Chinatown (NYC) Photography, Podcasts, Washington Newspapers, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, January 20, 2021

Chinatown (NYC) Photography, Podcasts, Washington Newspapers, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, January 20, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Gothamist: A Nearly Forgotten Photo Archive Becomes A Vivid Exhibit Of Chinatown’s Past. “Although planned prior to the pandemic, the exhibit has landed at a precipitous moment for Chinatown and Chinese New Yorkers…. Old photo tours of New York City are well-mined territory. But the nostalgia kindled by Bocian’s black and white photos of old storefronts, like that of Hop Shing, a coffee shop and dim sum restaurant known for its pork and coconut buns, has only intensified in light of COVID. Hop Shing closed finally in September, one of many Chinatown businesses felled by the crisis.”

TechCrunch: Podchaser raises $4M to build a comprehensive podcast database. “Podchaser, a startup building what it calls ‘IMDB for podcasts,’ recently announced that it has raised $4 million in a funding round led by Greycroft. In other words, it’s a site where — similar to the Amazon-owned Internet Movie Database — users can look up who’s appeared in which podcasts, rate and review those podcasts and add them to lists. In fact, CEO Bradley Davis told me that the startup’s “vibrant, exciting community of podcast nerds” have already created 8.5 million podcast credits in the database.”

Washington Secretary of State: Breaking News! More Historic Washington Newspapers Online. “Washington State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State, has digitized over 450,000 pages of historic Washington newspapers for the WDN website, including over 27,000 new issues that have just been released and are now available and free to the public.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

USA Today: Joe Biden committee to roll out inauguration-themed AR lenses for Snapchat. “The inauguration committee for President-elect Joe Biden will roll out augmented reality lenses on Snapchat on Wednesday to help users celebrate the transition of power from afar.”

VentureBeat: Opera acquires YoYo Games for $10 million and launches Opera Gaming division. “Web browser maker Opera has acquired YoYo Games, maker of the GameMaker Studio 2 game engine, for $10 million, and it has also launched its Opera Gaming division. The deal underscores Opera‘s efforts to differentiate its web browser, Opera GX, through a gaming community. Opera itself has more than 380 million people using its web browsers worldwide, but the new Opera GX gaming browser has seven million monthly active users as of December, up 350% from a year earlier.”

Vintage Motorsport: The Henry Ford Achieves Digitized Artifacts Milestone. “For nearly a decade, The Henry Ford has worked to digitize its unparalleled collection of artifacts that tell the story of America’s traditions of ingenuity, resourcefulness and innovation in order to make them more accessible, to educate and inspire those around the world. The organization has now digitized its 100,000th artifact – fittingly, a photograph of the 100,000th Fordson Tractor.”

USEFUL STUFF

NixIntel: Make Your Own Internet Archive With Archive Box. “Hunchly is excellent for capturing web pages, but I still like to supplement it with YouTube-dl for grabbing video content. Recently I’ve also started using Archive Box to build offline archives of web content that I want to keep…. Archive Box can build full archives of the websites listed in your bookmarks, browser history, or from a list of custom URLs that you provide. In the rest of this post I’ll show you how you can set up and install Archive Box and start to archive your own pages.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: A QAnon ‘Digital Soldier’ Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling. “Every morning, Valerie Gilbert, a Harvard-educated writer and actress, wakes up in her Upper East Side apartment; feeds her dog, Milo, and her cats, Marlena and Celeste; brews a cup of coffee; and sits down at her oval dining room table. Then, she opens her laptop and begins fighting the global cabal.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Biden as president: What it will mean for tech. “Even though tech policy didn’t dominate election issues, Biden’s presence in the Oval Office over the next four years will have a major influence on the sector, including infrastructure policy on broadband deployment and national security issues involving China. The president and his team will also play a role in how to handle the growth and influence of social media giants. Facebook, Twitter and other tech companies are already feeling the heat from politicians on both sides of the political aisles.”

