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Home/ HIST 390-001 The Digital Past Fall 2013/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by Amanda French

Contents contributed and discussions participated by Amanda French

Amanda French

Microsoft Rolls Out Student Advantage, Giving Students Free Access To Its Office Suite ... - 1 views

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    I'm pretty sure GMU subscribes to Office 365, which means that you can get Microsoft Office products for free while you're enrolled here. Quite a deal. Or you could use OpenOffice, the open source alternative.
Amanda French

James Van Der Beek on Dawson's Creek and 1998 -- Vulture - 0 views

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    Just for fun, a story about James Van der Beek guy who was on "Dawson's Creek," which was *THE* hot show in 1998, and some of the differences between being famous then and being famous now. On the one hand, you're more exposed now (thanks, iPhone); on the other hand, there are more ways to make pieces of 'the real you' public: " At least on Twitter, I put out some bits of my sense of humor. Whereas in '98, when I was being mobbed by girls, they were just looking to go crazy about anything and could use the excuse, you know, to scream and go mad." Just FYI, I myself have never seen Dawson's Creek, but I remember when it was big, and I know someone who's rewatching all the episodes on Netflix now and live-tweeting them.
Amanda French

Sorting the Real Sandy Photos From the Fakes - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic - 0 views

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    Here's a great story related to the issue Milan raised of authenticity in photographs -- during any disaster, lots of fake photos circulate, such as these "from" Superstorm Sandy.
Amanda French

Google Books ruling is a huge victory for online innovation - 0 views

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    Big news today: a ten-year-old lawsuit about Google Book Search has been resolved in Google's favor -- basically, the law has ruled that it was okay for Google to scan in-copyright books because it had no plans to publish the whole version of those in-copyright books online in http://books.google.com. Compare this to what we've heard about celebrity photographs and Pinterest. Here's a quotation from the story: "When Google started work on its book search engine a decade ago, the company realized that getting the approval of copyright holders would be a logistical nightmare. Not only would major publishers likely demand high fees for permission to scan their books, but for many older works, it would be difficult to even figure out who the appropriate copyright holder was. So Google took a gamble, scanning library books without seeking copyright holders' permission and relying on copyright's fair use doctrine as a justification."
Amanda French

Are These People Building Their Own Internet? - 0 views

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    Fascinating article on grassroots alternatives to paying a company like Verizon for Internet access. If enough of these community-built networks come into being and link to each other, we'll have a brand-new Internet!
Amanda French

First Look at Aaron Swartz Documentary 'The Internet's Own Boy' - 0 views

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    A couple of people wanted to do research on Aaron Swartz, who was arrested under the Computer Fraud Act for unauthorized use of MIT's network to download "all of JSTOR," presumably for rerelease onto the open web. Here's an article about a forthcoming documentary on him.
Amanda French

Talk:DuckDuckGo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

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    Here's the discussion page about that misleading Wikipedia article about DuckDuckGo, if you're interested.
Amanda French

U.S. Postal Service to deliver Amazon packages on Sundays - latimes.com - 0 views

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    Interesting fact from this news article about the effect of the Internet on the postal service: "Spokeswoman Sue Brennan said that letter mail volume is declining "so extremely," yet package volume is "increasing in double-digit percentages.""
Amanda French

Scanning Center Fire - Please Help Rebuild | Internet Archive Blogs - 0 views

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    "Fire in the Scanning Center" is a great caption for a photo. Glad no one was hurt, and that the Internet Archive continues to operate.
Amanda French

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine - 0 views

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    Don't forget about the Internet Archive and especially the Wayback Machine in your research -- lots of good free stuff here, and you can look at what websites looked like years ago.
Amanda French

Internet Archive's S.F. office damaged in fire - SFGate - 0 views

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    Bummer -- the physical location of http://archive.org has been damaged in a fire. The cause was a spark from a scanner. Yikes.
Amanda French

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse: DMCA Safe Harbor - 0 views

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    Here's a description of the "Safe Harbor" provision of the 1998 DMCA, which allows sites like YouTube and Pinterest to operate without (too much) fear of copyright lawsuits.
Amanda French

Library databases vs Search engines - YouTube - 0 views

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    A nice little video from A New Zealand library explaining the difference between a search engine and a database. I noticed a bit of confusion about this on exam 2.
Amanda French

Here's what the Morris Worm prosecutor thinks about Aaron Swartz - 0 views

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    More on Robert Tappan Morris, plus a comparison to Aaron Swartz (whom a few of you know about). Swartz was charged in 2011 or 2012 (I forget which) under the same law Morris was, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and committed suicide in January.
Amanda French

How a grad student trying to build the first botnet brought the Internet to its knees - 0 views

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    Turns out yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the worm that Robert Tappan Morris released, so here's another Washington Post article on him. Again, great timing, Britney! Be sure to consult this for your final project.
Amanda French

File:PineScreenShot.png - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

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    Here's the CLI program I used to read email at the University of Virginia in 1992, when I first started using the Internet. Again, not the web. It didn't exist yet.
Amanda French

1994/1995 Flatland BBS Menu Screen | Flickr - Photo Sharing! - 0 views

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    Okay, here's a picture that roughly approximates how people used to interact with the Internet before there was a Web. All through text, all through a CLI (command-line interface). I started grad school in 1992 and this is pretty much what we had. This too is what that 1988 Washington Post article is thinking of when it talks about Internet.
Amanda French

Here's how The Post covered the 'grand social experiment' of the Internet in 1988 - 0 views

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    Oddly enough, today the Washington Post has chosen to reprint a 1988 article about the Internet; that article mentions Robert Tappan Morris, the first person prosecuted under the Computer Fraud Act, whom Brittney Douress told us about today. Nice timing, Brittney! :)
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    Note too that this article came out well before the World Wide Web was invented circa 1992 / 1993. There weren't any GUI web browsers yet; people just used text-only terminals (no pictures, no video) to access stuff. Mostly news groups -- I'll post a picture of what that looked like if I can find one.
Amanda French

Web Trend Map 4 - 0 views

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    This 2009 "subway map" of the Internet is based on Tokyo's subway system. This design company (like a few others, I think) does one of these every year. It's a articular genre of a thing called an "infographic" that you see everywhere.
Amanda French

Uuencoding - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

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    A friend of mine on Twitter said that he remembers when the MIME format for email attachments was competing with the UUencode format for email attachments -- kind of like VHS versus Betamax. Here's the Wikipedia article on the format that lost.
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