Warning: This article contains personal opinions.

From Slashdot.org:

Generically, passkeys refer to various schemes for storing authenticating information in hardware, a concept that has existed for more than a decade. What's different now is that Microsoft, Apple, Google, and a consortium of other companies have unified around a single passkey standard shepherded by the FIDO Alliance. Not only are passkeys easier for most people to use than passwords; they are also completely resistant to credential phishing, credential stuffing, and similar account takeover attacks. 

On Monday, PayPal said US-based users would soon have the option of logging in using FIDO-based passkeys, joining Kayak, eBay, Best Buy, CardPointers, and WordPress as online services that will offer the password alternative. In recent months, Microsoft, Apple, and Google have all updated their operating systems and apps to enable passkeys. Passkey support is still spotty. Passkeys stored on iOS or macOS will work on Windows, for instance, but the reverse isn't yet available. In the coming months, all of that should be ironed out, though. 

Passkeys work almost identically to the FIDO authenticators that allow us to use our phones, laptops, computers, and Yubico or Feitian security keys for multi-factor authentication. Just like the FIDO authenticators stored on these MFA devices, passkeys are invisible and integrate with Face ID, Windows Hello, or other biometric readers offered by device makers. There's no way to retrieve the cryptographic secrets stored in the authenticators short of physically dismantling the device or subjecting it to a jailbreak or rooting attack. Even if an adversary was able to extract the cryptographic secret, they still would have to supply the fingerprint, facial scan, or -- in the absence of biometric capabilities -- the PIN that's associated with the token. What's more, hardware tokens use FIDO's Cross-Device Authentication flow, or CTAP, which relies on Bluetooth Low Energy to verify the authenticating device is in close physical proximity to the device trying to log in.

"Users no longer need to enroll each device for each service, which has long been the case for FIDO (and for any public key cryptography)," said Andrew Shikiar, FIDO's executive director and chief marketing officer. "By enabling the private key to be securely synced across an OS cloud, the user needs to only enroll once for a service, and then is essentially pre-enrolled for that service on all of their other devices. This brings better usability for the end-user and -- very significantly -- allows the service provider to start retiring passwords as a means of account recovery and re-enrollment." 

In other words: "Passkeys just trade WebAuthn cryptographic keys with the website directly," says Ars Review Editor Ron Amadeo. "There's no need for a human to tell a password manager to generate, store, and recall a secret -- that will all happen automatically, with way better secrets than what the old text box supported, and with uniqueness enforced." 

If you're eager to give passkeys a try, you can use this demo site created by security company Hanko.

The following announcement was written by folks at the Internet Archive:

Introducing Democracy’s Library

Tara Calishain is the author of hundreds of "Search Gizmos." Here is her announcement of her latest free offering:

The amount of genealogy content on the Internet is amazing, but it’s a bit hard to search on the open Web. Especially if you’re doing something like looking up obituary notices and your relatives have common names.

I can’t give your relatives new names, but I can make a tool that narrows down the scope of your results and makes finding obituaries easier. So I did. It’s called Obit Magnet and you can find it at https://searchgizmos.com/obit-magnet/ .

It’s easy to use. Enter a name and the date of death for the person you’re searching for, and Obit Magnet makes searches for that name for Google Books (newspapers only), Newspapers.com, NewspaperArchive.com, and Chronicling America. Instead of making the searches open-ended, though, Obit Magnet makes searches for a 7-day span after the date of death and a 15-span if the 7-day span doesn’t catch the obituary.

If the person you’re searching has a middle name, use it in the search. Obit Magnet will automatically create searches with and without a middle name. If you’re searching for a married woman and you have her middle name, enter her full name like this: firstname middlename maidenname lastname. Obit Magnet will automatically generate a full complement of name variations for your search. Here’s what part of the result for John James Smith looks like:

Here is a list of all of this week's articles, all of them available here at https://eogn.com:

(+) You Can Build Your Own Safe and Secure Cloud-based File Storage Service

Using the FREE (and Paid) Proton VPN

Ukraine Accuses Russian Troops of Looting Museums, Destroying Cultural Sites

MyHeritage Publishes 30 New Historical Record Collections and 31 Million Records in September 2022

Connect with Your Ancestors This Halloween with Free Death Records from MyHeritage

23andMe Adds Ancestry Composition Detail for People of Ashkenazi Ancestry

8th Aeolian Genealogy Seminar

22 Southern California Newspapers Will Be Preserved, Digitized, And Available To The Public

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) Receives Funding for Project Aimed at Digitally Preserving Civil War Graffiti Houses

