April 6, 2021

Analysis: 2,000 digital-only games will disappear when PlayStation closes its stores (Video Games Chronicle)

Video Games Chronicle: Analysis: 2,000 digital-only games will disappear when PlayStation closes its stores. “Although users will still be able to redownload their previous purchases for the foreseeable future, from July 2 it will no longer be possible to buy games on the PS3 or PSP online marketplaces, and come August 27 the same will apply to the Vita too. Of the games set to disappear from the formats, the vast majority are available on other platforms such as older PlayStation consoles or PC. However, around 138 games will essentially become lost forever once the stores close, our analysis suggests.”

Research & Opinion 0
April 5, 2021

The Verge: Yahoo Answers will be shut down forever on May 4th

The Verge: Yahoo Answers will be shut down forever on May 4th. “Yahoo Answers, one of the longest-running and most storied web Q&A platforms in the history of the internet, is shutting down on May 4th. That’s the day the Yahoo Answers website will start redirecting to the Yahoo homepage, and all of the platform’s archives will apparently cease to exist. The platform has been operating since 2005.”

Tweaks & Updates 0
March 26, 2021

Yale University Library: First endowment for digital preservation spotlights a rising need—and Yale Library expertise

Yale University Library: First endowment for digital preservation spotlights a rising need—and Yale Library expertise. “Library leaders hope the new fund will also draw attention to digital preservation as an area of ongoing need and rising importance. Increasingly, Yale Library collections extend far beyond print books, physical manuscripts and other tangible objects to ‘born-digital’ content created and existing only in digital form. Yet, even as digital content proliferates, its existence is threatened by obsolescent technologies, expensive data storage, and degradation of hardware and software.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
March 19, 2021

Washington Post: Biden administration revives EPA Web page on climate change deleted by Trump

Washington Post: Biden administration revives EPA Web page on climate change deleted by Trump. “The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday relaunched a webpage dedicated to climate change that had gone dark under President Donald Trump, who frequently dismissed the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet. The restoration of the climate website comes four years after the Trump administration took down much of the EPA’s digital presence that explained global warming and why it is worth fighting.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
March 9, 2021

The Verge: How Scientists Scrambled To Stop Donald Trump’s EPA From Wiping Out Climate Data

The Verge: How Scientists Scrambled To Stop Donald Trump’s EPA From Wiping Out Climate Data. “After hearing the news that then President-elect Donald Trump had appointed a notorious climate change denier to lead the Environmental Protection Agency transition team in 2016, Nicholas Shapiro, an environmental anthropologist, penned an urgent email to a dozen or so fellow scientists. He was worried that the EPA was about to be torn apart from the inside under Trump’s leadership. Others on the email thread were concerned that vital environmental data would be taken down from federal websites and destroyed….So Shapiro took a cue from his sister, an organizer for the Women’s March, and tried to bring researchers together to mount an offensive.”

Research & Opinion 0
February 18, 2021

ABC News (Australia): Sex abuse survivors lose archive as Facebook removes news from ‘life saving’ site

ABC News (Australia): Sex abuse survivors lose archive as Facebook removes news from ‘life saving’ site. “A survivor of clergy abuse who started a Facebook group to help other survivors says he is ‘devastated’ by the social media giant’s decision to block Australian news….[Richie Scutt] estimated more than 2,000 news articles had been shared to the Facebook group since 2016, and said he was devastated to find they had all disappeared when he logged onto Facebook this morning.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
January 31, 2021

Mother Jones: A Major Trump Forum Scrubs Its Archives of Thousands of Pre-Riot Posts