ABC News: Washington, Oregon, 29 tribes sue over plan to move archives. “Washington, Oregon, more than two dozen Native American and Alaska Native tribes and cultural groups from the Northwest are suing the federal government to stop the sale of the National Archives building in Seattle, a plan that would force the relocation of millions of invaluable historical records to California and Missouri.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NiemanLab: The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth. “The next few years will undoubtedly be met with massive efforts to rebuild the infrastructure of truth in the U.S. This will happen; it is a natural and inevitable reaction. Fake news will not dominate our infoscapes forever. It won’t go away completely, but it will become more marginal, because there’s been a change in the leaders we have elected to power. But a simple repair to the infrastructure of truth won’t be enough to do the trick. We must work together to make the infrastructure of truth less vulnerable.”

Business Insider: Google says it is investigating an AI ethicist for sharing sensitive documents, amid bristling tensions between employees and leadership. “Google has suspended the corporate account of Margaret Mitchell, a lead on its ethical AI team, claiming she downloaded and shared sensitive documents with external accounts. A Google spokesperson confirmed late on Tuesday that Mitchell’s corporate access, including her work email, had been locked.” Good morning, Internet…

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January 20, 2021 at 08:29PM
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Boston Public Library, Teaching Current Events, January 6th, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, January 19, 2021

Boston Public Library, Teaching Current Events, January 6th, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, January 19, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Art Newspaper: From mummies to mosques—new Google Arts & Culture initiative brings Egypt’s archaeological treasures to the masses. “‘From Pharaonic tombs, to Mamluk mosques, and from Coptic monasteries to Roman villas,’ you can now take online tours of Egypt’s most important archaeological sites. The Google Arts & Culture organisation has teamed up to create the digital platform Preserving Egypt’s Layered History with archaeologists at the American Research Centre in Cairo, revealing ‘stories of the restoration of diverse locations around Egypt’.”

Universe Today: Here’s the Extremely New Website for the Extremely Large Telescope. “In the vein of ‘go big or go home,’ the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has launched a stunning new website to showcase information about — and match the scale of — its Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the highly anticipated observatory scheduled to have first light in 2025. The new website is well-designed and contains a plethora of details and images about the new telescope, its instruments, and how it will further our knowledge of the cosmos.”

The Daily Sentinel: New site detailing Colorado state history launched. “The website… features an interactive timeline full of milestones, which users can click for more information about whichever subject is being presented. Milestones range from 1771 to 2019, covering everything from the lives of Native Americans to significant cultural and political events.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ZDNet: DuckDuckGo surpasses 100 million daily search queries for the first time. “The achievement comes after a period of sustained growth the company has been seeing for the past two years, and especially since August 2020, when the search engine began seeing more than 2 billion search queries a month on a regular basis. The numbers are small in comparison to Google’s 5 billion daily search queries but it’s a positive sign that users are looking for alternatives.”

Reuters: U.S. Census Bureau director resigns ahead of schedule. “The U.S. Census Bureau’s embattled director on Monday announced he is resigning nearly a year ahead of schedule and will retire on Wednesday, the day Democratic President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated, according to a letter on the bureau’s website.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNN: Facebook posts promoting violence still circulated even after insurrection. “Facebook posts promoting violence during inauguration week have circulated on the platform over the past week despite a crackdown by the social media giant since the January 6 insurrection, a tech watchdog group found.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Law Street Media: Ancestry .com Moves to Dismiss Yearbook Photo Misappropriation Suit. “On [January 4] in the Northern District of California, Ancestry.com and related entities and individuals filed a motion to dismiss the putative class action lawsuit against it claiming the company misappropriated their personal information and photographs for advertising and other promotional purposes. Ancestry claimed that this lawsuit is ‘misguided’ and should be dismissed with prejudice.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechCrunch: Google AI concocts ‘breakie’ and ‘cakie’ hybrid baked goods. “If, as I suspect many of you have, you have worked your way through baking every type of cookie, bread and cake under the sun over the last year, Google has a surprise for you: a pair of AI-generated hybrid treats, the ‘breakie’ and the ‘cakie.’ The origin of these new items seems to have been in a demonstration of the company’s AutoML Tables tool, a codeless model generation system that’s more spreadsheet automation than what you’d really call ‘artificial intelligence.’ But let’s not split hairs, or else we’ll never get to the recipe.”

