 1960s for packet network systems, including the development of the ARPANET (which would become the first network to use the Internet Protocol). Numerous people worked to connect computers together in a collaborative manner. Early examples include ARPANET, Mark I at NPL in the UK, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet. All were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of communications protocols.

A major revolution began, however, when Tim Berners-Lee, an independent contractor at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, posted a short summary of his implementation of something he called the World Wide Web project on August 6, 1991 in the alt.hypertext newsgroup, inviting collaborators. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. The world was never the same again.

In fact, the World Wide Web was implemented and then has changed significantly over the years. We’ve really had 3 generations:

Web 1.0 existed from 1994 through about 2001. It included Netscape, Yahoo!, AOL, Google, Amazon and eBay. In those early days, the world Wide Web was primarily an information retrieval service.

Web 2.0 was the implementation of social network then made the World Wide Web more democratic: anyone could contribute information about themselves, their hobbies, their employers, or any other topic of interest without possessing technical knowledge in how to create Web sites and how to create web pages in HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Web 2.0 started around 2002 and continues to this day. Web 2.0 companies included Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google Plus.

Web 3.0 - The next update to the World Wide Web obviously is called Web 3.0. But what is it? The question is a bit difficult to answer. Much of Web 3.0 is available today and yet some significant sections have not yet been implemented. Also, there is some disagreement as to what will be included in the (completed) Web 3.0. However, here are a few of the things that are already included with, or planned to be included in, Web 3.0:

The remainder of this article is reserved for Plus Edition subscribers only. If you have a Plus Edition subscription, you may read the full article at: https://eogn.com/(*)-Plus-Edition-News-Articles/12986334

If you are not yet a Plus Edition subscriber, you can learn more about such subscriptions and even upgrade to a Plus Edition subscription immediately at https://eogn.com/page-18077.

I strongly suggest every computer user should use a VPN all the time on their computer(s) and cell phone(s). In fact, I am using a VPN right now as I write this article and I leave the VPN connected all the time. I also have a VPN installed on my cell phone that runs continuously. There are a number of excellent VPNs to choose from, except those that come from Russia.

NOTE: A virtual private network (VPN) enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks in a secure manner. In short, it locks out hackers, online thieves, credit card thieves, government agents, and other people who want to tap into your online conversations and activities in order to steal your private information.

You can learn more about VPNs in Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_network as well as in dozens of other articles that can be found by starting at your favorite search engine and searching for "What is a vpn?."

The reason I do not recommend Russian VPNs is because Russia's telecommunications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, announced VPN bans in June 2021 and then again in December 2021. "The reason for banning VPNs in the country was because Russian VPN producers refused to connect their services to the FGIS database, which would apply government-imposed censorship in VPN connections, and would also make user traffic and identity subject to state scrutiny," according to BleepingComputer. 

In other words, Russia wants to limit VPN use in Russia and elsewhere to VPNs that provide the Russian government "back door" access that makes everything being sent and received visible to Russian government agents. In my mind, that defeats the entire purpose of using a VPN.

My suggestion: go to a search engine or online review of VPNs to find a suitable service for your use. With one exception, I would strongly recommend avoiding free VPNs as almost all free VPNs track your usage and then sell your personal information to anyone who will pay for it. (After all, how can anyone provide a FREE VPN service? They have to make money to pay the bills somehow!)

The one exception is Proton VPN. Proton sells both free and paid-for VPN services with the free service paid for by people who try the free version, like it, and then upgrade to the paid Proton VPN service. (The paid Proton VPN has several additional services not available in the free version.)

The paid version of Proton VPN is available for Macintosh, Windows, Android, Apple iPhones and iPads, and Linux.

Proton is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, allowing Proton's users to benefit from some of the world's strongest privacy laws. 

Proton  may be found at: https://protonvpn.com

NOTE: I am not being compensated by anyone for writing this article. While I use the paid version of Proton's VPN, neither Proton nor any other company will pay me any money or provide any other benefit for using that particular service. Yes, I pay Proton for using that company's services, just like all of Proton's other customers. I also know that a number of other VPN providers also offer high-quality VPN services.

The following is a press release from TheGenealogist:

Memorial Records of the First World War

As we prepare to remember our fallen heroes from the World Wars and other conflicts on Remembrance Day this weekend, TheGenealogist has released a collection of war memorials for soldiers that had served in the First World War. Comprising of details for men who had been born in Ireland as well as in England, Scotland and Wales with connections with the island of Ireland.

With almost 50,000 records that were originally compiled by the Committee of the Irish National War Memorial and published in 1923. Assembled at the time by Miss Eva C. Barnard, secretary to the Irish National War Memorial Committee and printed under the direction and personal supervision of George Roberts they are presented with attractive decorative borders designed by Harry Clarke.

This eight volume set of Ireland's memorial records, 1914-1918, was published in 1923 for the Committee of the Irish National War Memorial. Each entry gives name, regiment, rank, date and place of death, sometimes date of birth and next of kin.

Read TheGenealogist’s feature article: Remembering the Fallen: https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2022/remembering-the-fallen-1633/ 

These records and many more are available to Diamond subscribers of TheGenealogist.co.uk

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections.

TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.

TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!

It was a great idea, but it disappeared a few months after it was first introduced.

The flexi disc is, in effect, an audio time capsule preserving the state of speech digitization research in the early 1970s.

A slim square of vinyl, measuring 18 cm on a side, the record is what's known as a flexi disc, a lightweight alternative to traditional records that became popular after World War II. The technology had many precursors, including German “gramophone postcards” and Soviet “bone music”—jazz or rock recordings pressed on to discarded X-ray film to avoid government censorship. In the United States, the Eva-Tone Company of Deerfield, Illinois became the leading manufacturer of vinyl “sound sheets” (their preferred trademark) by the mid-1960s and promoted their use in “mailing pieces, financial reports, product instruction, sales training, and packaging inserts.”

Due to their low cost, thin form factor, and pliability, flexi discs became the medium of choice for magazine publishers who wished to supplement articles with audio content. Recordings were not limited to musical performances. For example, the December 1969 issue of National Geographic was dedicated to the Apollo 11 lunar landing and contained a sonic retrospective of the Space Race (“Sounds of the Space Age”) narrated by Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman.

You can read more about flexi discs in an article by Benjamin Gross  published in the IEEE Spectrum web site at: https://spectrum.ieee.org/history-of-digital-speech.