Harvard Announces the Data.gov Archive
Harvard Law School Innovation Lab: “Today we released our archive of data.gov on Source Cooperative. The 16TB collection includes over 311,000 datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025, a complete archive of federal public datasets linked by data.gov. It will be updated daily as new datasets are added to data.gov. This is the first release in our new data vault project to preserve and authenticate vital public datasets for academic research, policymaking, and public use.
David Kurtz argues that we should refer to Trump’s mass removal of federal employees as purges, not as “firings” or “layoffs”. “Business terms provide a totally wrong conceptual framework for the purges underway.”
As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders
Organized Abandonment Sarah Jaffe, The Baffler
Increasing rat numbers in cities are linked to climate warming, urbanization, and human population Science Advances
Art Technica: “Two years ago, a Canadian writer named Cory Doctorow coined the phrase “enshittification” to describe the decay of online platforms. The word immediately set the Internet ablaze, as it captured the growing malaise regarding how almost everything about the web seemed to be getting worse. “It’s my theory explaining how the Internet was colonized by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters, and what we can do about it,” Doctorow explained in a follow-up article. “
This Intercept article is from December 2022but has all the hallmarks of what Musk and DOGE are now perpetrating within our federal government agencies, using OPM, GSA and Treasury’s massive databases of fiscal, financial data and PII, on all Americans.
…To begin with, a wide array of document watermarking measures can identify the source of a leak. That’s why leakers and publishers need to figure out whether a given document is unique and whether it is safe to publish the document itself — or maybe, in the interest of protecting the source, not publish or even write about the document at all.nThe notion of uniquely fingerprinting or watermarking each version of a digital text using various spacing modifications is not particularly new. It has been discussed since at least the early 1990s, with research building on general fingerprinting literature from the early 1980s. Ironically, one of the original proposed applications of document watermarking was to protect newspaper and magazine articles from unauthorized distribution. Every spatial element of a document — including the spacing between characters, words, sentences, and paragraphs — can be modified in every version to form a unique signature that identifies the recipient of that particular document. For instance, a version of a document sent to one person could have slight variations in the distance between certain characters, words, sentences, or paragraphs that uniquely differentiate the document from a version sent to another person with ever-so-slightly different spacings…”
