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Showing posts from January, 2019

Privacy Please

Today is Data Privacy Day , an international event to raise awareness about online privacy and security. As noted on the event's website, "Data Privacy Day began in the United States and Canada in January 2008 as an extension of the Data Protection Day celebration in Europe. Data Protection Day commemorates the Jan. 28, 1981, signing of Convention 108, the first legally binding international treaty dealing with privacy and data protection." The Data Privacy Day website includes practical tips to Stay Safe Online . Three easy steps that everyone can take today to increase their online privacy and security include: Strengthen your passwords. Did you know that current members of the Duke community can download the password management service LastPass Premium for free? LastPass and other services like it will help you create long, extra-strength passwords, which are then stored securely in a "vault" – leaving you with only one master password to remember going ...

Language Resources Online

Did your New Year's resolution list for 2019 include learning a new language, or traveling to a foreign country? The Duke University community has access to a number of online tools that can help you build proficiency in a new (or rusty) foreign language. Mango Languages includes courses for 70 world languages and more than a dozen English as a Second Language/English Language Learner courses. To set up an account, visit Mango Languages while on the Duke network in order to authenticate as a valid subscriber. After your username and password has been created, you can access the site or mobile app without authenticating through Duke first. Note: Mango is available through the NC Live consortium, which offers access to more than a hundred subscription databases through a user's "home" public or academic library (meaning that North Carolina residents without a current Duke NetID may also be able to access the site through their public or academic library at https:/...

The Expanding Public Domain

On January 1, many U.S. works originally published in 1923 entered the public domain , making them freely available for use, copying, and modification. Duke Law's Center for the Study of the Public Domain provides a sample of the newly-available titles in film, literature, and music , with a link to a fuller Excel spreadsheet. The 2019 release is notable since it marks the first major addition to the U.S. public domain in more than twenty years. With works from 1923 slated to enter the public domain in 1999 under their original 75-year copyright term, Congress enacted the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 , which added 20 years to existing copyright terms and stalled the expansion of the public domain until now. (Without that extension, notes the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, works from 1962 would be entering the public domain this year instead; the Center provides a list of those titles as well.) This development opens new avenues for res...