In 1980 a 23-year-old woman was shot multiple times by an unknown assailant in a small county in central Kansas.

44 years later, the county sheriff made a Facebook post. Over the years, dozens of law enforcement officers looked at the case to no avail. In mid-2022 I was approached by Detective Sgt. Adam Hales to reopen the case using new techniques and technology that were now available at the time of the murder. In all honesty, it was with some degree of skepticism that I authorized the expenditure of manpower and resources. Many of the witnesses as well as law enforcement officers that were originally involved in the case had died and interviews were not possible.

A statement from the Kansas attorney general's office says the police investigation culminated with an interview with Steven Hanks, a neighbor of the woman, who admitted to the killing. Hanks (who is now 70 years old) was arrested and charged with murder and second-degree, according to the county sheriff's Facebook post.

Hanks has been sentenced to up to 25 years in prison.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Dallas office is reaching into the toolbox of technology to solve crimes, with a particular emphasis on Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG). This modern method intertwines the science of genetics with the traditional sleuth work of genealogy, aiding agents to track down culprits who've long evaded capture. Embracing this innovation, the FBI Dallas has established a dedicated team whose focus is tirelessly utilizing IGG to unravel cold cases and bring closure to mysteries.

The FBI's appeal to the public is a crucial aspect of this process. By submitting genetic information to public databases, citizens have the power to indirectly assist in these investigations. This method relies heavily on the availability of such data, making community cooperation an indispensable component. The FBI Dallas has clearly stated, "we can't do it alone and need the public's assistance," an acknowledgment that the lineage of justice is not solely in the hands of the authorities but also in the strands of the public's DNA.

The effectiveness of IGG in crime solving has been underscored by its role in high-profile cases across the country, including the identification of the notorious Golden State Killer. In these instances, IGG has proven to be a beacon of hope, illuminating paths to mysteries that were once shrouded in shadows. It is not only a tool for law enforcement but a symbol of the interconnectedness between individuals and the larger narrative of our communal existence.

As advancements in IGG continue to evolve, ethical discussions about privacy, consent, and the boundaries of law enforcement's reach into personal data are sparking up. While there is broad acknowledgment regarding the potential of IGG to deliver long-overdue justice, these conversations are imperative to ensure that the eagerness to embrace such technologies doesn't infringe upon the rights and liberties we hold dear. It's a tightrope walk where balance must be meticulously maintained.

I first wrote about this story 2 weeks ago at: https://eogn.com/page-18080/13402660. However, a new article at https://tinyurl.com/d86x23uc provides additional information. 

Research shows 25% of web pages posted between 2013 and 2023 have vanished. A few organisations are racing to save the echoes of the web, but new risks threaten their very existence.

It's possible, thanks to surviving fragments of papyrus, mosaics and wax tablets, to learn what Pompeiians ate for breakfast 2,000 years ago. Understand enough Medieval Latin, and you can learn how many livestock were reared at farms in Northumberland in 11th Century England – thanks to the Domesday Book, the oldest document held in the UK National Archives. Through letters and novels, the social lives of the Victorian era – and who they loved and hated – come into view.

But historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That's because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally – and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world's information as it's produced these days.

However, an informal group of organisations are pushing back against the forces of digital entropy – many of them operated by volunteers with little institutional support. None is more synonymous with the fight to save the web than the Internet Archive, an American non-profit based in San Francisco, started in 1996 as a passion project by internet pioneer Brewster Kahl. The organisation has embarked what may be the most ambitious digital archiving project of all time, gathering 866 billion web pages, 44 million books, 10.6 million videos of films and television programmes and more. Housed in a handful of data centres scattered across the world, the collections of the Internet Archive and a few similar groups are the only things standing in the way of digital oblivion.

"The risks are manifold. Not just that technology may fail, but that certainly happens. But more important, that institutions fail, or companies go out of business. News organisations are gobbled up by other news organisations, or more and more frequently, they're shut down," says Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a tool that collects and stores snapshots of websites for posterity. There are numerous incentives to put content online, he says, but there's little pushing companies to maintain it over the long term.

Despite the Internet Archive's achievements thus far, the organisation and others like it face financial threats, technical challenges, cyberattacks and legal battles from businesses who dislike the idea of freely available copies of their intellectual property. And as recent court losses show, the project of saving the internet could be just as fleeting as the content it's trying to protect.

"More and more of our intellectual endeavours, more of our entertainment, more of our news, and more of our conversations exist only in a digital environment," Graham says. "That environment is inherently fragile."

