Inspired by Tom Whitwell's 52 things I learned in 2022 , I started my own list of things I learned in 2023 and repeated it last year . Reaching the end of another year, it is time for Things I Learned In 2025. Part way through the year I had the brilliant …
Thursday Threads this week delves into the rise of surveillance tech used by law enforcement, covering topics like Fog Reveal's phone tracking without warrants, suits against Whitepages for exposing officer info, and NYPD's deals with surveillance firms. It also discusses ICE's informal access to local license plate data and the growth of Real-Time Crime Centers. These issues underscore…
U.S. surveillance is escalating: Trump’s order to scrap inter-agency data silos and Musk’s DOGE unite federal databases; Oracle’s Ellison envisions AI cameras and drones; the Pentagon’s Locomotive tracks phones via app data; and brokers sell personal records to law enforcement. As LexisNexis lobbied for hands-off regulation and Apple battled over data access, pressing issues of oversight, due…
This Thursday Threads issue explores the growth of surveillance camera networks like license plate readers, highlighting privacy concerns despite their law enforcement benefits. It discusses investigations, security flaws, private networks, AI integration, and artistic controversies.
A running list of the protest signs I'm using to protest. Many of them include links to PDFs that you can download to make using your home printer.
Amazon's cloud mandate for Echo recordings sparks privacy worries. Workplace surveillance tech and the FTC’s findings on social media data collection highlight ongoing security challenges, alongside Fiverr's controversial data access listings.
At the Easton #TeslaTakedown, 600 protesters or more covered all four corners for the first time. The pleasant weather brought more families and supportive drivers. High energy. My sign read, 'The SIGNAL is coming from INSIDE the house!' and is available for download.
In Thursday Threads this week: key legal cases and corporate actions on using copyrighted materials in AI training, emphasizing growing tensions between creators and tech companies as AI increasingly utilizes large licensed and some pirated datasets.
At the Columbus, Ohio, #TeslaTakedown, attendance rose to 450-500, featuring music and supportive honks. My improved sign read, 'Our GOVERNMENT was fine. Now it is MUSKed UP! FIRE ELON! Read the post for instructions on how to print your own.
The case of OCLC against Anna's Archive, accused of “data scraping” from OCLC's WorldCat, takes a turn as the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio decides to certify several “novel and unsettled” legal questions to the Supreme Court of Ohio.
This thread of articles reviews social media's role in spreading misinformation and impacting teen mental health, highlighting personal strategies for prevention and a review of how “Community Notes” do and don't help.
The second #TeslaTakedown at the Easton Tesla store saw around 400 attendees, despite gloomy weather reducing family participation. The presence of more police, especially a “Dialogue Team,” was noted, along with increased driver support through honks and thumbs up. The author's protest sign, though still verbose, was better received than last week. A personal dilemma arose over using…
This Thursday Threads explores global security issues, encryption reforms, and tech giants’ countermeasures against quantum threats and AI, reinforcing the crucial role of end-to-end encryption in safeguarding privacy and communication.
For #TeslaTakedown, I crafted a sign on economic disparity. Using a “cosmic distance ladder,” I aimed to show that while 1,000 passersby might collectively hold $100M, Musk's net worth of $350B highlights our shared realities versus billionaire influence.
