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The Video Game History Foundation will open a digital version of its research library
The Video Game History Foundation has unveiled a digital library that offers remote access to the archive’s collection of gaming magazines, art books and various historical materials. This has been in the works for two years.
The Internet Archive is building a library of amateur radio broadcasts
It's also looking for print materials to digitize, as well as early-internet communications.
Instagram extends the maximum length of Live streams to four hours
You'll soon be able to archive your streams for up to 30 days too.
Twitter suspends 1,600 accounts linked to state disinformation networks
It blocked accounts allegedly run by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Thailand.
Twitter removes 170,000 state-backed accounts based in China
In its latest sweep, Twitter has removed 32,242 state-linked accounts with ties to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Russia and Turkey.
Library of Congress app lets you make hip hop with century-old samples
The US Library of Congress has unveiled Citizen DJ, a digital tool that allows you to remix sounds from its massive collection of film, television, video and sound recordings. It was created by “innovator in residence” Brian Foo to recapture the ‘80s and ‘90s golden age of hip-hop sampling.
GitHub will store all of its public open source code in an Arctic vault
Let's face it, there are a lot of things that could bring about the end of the world as we know it -- heightened political tensions, climate change, even an asteroid. In the event that things go FUBAR, what will happen to the masses upon masses of data and digital stuff that humanity relies upon every day? If open source coding platform GitHub has anything to do with it, it'll all be stored safely at the very ends of the Earth.
Wikipedia fixes 9 million broken links thanks to the Internet Archive
Wikipedia has millions of articles across numerous languages, and that makes it a pain to ensure the links to third-party sites are up to date, if they can work at all. What are you supposed to do if an important reference stops working? You can relax, it seems -- the Internet Archive has 'rescued' 9 million previously broken Wikipedia links by caching them in the Wayback Machine and other archive services. The team accomplished the feat by using a bot to search for broken links in articles and automatically restore those links with archived versions.
Facebook promises to delete unpublished videos
Now that Facebook has been outed as keeping videos you've recorded but never published, the social media has promised to actually delete them. Last week, the sister of a New York Magazine writer found old videos that should have been cleaned off the site buried in her downloaded Facebook data archive. Facebook today apologized for this issue and told Select/All that it would delete the video content it should have in the first place.
Internet Archive is saving all your favorite handheld LCD games
The Internet Archive has been saving gaming history for a while now. It's archived Amiga games (and apps), Macintosh stuff from the '80s (including Space Invaders) and a ton of other retro games you can play for free. Now the group has started collecting handheld games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Space Jam while also making them available to play in your web browser via MAME emulation.
Nintendo's Miiverse lives on in a giant internet archive
Nintendo's Miiverse is dead. However, that doesn't mean that all your message board posts have disappeared into the ether. Drastic Actions and the Archive Team have launched Archiverse, an unofficial but very thorough collection of Miiverse posts. There are roughly 133 million posts, 217 million replies, 76 million screenshots and 72 million drawings -- all told, just shy of 17TB of data. It even includes developer-specific communities and the E3 communities that Nintendo delisted.
Instagram is testing a lot of new features, including a repost button
The Next Web reports today that Instagram is testing a slew of new features, many of which could be quite welcome among users. Maybe the most exciting feature is a native Regram button, which would let users repost others' photos and videos without having to turn to a third-party app. Another potentially popular addition is the ability to archive your Stories and it appears you'll be able to set Instagram to do that automatically. And it looks like iOS users might soon be able to share Instagram posts and profiles to WhatsApp with just a click of a button.
HP lost key historical archives in California's wildfires
There's no question that California's recent wildfires are ultimately a human tragedy, destroying homes and upturning lives. Please donate if you can. However, they've also represented a loss for technology history. The Press Democrat has learned that fire in Santa Rosa's Fountaingrove region destroyed key archives of HP's namesake founders, William Hewlett and David Packard, earlier in October. The blaze destroyed correspondence, writing and other artifacts held at the headquarters of Keysight Technologies, a company with HP origins that took ownership of the archives in 2014. While a large chunk of HP's archives are stored elsewhere (such as with HP spinoff Agilent), this wiped out a significant amount of irreplaceable personal material.
BBC is putting hundreds of classic TV programmes on iPlayer
Over the years, the BBC has amassed an impressive trove of classic TV and radio programming. Accessing it all can be tricky, however, because iPlayer has always been positioned as more of a catchup service. Some series are available permanently, but most, especially older shows, are not. You normally have to buy them digitally, on DVD or Blu-ray, or hope they're accessible somewhere on the BBC website. Not anymore. The BBC is launching a section on iPlayer called 'From the Archive,' which, as the name implies, will be a home for BBC classics. Roughly 450 programmes are available at launch, with more being added "in the coming years."
British Library exhibit to highlight the sounds it’s fighting to save
Last year, the British Library began the "Save our Sounds" project, with the aim of accelerating the digitisation of millions upon millions of lost audio recordings held in its vast archive. The collection includes many rare and previously unreleased recordings of everything from speeches and music to wildlife, street sounds and pirate radio broadcasts. In some respects, it's a race against the clock. Time is taking its toll on ancient formats like the wax cylinder, for example, and the equipment needed to play some formats is extremely hard to come by. There's much to be done, but next month the British Library is celebrating achievements thus far with a free exhibition that "will explore how sound has shaped and influenced our lives since the phonograph was invented in 1877."
Neil Young prepares a giant online archive for his music
Neil Young has come a long, long way since he dismissed streaming music services. The singer-songwriter has unveiled plans for a huge online archive of his work that, naturally, will tie into his streaming music service (Xstream Music). The focus is on a timeline that highlights his music from 1963 onward, complete with playback and a "Filing Cabinet" that offers video, memorabilia and other content attached to each song. Think of it as an album box set with very, very extensive liner notes.
Seminal sci-fi magazine 'Galaxy' is now free online
The next time you watch a big blockbuster sci-fi film like Alien: Covenant, you can thank the original pulp magazines. The written form of the popular genre got its start in comic book-sized magazines like Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. These publications, under the direction of influential editors like John W. Campbell, Jr., helped improve the genre from basic adventure stories to more thoughtful, well-written speculative fiction by authors like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. It's not an overstatement to say that these magazines created the current science fiction craze. Now, Galaxy Science Fiction, a magazine that published Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" and Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man," is available for free online.
Library of Congress archives select webcomics for posterity
Webcomics have been around for a long while, and that's raising a question: who's going to preserve those comics for online viewing outside of non-profits like the Internet Archive? The Library of Congress, that's who. It just launched a Webcomics Web Archive that curates stand-out strips. Many of them are award-winning or otherwise stand-out comics that you may have read -- the nerdiness of XKCD and the historical spoofs of Hark! A Vagrant are among the initial batch.
Instagram rolls out its Archive feature to all users
Last month, we reported that Instagram was trying out a new feature that allows you to hide old photos. Now, that feature, called Archive, has been rolled out to all Instagram users.
Google Photos archiving rolls out with AI-powered suggestions
The new Archive feature recently spotted in Google Photos is now rolling out to all users, but it has an extra trick. While the Archive button lets you push more mundane photos (scans of receipts, screenshots of a random tweet, or maybe particularly personal photograph) out of the main Photos display without deleting it, there's also a new suggestion in the Assistant tab that will use its machine learning skills to find likely candidates for you. Of course, you can manually archive photos any time you like (they'll still show up in search or inside albums), but if you already have a significant Photos catalog this should make things easier. Whether you're using Android, iOS or the website, the new option should be there.