Romania’s Ornate and Sometimes Crumbling Synagogues Get New Access via Online Virtual Tours

Making Black America: Through the Grapevine

Practical Saturday at the Really Useful Family History Show

Findmypast Expands Their Caribbean Collection This Week

Discover Your Ancestors in Historical Newspapers

Lost Something? Search Through 91.7 Million Files From the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s With Discmaster

Join CZUR Group For Secret Perk Spots for the New Scanner

Adobe Demos a Prototype Tool That Can Uncrop Photos Using AI to Recreate What's Missing

New AI Tool Colorizes Black-And-White Photos Automatically

The following announcement was written by the folks at MyHeritage:

MyHeritage invites you to connect with your departed ancestors in honor of Halloween and All Saints’ Day: we’re providing free access to all our death records for one week only, October 26–November 3, 2022!

Search free death records on MyHeritage

The records in this category include death, burial, and cemetery records as well as obituaries. These records are crucial sources of information for family researchers. Death certificates are typically issued within days of a death and can contain many details about a person’s life, such as their age at death, place of birth, parents’ names and origins, and the cause of death. The name of the person who provided these details may also be mentioned, and this can also be an important clue that can help you locate new relatives.

Burial and cemetery records can supplement death certificates and offer additional information, while obituaries may provide rich details about the person’s life: their interests, profession, passions, and connections in the community.

Since the beginning of last October, we’ve added an astonishing 224 million records to an already huge collection of death records, burial records, cemetery records, and obituaries — bringing the total to 810,792,208 records. During that time, more than 80 collections were added or updated, including vast collections from the United States, France, Australia, New Zealand, and many other places. So even if you’ve searched MyHeritage’s death record collection in the past, there’s a good chance you will find something new concerning your family history.

Don’t miss this opportunity! Search free death records on MyHeritage now.

Use this to colorize your old black-and-white photographs:

A Swedish machine-learning researcher named Emil Wallner has released a free web tool called Palette.fm that automatically colorizes black-and-white photos using AI. After uploading a photo, users can choose a color filter or refine the colors using a written text description.

Palette.fm uses a deep-learning model to classify images, which guides its initial guesses for the colors of objects in a photo or illustration. We asked Wallner what kind of back-end technology runs the site, but he didn't go into specifics. "I’ve made a custom AI model that uses the image and text to generate a colorization," Wallner replied. "One model creates the text and the other takes the image and the text to generate the colorization."

After you upload an image, the site's sleek interface provides an estimated caption (description) of what it thinks it sees in the picture. If you don't like any of the preset color filters, you can click the pencil icon to edit the caption yourself, which guides the colorization model using a text prompt.

You can read more in an article by Benj Edwards published in the Ars Technica web site at: https://tinyurl.com/42zc6x7m.

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

Cloud-based file storage services provide convenience and security. Having a second (or more) copy of a file stored elsewhere provides a lot of safety in case of hard drive crashes or accidental deletions. Such cloud-based file storage services include Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, iDrive, SugarSync, Box, SpiderOak, and probably a dozen or more others. However, all of these services have one thing in common: they store your files on other companies' servers. Many individuals and almost all corporations are reluctant to do that for security reasons.  Many individuals and almost all corporations and non-profits do not want to keep their secrets stored on someone else's servers.

Luckily, there is an easy answer: store your files on your own servers or on rented servers that are TOTALLY under your control, not accessible to anyone else.

Instead of trusting someone else to keep your files safe and secure, you can create a privately-owned equivalent of Dropbox and the other commercial file storage services. You can have any of these private file storage products installed in a computer in your own home, in your employer's data center, in a data center where you have a server installed, or you can rent space from a web hosting service, space that is encrypted by you and not visible to anyone else unless you give them the encryption key. Thanks to encryption, even the data you host on someone else's servers will be invisible to the system administrators of that service.

Anyone who does manage to access your data, which is doubtful, will only see something that looks like this: 

hknafd6MYT04#$njiem&*nnds!ikrnmf'po

However, when you log in with your encryption key, you will see everything in exactly the same manner as it was when you stored it on the cloud-based file storage server(s).

