LISNews: Librarian News

This week's episode brings not just an editorial about the Smith-Mundt Act & domestic dissemination of the Voice of America, economic chatter, but a news miscellany too. As discussed in the program, you can get a France24 app for your phone here. The linkdumps feed off the Erie Looking Productions blog is available here.

Direct Download Link: Ogg Vorbis Audio

Related links:
Orin Kerr Named Scholar in Residence at Law Library of Congress
PC World: EU Wants Blocking Agreement for Child Porn Websites
BBC News: Depression: Exercise advice questioned when added to standard treatments
PC World: IPv6 Launch: Amazon, eBay, Twitter Sit on Sidelines
Matt Asay at The Register: Big Data is now TOO BIG - and we're drowning in toxic information
ABC News: Senator Asks DOJ to Investigate SWAT-ting Attacks on Conservative Bloggers
Marchant Stands for Free Speech and with Conservative Bloggers Under Attack
The Register: Vint Cerf--'COMMUNISTS want to seize the INTERNET'
CBC News: Google flags censored search words to Chinese users

LISTen: An LISNews.org Program -- Episode #201 by The Air Staff of Erie Looking Productions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

Occupy Wall Street filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against New York City, claiming authorities destroyed $47,000 worth of books, computers and other equipment confiscated from the protesters' encampment in lower Manhattan last fall.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

The Philadelphia Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, the nation's oldest book collection serving the visually impaired and one of only two in the commonwealth, is slated to be dramatically diminished this week, as services and the collection are slashed.

The plan calls for moving most reading materials to the smaller, less-used Pittsburgh branch; foolishly dumping half a million recorded cassettes; and halving the caring, veteran staff that helps disabled patrons in 29 counties. [ed: I heard about this plan while at PLA in Philadelphia in March; word has it that its the plan of Governor Tom Corbett, a native of Pittsburgh].

The merger makes absolutely no sense and will not save the commonwealth a cent, while providing slower, less efficient service to an already underserved population. Indeed, critics believe the merger will cost more money in unanticipated operating costs.

Inside Washington's high risk mission to beat web censors
For more than a year, the intelligence services of various authoritarian regimes have shown an intense desire to know more about what goes on in an office building on L Street in Washington DC, six blocks away from the White House.

The office is the HQ of a US government-funded technology project aimed at undermining internet censorship in countries such as Iran and Syria. And so every week – sometimes every day – email inquiries arrive there that purport to be from pro-democracy activists in those places, but which, the recipients are confident, actually come from spies.