Recent research in generative AI highlights impressive capabilities and concerns. Models show harmful behaviors like 'emergent misalignment' and can 'scheme' autonomously. In Minecraft, AI agents mimic human-like social dynamics. However, models struggle with historical accuracy, revealing biases and knowledge gaps. Despite rapid advances, the unclear mechanisms of AI underscore the need for…
This week's Thursday Threads is on generative AI in libraries, with projects by OCLC, JSTOR, EBSCO, Clarivate, and ProQuest. OCLC's AI model is removing duplicate WorldCat records. JSTOR and EBSCO explored AI tools for article summaries and research questions. Clarivate's survey highlighted AI as a library priority but noted concerns about skills and budgets. Ed Summers critiqued AI's biases,…
I've been in or near higher education for my entire career, so it is probably no surprise that educational technology ranks high on DLTJ topics. Although a lot of my experience is with library technology, that isn't the only part of the ed-tech landscape that I'm interested in. Take, for …
Batteries are among the technologies that have had a silent, dramatic change over my lifetime. Last week, as I was setting up a blood pressure cuff for my mother, I opened the compartment in the back and realized I needed 4 AA-sized batteries. It was once common for devices to …
With millions of digital transactions taking place every day, have you ever wondered about the complex world behind your simple card swipe? In this week's Thursday Threads , we delve into the multi-layer maze that is the credit card industry. Grappling with $130 billion in fees, merchants are the invisible heroes …
In this week's Thursday Threads , I'll point to articles on the contentious subject of facial recognition technology. This tech, currently used by law enforcement and various businesses around the world, raises critical ethical and privacy questions. Beyond the instances where facial recognition use has resulted in wrongful apprehensions by law …
This week's Thursday Threads looks at digital storage from the past and the future. There are articles about the mechanics of massive data storage systems in tech giants like Google and Amazon, the still existing use of floppy disks in certain industries, and the herculean efforts of digital archivists to …
This week, I'm going to tug on time. This follows the last item in last week's issue of Thursday Threads : The Clock that Made Power Grids Possible . Two years ago, I also published an issue about time , pointing to articles about eliminating the leap second , time standards on the moon …
I'm about halfway through Saul Griffith's 2021 Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future , and I find the author makes a compelling point about bringing nearly everything—energy creation, transmission, and use—to a common factor of "electricity" and then optimizing that system. There are many interesting problems …
One of the very first issues of Thursday Threads was on data centers (2011). That issue had articles on a major Amazon Web Services outage, remote data centers powered by renewable energy, and videos about Google's and Meta's data centers. Unfortunately, I've found that the videos are lost to time …
Inspired by Tom Whitwell's 52 things I learned in 2022 , I started my own list of things I learned in 2023 . Reaching the end of another year, it is time for Things I Learned In 2024: Some jurisdictions use "day fines"—or fining an offender based on that person's daily …
Four years ago I posted my reflections here on the 2020 presidential election . This year, I worked the election again as a precinct election official ("PEO"—a poll worker) for Franklin County, Ohio. Much like four years ago, it was a record-setting voter turn-out year, and unlike four years ago …
This was going to be only a post about how I got the Ghost newsletter software to use Amazon Simple Email Service (AWS SES) instead of the built-in Mailgun support , but it turned into that plus why I can't use Ghost for the DLTJ Newsletter. Ghost's bulk email delivery problem …
One thing that would dramatically clarify the controlled digital lending concept in general and the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit in particular is having distinct terms for types of ebooks. I propose that we refer to them as digital and digitized . A digital book is one that is born digital …
In my prior two posts, I outlined a strategy to minimize personally identifiable information in library automation systems ( idea overview , impact on FOLIO ). This approach uses a unique single-service identifier (the "pairwise-id") recognized exclusively by the identity provider (IdP) and the library's service provider (SP), effectively preventing any cross-system correlation …
In the previous blog post , I outlined the concept of a library system with no personally identifiable information as a way to safeguard a patron's right to privacy. Library systems commonly retain traces of a patron's library activity, and the librarian ethos protects a patron's privacy as they conduct their …
Library systems hold significant information about patrons, including their search and reading histories. For librarians, ensuring the privacy and confidentiality of this data is an essential component of professional ethics. In the United States, for example, the third point in the American Library Association Code of Ethics is "We protect …