MIT Technology Review: The year deepfakes went mainstream. “The vast majority of them are still used for fake pornography. A female investigative journalist was severely harassed and temporarily silenced by such activity, and more recently, a female poet and novelist was frightened and shamed. There’s also the risk that political deepfakes will generate convincing fake news that could wreak havoc in unstable political environments. But as the algorithms for manipulating and synthesizing media have grown more powerful, they’ve also given rise to positive applications—as well as some that are humorous or mundane. Here is a roundup of some of our favorites in a rough chronological order, and why we think they’re a sign of what’s to come.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Mashable: This clever bot turns Reddit arguments into video game scenes. “On Sunday, 24-year-old software engineer Micah Price from Cape Town, South Africa, unveiled what can only be described as a niche-but-genius creation: a bot that takes everyday arguments on Reddit and has them play out in the style of scenes from Ace Attorney, Capcom’s animated courtroom-based video game series. The end result is a gloriously dramatic affair that shines a whole new spotlight on Reddit’s comment section.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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January 20, 2021 at 01:08AM
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Boston Public Library, Teaching Current Events, January 6th, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, January 19, 2021

Boston Public Library, Teaching Current Events, January 6th, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, January 19, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Boston Public Library: Boston Public Library makes historical images available for use in Wikipedia. “In celebration of Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary on January 15th, Boston Public Library has uploaded more than 8,000 historical photographs from its archival collections to Wikimedia Commons. These images include some of the library’s most important photographic collections, and contribute to the single largest batch of uploads ever contributed to Wikimedia Commons. By uploading these public domain images, BPL is making them available so that they can be freely used to enhance Wikipedia articles, re-printed in publications, or incorporated in student projects and papers.”

University of Virginia: UVA Helps Educators Wrestle With How To Appropriately Teach Current Events. “In the coming months and years, educators will grapple with how to most appropriately and effectively teach about recent events that illuminate the deep, troubling divisions in America and the history from which they emerged…. To address this need to support K-12 teachers throughout the U.S., a team of faculty and students from the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, alongside practicing educators, have collaborated to launch a new online resource hub. Educating for Democracy offers a range of teaching tools, including developmentally appropriate lessons that interrogate issues of race, justice and human welfare in the U.S. by connecting the full story of the past with current events.”

George Washington University Program on Extremism: Capitol Hill Siege. “In keeping with our tradition of providing primary source documents to the research community and the public at large, The Program on Extremism has launched a project to create a central database of court records related to the events of January 6, 2021. This page will be updated as additional individuals are charged with criminal activities and new records are introduced into the criminal justice system.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ZDNet: WhatsApp delays take it or leave it privacy terms update until May. “WhatsApp has announced that it will delay enforcing its new privacy terms from February 8 to May 15. With little fanfare, in recent weeks, WhatsApp has presented users with a prompt to accept its new privacy terms by February 8, or risk not being able to use the app.”

The Guardian: Parler website partially returns with support from Russian-owned technology firm . “On Monday, Parler’s website was reachable again, though only with a message from its chief executive, John Matze, saying he was working to restore functionality. The internet protocol (IP) address it used is owned by DDos-Guard, which is controlled by two Russian men and provides services including protection from distributed denial of service attacks, infrastructure expert Ronald Guilmette told Reuters.”

