On Thursday JRR Tolkien’s early story The Story of Kullervo will be published for the first time. The dark tale reveals that Tolkien’s Middle Earth was inspired not only by England and Wales… but also by Finland.
From Kullervo: Tolkien’s fascination with Finland – BBC News
This means the iOS platform will now support developers who want to build sophisticated apps that give users ways to block stuff they don’t like, such as adtech tracking and various forms of advertising — or all advertising — and to do it privately.
This allows much more control over unwanted content than is provided currently by ad and tracking blockers on Web browsers, and supports this control at the system level, rather than at the browser level. (Though it is executed by the browser.)
From Doc Searls Weblog · Apple’s content blocking is chemo for the cancer of adtech
The final novel by author Sir Terry Pratchett has been released, almost six months after his death.
The Shepherd’s Crown, the 41st novel in his Discworld series, went on sale in the UK and Commonwealth at midnight BST (23:00 GMT Wednesday).
In the UK, fans gathered for midnight openings at stores in London, Oxford and Newcastle. More shops will open earlier than usual on Thursday.
From Final Terry Pratchett novel The Shepherd’s Crown on sale – BBC News
Like all Smithsonian museums, all online content is subject to institution-wide ‘Terms of use‘. This governs the ‘permitted uses’ of anything on our websites, irrespective of underlying rights. These terms are not created at an individual museum level but are part of Smithsonian-wide policy. You can see that whilst these terms allow only ‘allows personal, educational, and other non-commercial uses’ they encourage the use of Fair Use under US Copyright law.
From Slowly improving Copyright clarity | Cooper Hewitt Labs
“More than a century ago, the University of Missouri’s first professionally trained librarian, James Thayer Gerould, campaigned for a building to house the library’s books. The collection was relatively small; all of the books, except the few on loan, had been destroyed in the Academic Hall fire of 1892…Today, the structure houses nearly 2 million print volumes.”
“It’s hard for me to think of another profession that has been more fundamentally changed than librarianship,” says Director of MU Libraries Jim Cogswell. “Librarians have always said they are trying to do the impossible, which is to try to take all of the world’s recorded knowledge and information and make it available to anybody at any time. That’s crazy. How could anybody ever do that? But with every iteration of technology, we get closer.”
Read more of Ellis Library’shistory at MIZZOU Magazine
When you think of the most astute minds of our time, you might well think of Ray Bradbury’s — but you probably don’t think of him as one of the most astute terrorist minds of our time. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, saw things differently. Collaborative news site MuckRock found that out through files “released to former MuckRocker Inkoo Kang [which] document the decade the Bureau spent trying to determine if Bradbury was, if not a card-carrying Communist, at least a sympathetic ‘fellow traveler.’” See snippets of documents here from 1959.
From Who Was Afraid of Ray Bradbury & Science Fiction? The FBI, It Turns Out (1959) | Open Culture
(Updated to add: but don’t go to the library and use the library book to claim your Shelfie, because that’s weird, and would also require you to write your name in a library book, but mostly it’s weird.)
From Joe Hill’s Thrills
All over America, people have put small “give one, take one” book exchanges in front of their homes. Then they were told to tear them down.
From The Crackdown on Little Free Library Book Exchanges – The Atlantic
Likewise, those who blithely state “privacy is dead” as if they have no skin in the game, as if merely shrugging and accepting that we no longer have any rights as individuals, may be the most disheartening of all. Are we ready to agree that we, as citizens, have no recourse, that it’s perfectly natural that criminals and the corporate entities that fail to protect us from them would mishandle our assets and expose us all to fraud and identity theft and public attacks? Do we want our public servants targeting citizens by using information gained through criminal means?
From The Ashley Madison Hack Should Scare You, Too — The Cut
There have been a lot of rumors about the decline in traffic Google is sending Wikipedia’s way. There have been reports from SimilarWeb that Wikipedia has shown a “sudden” and “massive” decline in traffic from Google’s organic search results.
But Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, said this week that this is not a sudden or drastic drop in traffic from Google, but rather a “long-term issue with decreasing traffic from Google.”
From Jimmy Wales Says Wikipedia Is Losing Traffic From Google
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