Link Smorgasbord, April 15 - 21


Meet the New CISPA. Same as the Old CISPA.
And ACLU's CISPA Explainer
Last year several similar efforts were ultimately defeated, but unsurprisingly, people keep bringing them back and trying to get various internet privacies stripped away.

State of America's Libraries Report 2013
A report on different areas of libraries and how everything measures up.  This includes copyright, technology, funding/staffing, resources, transformation, and banned books.  For the curious, the top 10 challenged books in 2012 were:
  1. Captain Underpants (series) by Dav Pilkey
  2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
  3. Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
  4. Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
  5. And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell & Justin Richardson
  6. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
  7. Looking for Alaska by John Green
  8. Scary Stories (series) by Alvin Schwartz
  9. The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
  10. Beloved by Toni Morrison
Simon & Schuster seems to reluctantly joining the library ebook party with a one year trial.  On the upside their entire ebook catalog is included.  On the downside the purchase is only for one year.

Windows 8.1 May Restore Boot-To-Desktop, Start Button
I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty damn fond of Windows 7.  I am some what sad they moved on so quickly from a solid operating system to something that largely feels unfinished and incomplete (and utterly will not work in my workplace).  That being said, boot-to-desktop and the start button are two small but significant features that it was mind boggling to me that they removed.

Apple Didn’t Censor Comic After All
After the hoopla about Saga #12, it turns out that blame was mis-attributed to Apple.  It was blocked by ComiXology on the assumption that it was not permitted by Apple policy.  On the flip side, I am curious if this ends up being one of the biggest selling issues of Saga because of the attention drawn by it being temporarily censored.

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