Saving our history

A quarter of all web pages that existed at some point between 2013 and 2023 now… don't. That's according to a recent study by Pew Research Center, a think tank based in Washington, DC, which raised the alarm of our disappearing digital history. Researchers found the problem is more acute the older a web page is: 38% of web pages that Pew tried to access that existed in 2013 no longer function. But it's also an issue for more recent publications. Some 8% of web pages published at some point 2023 were gone by October that same year.

This isn't just a concern for history buffs and internet obsessives. According to the study, one in five government websites contains at least one broken link. Pew found more than half of Wikipedia articles have a broken link in their references section, meaning the evidence backing up the online encyclopaedia's information is slowly disintegrating.

You can read more in an article by Chris Stokel-Walker published in the BBC web site at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20240912-the-archivists-battling-to-save-the-internet.

University of Glasgow researchers have helped to develop a new method for understanding the relationships between different DNA sequences and where they come from.

This information has widespread applications, from understanding the development of viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, the strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19, to precision medicine, an approach to disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual genetic information.

The study, led by the Big Data Institute, is published in GENETICS and is the featured paper in the September 2024 edition.

Genetics is rapidly becoming part of our everyday lives. Nearly every week sees another newspaper headline about genetics and human ancestry, with huge datasets of DNA sequences routinely generated and used for medical study.

We can make sense of this genomic big data by working out the historical process that created it—in other words, where the DNA sequences came from. If we take a small section of someone's DNA we know it must have come from one of their two parents in the last generation, and previously from one of their four grandparents in the generation before that, and so on. This means we can represent the history of different sections of DNA by tracing them backwards through time.

If we do this for a large set of DNA sequences from different people, we can build up a set of genetic "family trees," a genealogy of DNA sequences. This grand network of inheritance is sometimes called an ancestral recombination graph (ARG). Previous work by the same research group has shown that such networks can be used not only to illuminate the history of our genome, but also to compress DNA data and speed up genetic analyses.

You can read more in an article at: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-09-approach-document-genetic-ancestry.html.

23andMe will pay $30 million and provide three years of security monitoring to settle a lawsuit accusing the genetics testing company of failing to protect the privacy of 6.9 million customers whose personal information was exposed in a data breach last year.

The accord also resolves accusations that 23andMe did not tell customers with Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry that the hacker appeared to have specifically targeted them, and posted their information for sale on the dark web.

A preliminary settlement of the proposed class action was filed late Thursday night in federal court in San Francisco, and requires a judge’s approval.

It includes cash payments for customers whose data was compromised, and lets customers enroll for three years in a program known as Privacy & Medical Shield + Genetic Monitoring.

In a Friday court filing, 23andMe called the settlement fair, adequate and reasonable.

Citing its “extremely uncertain financial condition,” 23andMe also asked the judge to halt arbitrations by tens of thousands of class members, until the settlement is approved or they decide not to participate.

In a statement, 23andMe said it believes the settlement is in its customers’ best interest. It also expects about $25 million of the cost to be covered by cyber insurance coverage.

The breach began around April 2023 and lasted about five months, affecting nearly half of the 14.1 million customers in 23andMe’s database at the time. It was disclosed by 23andMe in an October 2023 blog post.

According to the company, the hacker accessed 5.5 million DNA Relatives profiles, which let customers share information with each other, and accessed information for another 1.4 million customers who used a feature called Family Tree.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said the settlement addressed their clients’ main claims, and reflected significant risks of further litigation given 23andMe’s “dire” finances.

The South San Francisco-based company lost $69.4 million on revenue of $40.4 million in the quarter ending June 30.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Anne Wojcicki has been trying to take 23andMe private, three years after it went public at $10 per share. Its shares have traded below $1 since mid-December.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers may seek legal fees of up to 25% of the settlement amount.

The case is In re 23andMe Inc Customer Data Security Breach Litigation, US District Court, Northern District of California, No. 24-md-03098.

Comment by Dick Eastman: I am sorry I was unable to attend this presentation by Dr. John Nestor. It sounds interesting.

You see, I spent my military service as a Viet Nam Era Cryptologist. I never considered those four years as being exciting or even interesting. In fact, I always thought it was 4 year's of boredom. I suspect the “good ol' years”  of cryptography during World War II were much more interesting.

