Christopher Michael Green

Dallas County Criminal District Attorney John Creuzot has announced that Christopher Michael Green will spend the rest of his life in prison after a Dallas County jury found him guilty of Aggravated Sexual Assault. The 52-year-old defendant was charged in a 2005 cold case attack on a young mother whom he sexually assaulted at knifepoint. This case marks the first jury trial in Dallas County history to utilize Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG) as an investigative tool to help identify the suspect.

“We have been working this case with the Dallas Police Department since we started the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI) almost a decade ago,” said lead prosecutor Leighton D’Antoni. “I remember long-time Dallas Police Department Sex Assaults Detective Todd Haecker telling me this was his ‘white whale.’ We exhausted every investigative tool without success until the DA’s Office and DPD began working with the FBI Dallas Violent Crimes Task Force, which finally cracked this case.”

During the punishment phase, evidence of five additional violent assaults allegedly committed by Mr. Green was presented, along with powerful testimony from the survivors— four of whom were between the ages of 15-17 at the time of their attacks

“You chose your path,” said one of the survivors. “I have been waiting for this day for 24 years.”

Throughout the trial, Mr. Green maintained his innocence and testified during punishment he did not commit any of these aggravated sexual assaults, but based on the compelling testimony and DNA evidence, the jury swiftly returned a guilty verdict and handed down a life sentence.

“Predators can’t live with the truth. Survivors can’t live without it. The truth came to light in this courtroom,” lead prosecutor ADA Leighton D’Antoni said in his closing argument.

Use of Innovative Genetic Genealogy and Traditional DNA

Law enforcement first identified a suspect DNA profile in one of these cases back in 2001. Over the next 15 years, the same DNA profile appeared in five more cases. However, without a prior felony conviction, Mr. Green's DNA was not in the national database, preventing a match. IGG is what provided a breakthrough -- enabling investigators to link unknown offender DNA profiles to familial connections, ultimately leading them to Green. Although IGG serves as an investigative lead and not as trial evidence, it helped put Green on the investigators' radar. Four of the six survivors identified Green in a photo lineup, but Detective Carlos Cardenas sought further confirmation, obtaining a search warrant for Green’s DNA via a buccal swab. The DNA was a perfect match in all six cases. This traditional (STR) DNA evidence, the gold standard for forensic identification since 1986, was what prosecutors presented at trial and confirmed Green’s identity.

As one of the survivors put it in her victim impact statement, “Science proved that you’re it. Nobody else shares your DNA.”

You can read more in an article published at https://bit.ly/3SUIq1E.

Google released the August 2024 core update today. It will take about a month to fully roll out.

This update is not just a normal core update. The August 2024 core update takes into account the feedback Google heard since the September 2023 helpful content update that seemed to have a negative impact on many small and independent publishers.

What Google is saying. John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google, wrote.

“Today, we launched our August 2024 core update to Google Search. This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.”

Google said this update aims to promote useful content from small and independent publishers, after Google listened to feedback it received since the release of the March 2024 core update. Mueller added:

“This latest update takes into account the feedback we’ve heard from some creators and others over the past few months. As always, we aim to connect people with a range of high quality sites, including ‘small’ or ‘“’independent’ sites that are creating useful, original content on relevant searches. This is an area we’ll continue to address in future updates.”

This August 2024 core update “aims to better capture improvements that sites may have made, so we can continue to surface the best of the web,” Mueller added.

Guidance updated. Google posted several updates to its help page about core updates, including more in-depth guidance for those who may see changes after an update.

More details. Google told us we should expect a core update soon, after many publishers have become concerned and anxious about the next update.

Since then we have seen a tremendous amount of Google search ranking volatility without a confirmation from Google on a core update or any update of its kind. In fact, this morning, I posted about even more intense Google Search ranking volatility on Search Engine Roundtable.

What to do if you are hit. Google has given advice on what to consider if you are negatively impacted by a core update in the past. Google has not really given much new advice here.

There aren’t specific actions to take to recover. A negative rankings impact may not signal anything is wrong with your pages.

Google has offered a list of questions to consider if your site is hit by a core update.

Google said you can see a bit of a recovery between core updates but the biggest change would be after another core update.

In short, write helpful content for people and not to rank in search engines.