The data you keep on your own file storage service will be safer than the data you keep in your own desktop or laptop computer. Also, you may keep all your data secret to yourself or you may share bits and pieces of it with others, as you wish. You can also create your own multi-user service and assign separate (and private) file storage areas to other family members or to your company's employees. Each person may have his or her own private and secure space and yet be able to (optionally) share selected files, pictures, videos, music, and more with others, if desired.

Still another option is to have some or all of the items stored in your file storage service automatically copied to your other computers and also be available to iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. You can save documents, pictures, videos, music, and more on your desktop computer or take pictures with your smartphone and have them automatically copied to your private file storage server plus to your desktop computer, office computer, and other devices as you wish. 

In other words, the file storage service you create can operate just like Dropbox or Google drive with only one significant difference: YOU control everything; you are not dependent on the whims of the folks at Dropbox or at Google.

I created my own cloud-based file storage service this week and have now moved almost all the items I previously had stored in Dropbox, Google Drive, SpiderOak, iCloud, and elsewhere to my new file storage server in the cloud. All my files, pictures, videos, music, and more are now available in my own private cloud and are automatically being copied (or replicated) to my two desktop computers.

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/12963056.

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.

Stepping inside Romania’s Fabric Synagogue in real life would be a dangerous proposition: Closed since 1986, the ornate 1899 structure in the heart of the city of Timisoara is crumbling inside.

Online is a different story. There, visitors to the Fabric Synagogue can look up at the domed cupola, its stained glass still intact even as holes dot the ceiling, and approach the ark, its closed doors leaving the illusion that a Torah might be contained inside. They can climb to the balcony and look out over the Hebrew letters still affixed to walls, then turn their gaze to the massive graffiti tag that occupies one whole wall of the second floor. They can even check out the synagogue’s dust-laden organ before walking into the Timisoara sunshine and strolling to the municipal parks along the Bega River just a block away.

The virtual tour is one of eight launched recently to give Jews — and non-Jews — the chance to immerse themselves in a world that is no more: that of the non-Orthodox Jewish communities that developed under the Habsburg Empire in the western part of today’s Romania.

Launched by Romanian NGO Pantograf in collaboration with Jewish local communities and activists, the website Povestile Sinagogilor, or Stories of the Synagogues at https://bit.ly/3F4T7sA (published in Romanian... use Google Translate at https://translate.google.com to convert to your favorite language), invites visitors to a virtual tour of eight historic sites in Romania, including Timisoara’s main synagogue, which has been recently renovated.

The website includes interviews with current Jewish leaders of each community, as well as the English and Romanian transcriptions of oral testimonies collected throughout the decades. In them, Jews who were born in the area recount the prewar era of interethnic coexistence, the years of fascist persecution, and the mass emigration, mostly to Israel, during and after communism.

You can read more in an article by Marcel Gascón Barberá  published in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency web site at: https://bit.ly/3gsZ8Fd.

You can view the synagogues at: https://www.povestilesinagogilor.com/en/home.

Making Black America: Through the Grapevine is a four-part series from executive producer, host and writer Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which premiered on October 4th on PBS stations nationwide. Professor Gates, with directors Stacey L. Holman and Shayla Harris, chronicle the vast social networks and organizations created by and for Black people beyond the reach of the “White gaze.” 

The series recounts the establishment of the Prince Hall Masons in 1775 through the formation of all-Black towns and business districts, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, destinations for leisure and the social media phenomenon of Black Twitter. 

Professor Gates sits with noted scholars, politicians, cultural leaders and old friends to discuss this world behind the color line and what it looks like today. Making Black America takes viewers into an extraordinary world that showcased Black people’s ability to collectively prosper, defy white supremacy and define Blackness in ways that transformed America itself.

Struggle and resistance are hallmarks of the African American experience, but they are not the only story. Beyond the reach of the “White gaze,” Black people worked and played, laughed and loved, hoped and dreamed, started families, built schools and businesses, formed communities, and created vast social networks that, borrowing from the motto of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, lifted as they climbed. In this new four-hour documentary series, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. takes us “behind the Veil” of racial segregation in Jim Crow America to tell their story.

Making Black America: Through the Grapevine is currently playing on PBS stations in the U.S. Even though some episodes have already aired, PBS stations usually re-broadcast major series again and again. Check your local TV listings to see where past and future episodes are being broadcast near you. You can learn more at: https://www.pbs.org/show/making-black-america/ .

You can also watch a promotional video on YouTube at https://youtu.be/DVrm1vMCENM. Some past episodes, in their entirety, are available at https://www.pbs.org/show/making-black-america/.