A note to Dr. John Nestor (if you ever read this article): If you ever give this talk again in the future, please let me know. I would like to attend, regardless of the amount of travel involved:

From an article in the recordherald web site: "Dr. John Nestor presented the program “Ada Nestor World War II Cryptologist” during the Aug. 19 meeting of the Fayette County Genealogical Society (of Uniontown, Pennsylvania). Ada Nestor was Dr. Nestor’s mother, and during World War II, she became a “Code Girl” deciphering enemy codes.

"Ada lived on a farm with her family in West Viginia in 1942 when she answered a generic advertisement for young women willing to work for the Army in Clarksburg, WV. She thought it was a chance to get off the farm. Little did she know that it would be serious top-secret classified work. After being tested, she made the cut to be a code girl and was shipped to Washington D.C. for training and work that had to be memorized, there were no books or notes allowed.

"The code girls themselves were considered top secret. They were never allowed to reveal what work they really did or talk about their work. They were never allowed to go out alone. They were always to be in a group. Dr. Nestor said that his mother took her service oath seriously and never spoke of her service even after her service days were over. It was only when he was an adult that an article came out in the Readers Digest about Code Girls that had reference to the Purple Code that he really found out about his mother’s service. She was really upset that the Purple Code was in the article. She felt that the Purple Code developed and used by the coders should forever remain classified. The Code Girls were a valuable and an important element in the defense in WWII, breaking down the communications of the enemy forces which was instrumental in leading to an ally victory.

"Dr. Nestor is a local consultant whose resume includes being the executive vice president of Riten Industries, implementing school safety plans, and developing college security systems. Dr. Nestor, who has authored books depicting the subjects of his work, has been recognized for outstanding work, and leadership.

"The next meeting of the society will be held on Monday, Sept. 16 in the downstairs meeting room of the Economic Development Building 101 E. East St., Washington Court House at 7 p.m. The program will be our “Annual Sharing Night.” Members and guests are invited to bring family heirlooms or keepsakes, family pictures, family history or community history stories, or any item or story of interest to share. This is always a fun and interesting meeting."

Vice President Kamala Harris wrote in her memoir that her mother always said to her, "Kamala, you may be the first to do many things. Make sure you're not the last."

Now, as Kamala Harris campaigns for president, her family is back in the spotlight. Here, her family tree—featuring the Harris, Gopalan, and Emhoff families, all the extended family of Vice President Harris:

Go to: https://tinyurl.com/3n6k9s9b

From an article by Zo Ahmed published in the TechSpot web site:

The music industry is grappling with a looming crisis regarding its archive of 90s recordings stored on aging hard drives. According to data storage experts at Iron Mountain, around 20 percent of drives from the era are now unreadable. The company is raising concerns that, due to deteriorating formats, insufficient metadata, and increasing disk failures, a significant portion of these historic recordings could be lost forever if urgent action is not taken. 

A report from music industry publication Mix, citing Robert Koszela, global director of studio growth at Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services, highlights the bubbling issue. Hard drives from the 1990s, even those stored according to best practices and appearing pristine on the outside, are increasingly failing.

Prior to the 2000s, master tapes were used to produce vinyl, cassettes, or CDs, with multitracks archived securely. However, the advent of new formats like 5.1 surround sound, Guitar Hero games, and online streaming led to a renewed need to access and remix older materials. This exposed the extent of degradation in some tapes, rendering them unplayable or even lost. Additionally, many formats from that era have become obsolete.

Compared to tapes, accessing files from old hard drives might seem straightforward, but Iron Mountain's analysis reveals that it's often far from easy. Even if drives power up, users face a range of technical challenges. These may include needing updated software, fixing plug-ins, or locating outdated proprietary cables or power adapters.

The issue has also been discussed on Hacker News with user "abracadaniel" highlighting additional concerns. "Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc." They concluded, "Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you'd expect."

Fortunately, Iron Mountain has invested in specialized equipment capable of reading various storage media as long as the disk platters remain undamaged. However, challenges persist, such as the lack of metadata to identify the content on poorly marked disks. Koszela notes that the only information on the outside of some cases might be an artist's acronym, making it difficult to determine whether the content is a video session, an interview, or something else.

Accessing archived drives often depends on commercial needs, like remixes or immersive releases. If a drive contains outdated transfers, additional budget may be required to re-transfer tapes at modern high resolutions.

University of Galway has launched a new archive recognising the different lived experiences of the Irish Traveller community, including challenges the community faced since the 1960s and the importance of the Traveller voice to educate and increase understanding of the history and culture of the community.

