Tuesday, December 10, 2013

35 Years Of Newscast Recordings To Be Digitized, Archived

A librarian who faithfully taped 35 years of TV news with the hope that one day it would prove to be valuable, searchable historical material did not live to see her dream realized.

But the vision of Philadelphia resident Marion Stokes, who died last year at 83, will become a reality now that her 140,000 video cassettes are being archived in an online library.

The trove, which totals about a million hours of newscasts, is expected to arrive Tuesday at the Internet Archive in Richmond, Calif., where it will be digitized and made available to the public, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported (http://bit.ly/1ksefVO).

"We were awestruck by two things," said Roger Macdonald, the virtual library's director of TV archives. "One, the size of the collection. And two, the human story behind it, that one person could create so extensive a collection."

The massive collection ... includes local news shows from Philadelphia between 1986 and 2012, and broadcasts from Boston, where she once lived, from 1977 to 1986. All the while, she also recorded national news and cable channels, leading to her to run several VCRs simultaneously 24 hours a day.

More from Huffington Post.

Monday, December 09, 2013

Has your e-mail password been compromised? Check this out.

From friend Arthur:

Were you caught up in all the recent databases that were compromised (Adobe, Stratfor, Gawker, Yahoo!, Pixel Federation and Sony)? There's a site where you can check your email address(es) to see, since the big companies aren't doing much to help their customers. http://haveibeenpwned.com

Have I been pwned? allows you to search across multiple data breaches to see if your email addresses has been compromised.