“There’s nothing new or special that creators need to do for this update as long as they’ve been making satisfying content meant for people. For those that might not be ranking as well, we strongly encourage reading our creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help page,” Google said previously.

Previous core updates. The previous core update – the March 2024 core update – was the largest core update, according to Google. It started March 5 and completed 45 days later on April 19.

Here’s a timeline and our coverage of recent core updates:

• The March 2024 core update was on March 5th and ended on April 19.
  
• The November 2023 core update was on November 2nd and ended on November 28.
  
• The October 2023 core update was on October 5th and ended on October 19
  
• The August 2023 core update was on August 22nd and ended on September 7.
  
• The March 2023 core update was on March 15th and ended on March 28th.
  
• Other updates. We did have a spam update between the last core update and this core update. It was the June 2024 spam update that started on June 20 and took 7 days to finish rolling out, completing on June 27.
  

Why we care. Many sites are hoping, and have been hoping, to see improvements with the last core update ever since the September 2023 helpful content update rolled out. Most, if not all, of those sites that were hit in September did not see recoveries. They were hoping to see recoveries with the March 2024 core update, but did not.

Now, with this August 2024 core update, many of those sites hit by previous updates will be watching closely to see if their sites recover over the next few weeks.

Published starting in 1984, MicroTimes magazine lauded itself as the newsletter for computer users in California. Published in two editions (Northern and Southern California) with the primary difference between them being the advertisements. MicroTimes provided interviews, instructions, humor and opinion pieces related to all manner of home computers and business. These issues are open access on Internet Archive with the blessing of the publisher.

The following issues are missing from this archive. If you have any of them, please contact Kay Savetz.

• Volume 2 Number 12
  
• Volume 3 Number 1
  
• Volume 3 Number 2
  
• Volume 3 Number 3
  
• Volume 3 Number 6 thru 12(?)
  
• Issue 78
  
• Issue 151-152
  
• Issue 154-155
  
• Issue 159-160
  
• Issue 162
  
• Issue 165
  
• Issue 182-199
  
• Issue 201-215
  
• Issue 217-end??
  

The following is a press release written by the Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA):

IGRA announced the restart of its partnership with MyHeritage in conjunction with the beginning of the 2024 IAJGS Conference in Philadelphia, PA.

Jerusalem, August 18, 2024 - We are pleased to announce a strengthened partnership between The Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA), Israel’s largest Jewish Genealogical Society, and MyHeritage, the leading global discovery platform for family history. This collaboration provides access to an index of more than 3.25 million records available in IGRA, to be available via search and matches to the millions of users of MyHeritage.

From now on, MyHeritage users will be able to receive results from IGRA when searching on the general search engine https://www.myheritage.com/research or specifically in the IGRA collection https://www.myheritage.com/research/collection-20862/israel-genealogy-research-association-igra. From here, they will be able to see the detailed record in the IGRA database [record details may require a fee]. MyHeritage users will receive matches on their trees with the IGRA records, allowing them to review the record and get more detailed information about their relatives in the IGRA database with just one click.

This is part of an ongoing commitment by IGRA to expand their reach and the availability of its Israel-related collections to a broader audience.

The Israel Genealogy Research Association has set as one of its primary aims the preparation of databases based upon various records, mainly found in Israel, for as wide an audience as possible. The large number of archives located in Israel dealing with communities in Israel and Jewish communities outside of Israel have records in a variety of languages but mostly in Hebrew and English. Our data comes from Archives as well as publications which are on open shelves in libraries.

IGRA Volunteers scan the materials, build databases with the pertinent information, and then link to the original scans, where archival permission has been granted. Surnames and first names are transliterated from Hebrew to English, and vice versa, depending on the language of the original material. This will enable researchers from around the world who are not familiar with the other language to find the families they are searching for.

About The Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA)

The Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA) is focused on genealogy – helping people with their family research and making available to the public a wide variety of material from the Ottoman period through the early years of Israeli Statehood, as well as additional material about Jews from the Diaspora located in Israeli archives. We work with people of many nationalities and provide resources on countries around the world. www.genealogy.org.il

About MyHeritage

MyHeritage is the leading global discovery platform for family history. With billions of historical records and family tree profiles, and with sophisticated matching technologies, MyHeritagen gives users the joy of discovering their past and empowering their future. MyHeritage is the most popular family history service and DNA test in Europe, and is trusted by millions of users worldwide. Since 2020, MyHeritage is home to the world’s most advanced AI technologies for animating, repairing, enhancing, and colorizing historical photos. www.myheritage.com.