The Mincéirs Archives, which will be digitised and available to the public, was launched today by Irish Traveller human rights activist Dr Mary Warde Moriarty and University of Galway President Professor Ciarán Ó hÓgartaigh.

The collection focuses on Irish Travellers from the 1960s when Ireland transformed socially, economically and culturally and how this impacted on the nomadic indigenous community, as well as the dawn of the Traveller rights movement in Ireland and Europe.

The Mincéirs Archives is the first step to embedding Traveller history and culture throughout the teaching, learning and research activities at the University.

            Dr Mary Warde Moriarty said: “It is great to officially launch the Mincéirs Archives as I know it will act as an anchor that supports the promotion and embedding of Traveller history and culture throughout the teaching and learning activities of University of Galway. As a Traveller woman, I am proud to have materials that document some of my early activities advocating for Traveller rights included in the archives. I feel it’s very important that everyone learns about Traveller history and culture as it supports greater understanding between all communities. I hope that the archives will be also play a major role with supporting the promotion of Traveller history and culture in local primary and secondary schools.” 

            University of Galway President, Professor Ciarán Ó hÓgartaigh, said: “At University of Galway, we are a university for the public good, with a shared vision, shaped by our values with a proud history of promoting Traveller history and culture. As a learning institution, we learn from all our communities and are the better for it. The Mincéirs Archives goes to the heart of this work in promoting Traveller history and culture that align with our values, particularly the importance which we place on respect and openness. The contents of the archives and most importantly the Traveller voice has guided our efforts as we provide a culture that creates opportunities for all members of our university community to learn more about - and to learn from - Traveller history and culture.”

Material related to Traveller human rights, education, employment, accommodation, music, folklore and photographs of the community form part of the archive. It includes official documentation such as the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy [1963], the work of Sister Colette O’Dwyer in Traveller education and training from the late 1960s onwards, the National Association of Training Centres for Travelling People, the National Federation of Irish Travelling People, the European Centre for Travellers, as well as a range of material relating to community development and activism across the country. There is also a range of correspondence, photographs and other material from Travellers themselves, reflecting their lived experiences. The Archive is augmented with material from existing archival collections. These include photographs and music collected in Ireland in 1952 by the American couple Jean Ritchie and George Pickow, similar material from the Joe Burke collection relating to county Galway, England and the USA, as well as photographs taken in the 1890s by Patrick Lyons of a Traveller camp near Ballyhaunis, County Mayo.

The Mincéirs Archives project began in November 2021 as part of the celebrations which followed on from the 175th anniversary of the foundation of the University in 1845, as Queen’s College.

Led by Owen Ward, the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Programme Manager for Race Equality at the University, and Kieran Hoare, Archivist at University of Galway Library, the research and digitisation of the Mincéirs Archives was one of six projects sponsored by the Office of the President through a special fund to record and share the institutional history of the University.

As part of embedding Traveller history and culture throughout the teaching, learning and research activities at the University, the Office of the Vice-President for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion is leading a project to diversify curricula. The aim is to enhance and embed the perspectives from the global south, nomadism, indigenous and black studies, including resources from the Mincéirs Archives, into wider academia across the University.

            Monica Crump, University of Galway Librarian, said: "The University of Galway Library is delighted to host the Mincéirs Archives, and in particular to enable students and researchers to learn about Traveller history and culture through their own voice and lived experience, greatly enhancing our existing archival collections. Through new strategies of acquisition and outreach, we are committed to diversifying our collections as well as the ways in which people can access them. The Mincéirs Archive will bring a greater understanding of Traveller history and culture to homes and schools across the country.  We are confident that this digital resource will become embedded in teaching and learning activities across campus and are looking forward to a continued partnership with the community and to seeing this collection grow."

            Owen Ward, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Programme Manager for Race Equality at University of Galway, said: “This initiative marks a significant milestone in the history of University of Galway and solidifies its position as a leader for Irish Traveller inclusivity cross higher education and wider society. By making the Mincéirs Archives accessible to everyone, we are taking a big step toward honouring the history and strength of Irish Travellers and building a more just and equitable future. We look forward to working closely with the Irish Traveller community to continue to expand the archives while ensuring that the lived experiences of Irish Travellers are central to this important work.”

University of Galway welcomes public donations of resources related to Irish Travellers to the Mincéirs Archives, including photographs, videos, audio recordings, papers, notes, books, and posters. Material can be donated to the archives temporarily and once digitised can be returned to the owner.