Author archives

Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Christmas

Via Kottke: Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Christmas – “In 2002, Aardman Animations produced a series of short episodes called Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Contraptions. In each episode, Wallace unveils a new invention, which Gromit then has to deal with. For the holiday season, Aardman has packaged a few of these short shorts into this compilation, Wallace & …

Subjects: Internet

Anna’s Archive rips 86 million of the most popular songs on Spotify

annas-archive.li/blog, 2025-12-20 “We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity. This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs. It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be …

Subjects: Copyright, E-Commerce, E-Records, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Measuring the Impact of Floods and Wildfires from Space

Data Innovations: Researchers at IBM Europe and the European Space Agency have released ImpactMesh, a global, open dataset focused on measuring the impact of extreme floods and wildfires. The team collected satellite images from Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel satellites, which regularly observe the same areas using both optical imagery and radar, and paired images taken before …

Subjects: AI, Climate Change, Environmental Law, Knowledge Management, Search Engines

Resources for Financial Market Data

CRS Report, Resources for Financial Market Data. R47379. 12/15/2025. Download PDF | PDF Version History. The U.S. financial system contains large and active markets for stocks, bonds, and commodities, as well as digital assets (e.g., cryptocurrencies) and other financial instruments. This report describes authoritative, open-access sources for current and historical information about major financial markets …

Subjects: Economy, Financial System, Government Documents, Legal Research

The year the government broke

The Verge [no [paywall] –  “2025 was the year the federal government and consumer protections were gutted…There was the record 43-day government shutdown that threatened food access for millions of low-income Americans, threw air travel into chaos, halted space launches, and delayed consumer products that needed regulatory approval. There was Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan …

Subjects: Censorship, Congress, E-Government, E-Mail, E-Records, Economy, Financial System, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy

The U.S. TikTok deal is official. Here’s what we know.

tubefilter: “An internal memo sent to TikTok employees has confirmed a rumor that has been swirling for months: ByteDance is about to sell the U.S. version of its social video app to a White House-approved ownership group. In the memo, which was viewed by Axios, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told his staff that TikTok U.S. will be sold to a …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

“Surviving CECOT”

To partially address CBS News pulls ’60 Minutes’ segment; correspondent blasts ‘political’ decision and ‘60 Minutes’ censored for not protecting Trump – The Trump administration sent innocent people to a torture camp. The head of CBS News blocked a 60 Minutes report on the story because it’s too focused on the facts – See also …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Economy, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Searchable database for the Epstein Files – Only Fraction of Files Released

Below the Belt – We created a searchable database for the Epstein Files, including everything the DOJ wants hidden. “The repository will continue to grow as the Trump administration releases hundreds of thousands more documents from the investigation into Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. The US Department of Justice on Friday [December 19, 2025] published a …

Subjects: Congress, E-Government, E-Records, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Legislation, Search Engines

The year Trump broke the federal government

The Washington Post [no paywall]: “How DOGE and the White House carried out a once-unthinkable transformation of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy…“It isn’t easy to fire federal employees,” her co-worker told her. “We have all these protections. We’ll be okay.” He was wrong. The United States’ 2.4 million federal employees were about to get caught up …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Congress, Defense, Education, Energy, Environmental Law, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Housing, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

How to Spot AI Hallucinations Like a Reference Librarian

Card Catalog – Hana Lee Goldin: “The verification tricks that would make fact-checkers weep with joy. Last Tuesday, a client sent me their “thoroughly researched” white paper on workplace automation. It had 47 citations. Looked bulletproof. Every claim backed by a study, every statistic sourced to a journal. I was impressed for exactly three minutes. …

Subjects: AI, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries