I’ve only just noticed that the Web browser Opera version 67.x has enabled the security feature DNS-over-HTTPS. It’s found down at the bottom of: Settings | Advanced | Security, under ‘System’.

It’s not enabled by default, as it now is in the Firefox browser (for U.S. users only, last time I heard). In Opera you can use Google DNS or Cloudflare, or plug in one of your own. I’m in the UK and it seems to work fine with Google DNS, and doesn’t appear to be limited to U.S. users.

It doesn’t however enable you to visit those annoying U.S. local and regional newspapers that shut out all non-U.S. traffic, and to get past such blocks you’ll still need to turn on a reliable free VPN and pretend to be in the USA. Luckily, Opera has one of those built in, too.

Archive.org is starting to load entire runs of scholarly journals, mostly under their Public Library-like “Borrow” arrangement. New today is Journal of British Studies, 1961-2015, journal of the North American Conference on British Studies.

Vogue Italia magazine “has opened its digital archive of every issue from 1964 to the present”, free and public…

From March the 17th, readers can also access the Vogue Italia archive completely free of charge [after an email sign-up]. Vogue Archive is a digital fashion archive, inaugurated in 2013 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Vogue Italia. A valuable repository which encompasses the entire history of the magazine [from 1964]. Features, photography, articles, advertising campaigns and much more besides. All meticulously cataloged and easy to consult thanks to the most advanced search technology.

A great resource for everyone from fashion historians to magazine designers looking for layout inspiration. Note that it’s always been the least self-censored and most arty version of Vogue, and as such will not be ‘safe for work’ viewing in some workplaces. Also, it doesn’t appear that the sister Vogue titles published in Italian are included, just the main Vogue Italia.

Announced in our Spring Budget speech today, the UK’s Spring budget speech in Parliament, good news for authors and publishers…

From 1st December 2020 [UK] ebooks, newspapers, magazines or academic journals will have no VAT to pay.”

VAT is the UK’s main UK sales tax, and printed publications are already exempt from the tax. At present it’s uncertain if digital audiobooks will also be exempt.

Gab Trends is a new topical / news search-engine from Gab, probably best described as the ‘free-speech Twitter’. Trends doesn’t currently appear to require a sign-up. Commenting on news stories does however require signing up to the Gab’s sister-project Dissenter. Comment-counts presumably then show up on the Gab Trends search results, but not the comments themselves, which are quarantined on Dissenter. That’s probably just as well, since this is the free-speech Gab and it veers strongly toward the right-wing of politics. Though at present there doesn’t seem to be much speech of any kind going on there.

If testing Gab Trends you’ll probably want to block all images on results. In uBlock Origin that’s…

##*.column-image

Once that’s done, a broad test for keyword alarmism shows about what you’d expect…

Conservative news sites are prominent. The UK’s Daily Mail and The Telegraph newspapers, the USA’s Fox News, and I think ZeroHedge is some sort of libertarian/Bitcoin news site? Sites such as InfoWars and RT (‘official’ Russian news) will fail to pass the sniff-test for many.

A search for virus + UK showed a similar spectrum of results, but with the BBC, Reuters and Yahoo ranking highly. No weird conspiracy-theory pundits in the top results, so far as I could tell.

Without making a search Gab Trends becomes effectively an algorithmic newspaper, giving you the top items as they currently stand in Trends. In that form it veers very strongly toward the tabloid ‘crime and grime’ type of linkbait, and is not much use.

Search results for a keyword can be easily had as an RSS feed, seemingly without sign-up. So you might get something useful out of it in RSS, if you’re prepared to drill down for half an hour.

There doesn’t appear to be a list of the news sources, and on my limited tests they feel quite limited at present. One would have expected to find robust conservative magazines like The Spectator, The Federalist, The Critic, Quillette, rather than questionable stuff like the InfoWars and RT sites, but I guess that’s perhaps because the focus is on ‘breaking news’ rather than on commentary. Yet the National Review is in there, which is the U.S. equivalent of The Spectator.

Overall, it’s possibly useful if you want an RSS feed to keep track of what restaurant Milo has been thrown out of this week. But at present it seems a worse choice for tracking news than Google News + a site-blocking script able to remove the news sources you don’t care to read.

The venerable and free Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary has a new public beta, and… “search and especially advanced search have been completely overhauled”.

The Smithsonian now has a unified open-access picture library online, primed with an initial 2.8 million hi-res images. The licencing appears to be uniformly CC0. Another 200,000 images will reportedly be added through 2020, with more in future years.

It’s easier to use than the main ‘advanced interface’ — where, on a search for cats for instance, you’ll have a very hard time figuring out how to remove scans of the pages of old botany recorder-books (with text-only records of cat’s tail plants) — when you just want pictures of furry cats.

The new CC0 portal is very slow at present, probably due to the weight of visitors arising from the publicity and the bots from the likes of Alamy which are doubtless already strip-mining it. But a search for cats in the Collection, with CC0 eventually loaded and the first page suggested it to be a fine collection, although it rapidly turned into cat skulls and botany (‘cat’s-tail grass’ etc) on the second and third pages.

A test download gave a large 7Mb .JPG file…

It appears not to be on Google Search or Google Images in any substantial form, as yet. “CC0” is on each record page in plain-text, so can theoretically be used as a keyword by Google. But it appears, from the following search…

site:www.si.edu/object/ “Cats” “CC0”

… that Google has not yet indexed the new 2.8m record pages. Indeed, one wonders if they ever will, as even a broad…

site:www.si.edu/object/ “CC0”

…reveals a mere 70 results in Google Search. If they hardly index the existing pages, then what hope for the new 2.8m?