If you are interested in getting your feet wet supporting Wikipedia’s mission to maintain a current and accessible encyclopedia, consider making some some quick edits using this feature: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Growth/Tools/Suggested_edits
This guide has a helpful explanation of how to turn on the suggested edits widget if you do not already have it activated on your user homepage: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Growth/Tools/Enable_the_Homepage
I am pleased to announce the launch of The Parisian Parliamentarians Projet as a collection on the Internet Archive!
An interesting article about the prevalence of cybercrime and the costs of defending against it: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-cybersecurity-cybercrime-hack-canada/. It is interesting that the move to remote work has created business opportunities for hackers, security consultants, and the cloud providers that host virtual private network access. Corporations and governments are almost guaranteed to lose money to crime, to security measures, or both. Should the costs of managing cyber risks be passed on to consumers/taxpayers? Or are they more like maritime shipping hazards that should be handled primarily by insurers? If so, digital services could only be delivered economically by the largest multinationals, much as in the maritime shipping industry.
To complicate the picture further, there are high environmental costs to maintaining all the processing power that supoorts AI-driven hacking and real-time security monitoring. But so are the costs of pushing the office workforce to commute more regularly. Should customers be asked to pay for carbon offsets for security measures, or should taxpayers and drivers be asked to pay for road maintenance, tolled roads, energy efficient vehicles, and so forth?
I just ran across this user group that might be of interest to those of you who are dealing with the technical challenges of using open-source/freeware research tools: Ottawa PC Users’ Group. As per the group’s History page, this group was founded in the pre-World Wide Web era of restricted Internet access were peer-support was an important factor in gaining access to software, training, and connectivity. I would encourage researchers to think about user groups that might be pertinent to their work; downloading software is easy today but training is extremely expensive and operating systems often introduce glitches that are not present in controlled lab environments.
This site is a blast from the past of the educational internet: Hellenic History. All the page copyrights seem to be pre-2000, but the graphic design is pretty retro. I have been finding the subtopics on the Archaic age particularly useful. I ran into a similar resource when I was writing my MA thesis: it explained the basic engineering problems faced by Roman aqueduct builders very handily, but didn’t serve as a rigorous source because it didn’t have any citations. I have the sense that twenty or twenty-five years ago people were excited to host encyclopedia entries on their personal websites, and that some of these people just kept paying the ISP fees. These articles are somehow easier to digest then Wikipedia entires and also evoke a lot of nostalgia!
Lucas Jerusalimiec 