From the archive.org web site:

This October, we are publishing Vanishing Culture, a new open access report examining the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. 

As more content is created digitally and provided to individuals and memory institutions through temporary licensing deals rather than ownership, materials such as sound recordings, books, television shows, and films are at constant risk of being removed from streaming platforms. This means they are vanishing from our culture without ever being archived or preserved by libraries.

But the threat of vanishing is not exclusive to digital content. As time marches on, analog materials on obsolete formats—VHS tapes, 78rpm recordings, floppy disks—are deteriorating and require urgent attention to ensure their survival. Without proper archiving, digitization, and access, the cultural artifacts stored in these formats are in danger of being lost forever.

By highlighting the importance of ownership and preservation in the digital age, the Vanishing Culture report aims to inform individuals, institutions, and policymakers about the breadth and scale of cultural loss thus far, and inspire them to take proactive steps in ensuring that our cultural record remains accessible for future generations.

Share Your Story!

As part of the Vanishing Culture report, we’d like to hear from you. We invite you to share your stories about why preservation is important for the media you use on our site. Whether it’s a website crawl in the Wayback Machine, a rare book that shaped your perspective, a vintage film that captured your imagination, or a collection that you revisit often, we want to know why preserving these items is important to you. Share your story now!

The following is an announcement from the (U.S.) Federal Trade Commission:

The FTC has issued a new rule striking against the persistent problem of fake and false consumer reviews and testimonials. Consumers should be able to trust the authenticity of feedback they read, hear, or see about a product or service. But digital content — including reviews and testimonials — has always been easy to fake, and with generative AI tools it’s now even easier. That makes our new rule even more significant.

Fake reviews and testimonials have polluted the marketplace. They harm the many consumers relying on them to pick products and providers, subverting people’s ability to make informed decisions. They also hurt competitors who work hard to comply with the law. 

The FTC has challenged illegal practices regarding reviews and testimonials for several decades. Along with numerous law enforcement actions, we’ve also issued guidance to help businesses do the right thing. We’re not alone. Other regulators in the states and abroad have been trying hard to attack the problem. And whether protected from liability or not, online marketplaces and social media companies also have a crucial role to play, and they could and should do more to stem the tide of deceptive commercial conduct that they’ve allowed to fester on their platforms.

But altogether it has not been enough. That’s why, in 2022, we started the process for developing a new federal rule spelling out clearly deceptive practices in this area, authorizing courts to impose civil penalties for knowing violations, strengthening our enforcement actions, and imposing a deterrent effect on bad actors. The final Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials reflects the great benefits of the public comment process. We heard a broad range of perspectives from consumers, small businesses, advocacy organizations, trade associations, review platform operators, researchers, and others with an interest in the area. As a result of their comments, we’ve made some clarifications and adjustments to the initially proposed version of the rule, which you can read all about in the lengthy statement accompanying the new rule.

Just as originally intended, the new rule remains focused on fighting clearly deceptive practices involving reviews and testimonials and not burdening honest businesses. Any deceptive or unfair practice involving reviews or testimonials which the rule does not cover is still subject to the FTC Act. The rule prohibits the following practices:

Writing, selling, or buying fake or false consumer reviews. The rule prohibits businesses from writing or selling consumer reviews that misrepresent they are by someone who doesn’t exist or who didn’t have actual experience with the business or its products or services, or that misrepresent the reviewers’ experience. It also prohibits businesses from buying consumer reviews that they knew or should have known made such a misrepresentation. Businesses are also prohibited from procuring from certain company insiders such reviews about the business or its products or services for posting on third-party sites, when the businesses knew or should have known about the misrepresentation. (The prohibitions on buying or procuring reviews don’t cover generalized review solicitations to past customers or simply hosting reviews on the business’s website. Neither will a retailer or other entity be liable for sharing consumer reviews unless it would have been liable for displaying those same reviews on its own website.)