The British Library suffered a major cyber attack in October 2023 that encrypted and destroyed servers, exfiltrated 600GB of data, and has had an ongoing disruption of library services after four months. Yesterday, the Library published an 18-page report on the lessons they are learning. (There are also some community …
Inspired by Tom Whitwell's 52 things I learned in 2022 , I started my own list of things I learned in 2023. I got well into 2024 before I realized I hadn't published it! So, in no particular order: In the summer of 2011, a lab technician at Los Alamos National …
While on vacation, I was catching up on some personal knowledge management maintenance I had been putting off. At one task—adding a page for a new employee at the company I work for—I noticed that the page for my company was gone. Odd, that page has been in …
WOLFcon—the World Open Library Foundation Conference—was held last month, and all of the meetings were recorded using Zoom. Almost all of the sessions were presentations and knowledge-sharing, so giving the recordings a wider audience on YouTube make sense. With nearly 50 sessions, though, manually processing the recordings would …
In May 2023 I was asked to join the opening session at Georgia's GIL User Group Meeting . Along with Chris Sharp and Emily Gore, we reflected on the conference theme: The Future is Open. GALILEO has an exciting time ahed of it...their libraries are adopting FOLIO and a new …
The Congressional Research Service has posted four reports about verifying users' ages for various services online in the past few months. This is a tricky area because there are open questions around compliance and potential free speech impacts. Figuring out how to protect minors while not infringing on lawful communication …
One of the hidden gems of the Library of Congress is the Congressional Research Service (CRS). With a staff of about 600 researchers, analysts, and writers, the CRS provides "policy and legal analysis to committees and Members of both the House and Senate, regardless of party affiliation." It is kind …
According to reputable sources, this blog contains 0.00006% of the world's knowledge. The large language models (LLMs) that underlie tools like ChatGPT and Bing-AI are being used as question-answering tools. If you listen to the hype surrounding what LLMs can do, you can hardly be faulted for thinking that …
It's coming up on four months this week since I left Twitter, and I started wondering about the impact of that. On the whole, I'm still quite fine with the decision. (If you need an itemized list of how Twitter is falling short of its history and its idealized self …
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is just over a year old, and shortly after the war started there were calls to cut Russia off from the internet as a punitive action. (See Can the Internet Sanction a Country? Should It? , Thursday Threads issue 89.) A year later now, that discussion has …
On March 16, 2023, I gave a presentation with this title to the code4lib conference in Princeton, New Jersey. The suggested links from the end of the presentation are listed below followed by a rough transcript of the talk. As I noted in the talk, the judge in the Hachette …
Cecil Mae Feather, 1929–2023 This issue is offered in honor of Cecil Mae Thornburg Feather , my mother-in-law. Cecil Mae was a wonderful person. I only knew her a short time as I married into the Feather family, and that time was filled with love and joy. She enjoyed playing …
If you have been following social media news, you know that Twitter is having its issues. Although there is still a bit to go before it goes away (or, more likely, puts up a paywall to view tweets), it seems prudent to save Twitter content so it can be viewed …
Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. The Confessions of St. Augustine . New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1931, page 267 . Translation of the Latin original from circa 397 CE. This week we look at time from a few points of view: Eliminating the leap second If adding a second causes problems, imagine removing …
The hot technology in the news now is chatbots driven by artificial intelligence. (This specific field of artificial intelligence is "large language models" or LLM). There were two LLM threads in DLTJ Thursday Threads issue 95 and a whole issue six weeks ago ( issue 93 ). I want to promise that …
The day after I posted LibNFT: a Project in Search of a Purpose , the project proponents held their CNI project briefing . The recording of that briefing is now online, and I've made some annotations on the recording transcript . I came away with a more nuanced understanding of the proposed project …
Metadata is at the core of what libraries do. (" metadata " is one of the most common tags on this here library technology blog.) We gather information about the resources available to patrons, then massage it and slice it and sort it and display it in ways that help patrons find …
This week we revisit threads from a month ago, a year ago, and 12 years ago. ChatGPT references a non-existent book AI generating news articles Cryptocurrency miners in Texas forced to shut down due to electricity shortage Lament for a future that could have been: A Web presence for every …
E-books are a prominent theme looking back at a couple of year-end issues of DLTJ Thursday Threads . In 2010 , a writer in Boston Review wondered about "books after Amazon." In 2011 , an author for O'Reilly Media's Radar blog wrote that "readers sure to like ebooks" and "DRM is full of …