Mother Jones: A Major Trump Forum Scrubs Its Archives of Thousands of Pre-Riot Posts. “In the days ahead of the January 6 Capitol riot, there were warnings, but no guarantee that the day would turn violent. But users of TheDonald.win, a major online pro-Trump forum, were preparing for a fight, posting maps of the Capitol and swapping messages about being ready to die. In the wake of the carnage, law enforcement identified TheDonald.win as a key planning platform for the insurrectionists. And on Inauguration Day, the forum established a new domain, rebranding as Patriots.win. Alongside that transition, thousands of posts from lead up to the riot have disappeared from the site as though they were never there.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
January 29, 2021

The Verge: Google salvaged Robinhood’s one-star rating by deleting nearly 100,000 negative reviews

The Verge: Google salvaged Robinhood’s one-star rating by deleting nearly 100,000 negative reviews. “Google is actively removing negative reviews of the Robinhood app from the Google Play Store, the company confirmed to The Verge. After some disgruntled Robinhood users organized campaigns to give the app a one-star review on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store — and succeeded in review-bombing it all the way down to a one-star rating — the company has now deleted enough reviews to bring it back up to nearly four stars.” This is nothing new. Yelp deleted many negative reviews of a dentist who killed a famous lion in 2015. Meanwhile if someone made a demonstrably false statement in a review of a local business during the same timeframe, Yelp couldn’t be bothered to remove it. Do not ask me how I know this.

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
January 22, 2021

ZDNet: Why all of Trump’s tweets and other social media posts must be archived for future historians

ZDNet: Why all of Trump’s tweets and other social media posts must be archived for future historians. “It is important to think of this as a historical issue and not a political one. Electronic records are still rather new to our history as a nation, couldn’t even have been conceived of by our founders, and aren’t represented fully in many of our older but still-active laws. But now that digital messages are so relevant to our lives, and have become the chief way we communicate, we need to make sure we don’t delete them, allow them to conveniently slip through loopholes, or let them be consumed by bit rot.”

Research & Opinion 0
September 17, 2020

BetaNews: Cloudflare and the Internet Archive are working together to help make the web more reliable

BetaNews: Cloudflare and the Internet Archive are working together to help make the web more reliable. “The Wayback Machine has been archiving much of the web for over 20 years now and has cached 468 billion pages to date, with more than a billion new URLs being added every day. As part of this new tie up, sites that make use of Cloudflare’s Always Online service will have their content automatically archived, and if the original host isn’t available, then the Internet Archive will step in to provide the pages.”

Tweaks & Updates 0
July 16, 2020

CNBC: Coronavirus data has already disappeared after Trump administration shifted control from CDC

CNBC: Coronavirus data has already disappeared after Trump administration shifted control from CDC. “Previously public data has already disappeared from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website after the Trump administration quietly shifted control of the information to the Department of Health and Human Services.” Regular readers of ResearchBuzz know that the Trump administration has a long history of disappearing data from government Web sites…

COVID-19 0
May 14, 2020

MIT Technology Review: The race to save the first draft of coronavirus history from internet oblivion

MIT Technology Review: The race to save the first draft of coronavirus history from internet oblivion. “According to Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder, his organization is already collecting about 1 billion URLs a day across the web. Archiving the pandemic means trying to identify and collect the pages their ordinary efforts might otherwise overlook, relying on a network of library professionals and members of the public: local and international public health pages, petitions, resources for medical professionals trying to fight covid-19, and accounts from those who have had the virus. It’s not easy. ‘The average life of a web page is only 100 days before it’s changed or deleted,’ he says.

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
February 23, 2020

Washington Post: USDA reposts animal welfare records it purged from its website in 2017

Washington Post: USDA reposts animal welfare records it purged from its website in 2017. “Tuesday’s move made available unredacted reports for nearly 10,000 zoos, circuses, breeders, research labs and Tennessee walking horse shows that were publicly available on Jan. 30, 2017 — days before they were purged — as well as those generated since, the department said. The reports, based on unannounced inspections, can be used by the agency to build cases against facilities that violate animal welfare regulations, and animal protection groups had long used them to call attention to operations they said treated animals inhumanely.”

Tweaks & Updates 0

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