Writing, selling, or disseminating fake or false testimonials. Businesses are similarly prohibited from writing or selling consumer or celebrity testimonials that make the same kinds of misrepresentations. They’re also prohibited from disseminating or causing the dissemination of such testimonials when they knew or should have known about the misrepresentation. (The prohibition on disseminating testimonials doesn’t cover the type of generalized solicitations to past customers discussed above with respect to reviews.)

Buying positive or negative reviews. Businesses are prohibited from providing compensation or other incentives contingent on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative. Violations here include situations in which such a contingency is express or implied. So, for example, while it prohibits offering $25 for a 5-star review, it also prohibits offering $25 for a review “telling everyone how much you love our product.”

Failing to make disclosures about insider reviews and testimonials. The rule prohibits a company’s officers and managers from writing reviews or testimonials about the business or its products or services without clearly disclosing their relationship. Businesses are also prohibited from disseminating testimonials by company insiders without clear disclosures, if the businesses knew or should have known of the relationship. A similar prohibition exists for officer or manager solicitations of reviews from their immediate relatives or from employees or agents of the business, and when officers or managers ask employees or agents to seek such reviews from relatives. For these various solicitations, the rule is violated only if (1) the officers or managers didn’t give instructions about making clear disclosures, (2) the resulting reviews – either by the employees, agents, or the immediate relatives of the officers, managers, employees, or agents – appear without clear disclosures, and (3) the officers or managers knew or should have known that such reviews appeared and failed to take steps to have those reviews either removed or amended to include clear disclosures. All of these prohibitions hinge on the undisclosed relationship being material to consumers. (These disclosure provisions also clarify that they don’t cover mere review hosting or generalized solicitations to past customers.)

Deceptively claiming that company-controlled review websites are independent.  Businesses are prohibited from misrepresenting that websites or entities they control or operate are providing independent reviews or opinions, other than consumer reviews, about a category of businesses, products, or services that includes their own business, product, or service.

Illegally suppressing negative reviews.  The rule prohibits using unfounded or groundless legal threats, physical threats, intimidation, or public false accusations (when the accusation is made with knowledge that it’s false or with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity) to prevent the posting or cause the removal of all or part of a consumer review. Legal threats are “unfounded or groundless” if they’re unwarranted by existing law or based on allegations that have no evidentiary support. Also, if reviews on a marketer’s website have been suppressed based on their rating or negative sentiment, the rule prohibits that business from misrepresenting that the reviews on a portion of its website dedicated to receiving and displaying such reviews represent most or all submitted reviews.

Selling and buying fake social media indicators.  The rule prohibits the sale or distribution of fake indicators of social media influence, like fake followers or views. A “fake” indicator means one generated by a bot, a hijacked account, or that otherwise does not reflect a real individual’s or entity’s activities or opinions. The rule also bars anyone from buying or procuring such fake indicators. These prohibitions are limited to situations in which the violator knew or should have known that the indicators were fake and which involved misrepresentations of a person’s or company’s influence or importance for a commercial purpose.

We mentioned generative AI earlier, and you may be thinking, to paraphrase Tina Turner, what’s AI got to do with it? The rule doesn’t specifically refer to AI, so do these prohibitions cover situations when someone uses an AI tool to generate the deceptive content at issue? Of course they do. To paraphrase ourselves, there’s no AI defense to the regulations on the books. 

From an article by David Nield published in the lifehacker web site:

Just like apps on your phone, websites can request permissions inside your browser. Some of these permissions are pretty essential—like webcam access for video calling apps—but it's a good idea to run a regular audit of which websites and web apps have access to which permissions on your computer and phone.

These permissions can be pretty important, too: access to your location, for example. You'll probably want this turned on for a website that's delivering you a daily weather forecast, but it's not necessarily something you want every website knowing about.

Whatever browser you use, permissions must be explicitly requested and then granted by you—there's no way for them to be accessed surreptitiously. You'll see a pop-up whenever a new permission is requested, but as we'll show you here, you can also, at any time, check up on the permissions you've granted or blocked.

You can find instructions on how to check all the more popular web browsers at: https://lifehacker.com/tech/check-website-permissions-in-chrome-edge-firefox-and

The Industrial Archives & Library (IAL) announced today that staff and volunteers finished a yearlong project to digitize and make accessible approximately 476 issues of Bethlehem Steel newsletters from a variety of steel plants, shipyards, mines and other operations across America. The newsletters not only tell stories about the industrial giant, but also its employees.

The newsletters, dated 1978-1985, are as much a story of Bethlehem Steel as the communities in which the company had its plants, yards, and offices. Most issues include corporate news, but also include stories about hobbies of miners, corporate picnics, and academic accomplishments of blue-collar workers’ children.

“The newsletters are a treasure trove of interesting information about Bethlehem Steel, much of it from the perspective of its everyday employees,” said Stephen G. Donches, IAL President & CEO. “While the scope of our collection strategy is national across a variety of industries,” Donches added, “our Bethlehem Steel holdings are central to our mission at IAL, and we are looking to expand them at every opportunity.”

”This collection would not have been available until much later if it were not for the work of one of IAL’s talented volunteers, George Myers,” said Missy Nerino, IAL’s Digital Archivist, who oversaw the project. Myers, who has been volunteering with IAL for over 17 months, has been digitizing the newsletters each week throughout the year. “George is a huge asset to IAL,” stated Nerino, “and he approaches every job with a positive attitude. I know he enjoyed digitizing these newsletters with an enthusiasm in finding interesting articles that was infectious on everyone involved with the project.”

“My main takeaway from these newsletters,” Myers noted, “Was that you get to see the real face of Bethlehem Steel through the stories of individual employees. The newsletters covered everything, and it was only on the front page you’d see the corporate line.”

In total, 28 different titles, and about 2732 pages were digitized in the effort. Nerino then provided metadata to each newsletter before uploading them into IAL’s digital asset management system, Preservica. The newsletters can be viewed online at this link. 

Can you help us fill the gaps? IAL is looking for missing issues of newsletters. Contact IAL by email at info@industrialarchives.org or by telephone at 618-868-1115.

• Google Drive now allows users to save scanned documents as JPEGs.
  
• Scanned docs saved as JPEGs are generally smaller in size when compared to PDFs, enabling faster uploads over mobile data.
  
• This new feature is rolling out now to all Google Workspace customers and those with personal Google accounts.
  

Google Drive users have long had the ability to scan physical documents and upload them to the cloud right within the app. However, saving scanned documents has always been limited to PDFs.

The tool had previously been upgraded to offer automatic capture when the camera view is aligned with a document, an option to import from your camera roll, and a scanner button shortcut for faster scans, alongside options for changing the scanned document's alignment, automatic crops, filters, and more.

Now, in a bid to make scanned documents easier to upload and share with others, Google Drive is rolling out support for saving scanned docs as JPEGs. The tech giant announced the rollout in a Workspace Updates post, highlighting that the feature will be available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts.

This new feature is rolling out now to users on both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains, and users can expect it to be available within the next fifteen days on both Android and iOS.

I wrote a few days ago (at: https://eogn.com/page-18080/13391849) about Tim Walz's ancestry from  Luxembourg. Now, as more amore genealogists research his heritage, they are finding more information about more ancestors from more countries. He is the latest American politician to have his roots traced back to Ireland - but where exactly his ancestors are from is a matter for debate.

The 41st governor of Minnesota's relatives are said to have hailed from County Wexford. American genealogist Megan Smolenyak, who has been tracking politicians' roots since Barack Obama first ran for president in 2008, believes his ancestors are from Ferns in the county. However, local genealogists are suggesting it is Kilmore which is about 52km down the road.

Ms Smolenyak told BBC News NI that Mr Walz was "about 1/8th Irish", pointing out that his ancestors moved to Wisconsin, Iowa and Nebraska.

She said, according to records, Mr Walz's great-grandmother was called Laura Ellen Sullivan. "A surname like Sullivan is a clear sign that you have Irish ancestry," she said. "I started working backwards then following the trail from there. "His ancestor's name was Sullivan. I found James Sullivan who was from Ireland, his daughter was Laura Ellen Sullivan."

The hunt is now on for distant relatives of the man who could be another American in the White House with Irish connections.

You can read more in an article by Barry O'Connor published in the BBC News web site at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz5r5yl624ko