USEFUL STUFF

MIT Technology Review: A guide to being an ethical online investigator. “How can you, an average person, be an ethical digital activist? What counts as going too far? How can you keep yourself safe? How can you participate in a way that doesn’t put anyone in danger? Below are some guidelines that might help.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BBC: Biden Twitter account ‘starts from zero’ with no Trump followers. “US president-elect Joe Biden has been given his new official presidential Twitter account, but has been forced to start it with zero followers. The Biden campaign is unhappy with the move, which marks a change from the previous transition from Barack Obama.”

Muskogee Phoenix: Muscogee (Creek) Nation National Library and Archives receives grant. “The project will include 40 oral history interviews from Muscogee citizens and community members concerning their experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic. The grant will also aid in the purchase of oral history recording equipment and supplies, the creation of a digital archive and Oral History Research Station, located in the MCN National Library and Archives, and the creation of a library website.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Behind a Secret Deal Between Google and Facebook. “In 2017, Facebook said it was testing a new way of selling online advertising that would threaten Google’s control of the digital ad market. But less than two years later, Facebook did an about-face and said it was joining an alliance of companies backing a similar effort by Google. Facebook never said why it pulled back from its project, but evidence presented in an antitrust lawsuit filed by 10 state attorneys general last month indicates that Google had extended to Facebook, its closest rival for digital advertising dollars, a sweetheart deal to be a partner.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Pew Research Center: How lawmakers’ social media activity changed in the days after the U.S. Capitol riot. “Social media activity by members of Congress changed in notable ways following the Jan. 6 rioting at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of lawmakers’ Facebook and Twitter posts in the days after the breach.”

ABC News (Australia): Drones count koalas faster and cheaper than manual spotting methods: study. “A team with a drone was able to spot koalas more effectively and cheaply than a team using more traditional methods, such as studying the forest floor for traces of koala scat, or shining spotlights into trees at night to catch a glimmer of eye-shine.” Good morning, Internet…

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January 19, 2021 at 06:34PM
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AppSheet, Uganda Internet Access, 2FA, More: Monday Evening ResearchBuzz, January 18, 2021

AppSheet, Uganda Internet Access, 2FA, More: Monday Evening ResearchBuzz, January 18, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Blog: Learn to build no-code apps quickly to simplify your work. “With AppSheet from Google Cloud, anyone can build custom applications without having to write code. Whether you’re part of a large organization seeking digital transformation or a small team in need of creative solutions to organize events during a pandemic, there’s no limit to what you can create.”

BBC: Uganda election: Internet restored but social media blocked. “Ugandans are celebrating the resumption of internet services after a shutdown was imposed ahead of last week’s election. However, social media platforms remain blocked and are only accessible using Virtual Private Networks (VPN).”

USEFUL STUFF

The Verge: How to set up two-factor authentication on your online accounts. “While 2FA — via text, email, or an authenticator app — does not completely cloak you from potential hackers, it is an important step in preventing your account from being accessed by unauthorized users. Here’s how to enable 2FA on your accounts across the web.”

Lifehacker: How to Take a Digital Break. “We’re entering the ‘doomscrolling and snark’ portion of our collective response, which is fine if it helps you cope; but if you’re like me, though, you get frustrated or anxious when we continue to spin our gears. To counteract this, consider scheduling a digital break. And you have plenty of options, each with varying degrees of severity.”

MakeTechEasier: 4 of the Best Productivity Apps for iOS . “This year is very challenging for many people due to the pandemic, but setting goals when setbacks occur can be a great way of traveling the road to recovery. Also, for many people who by and large continue living a relatively normal life, the change in lifestyle due to social distancing and other restrictions globally means it’s an ideal time to define a new goal or start a new hobby – but you’ll need the right toolkit. Here are some of the best productivity apps for iOS.” If you’re overwhelmed and can’t even think about productivity, you have my permission to cuss right out loud at this article.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNBC: GitHub head of HR resigns after investigation into firing of Jewish employee over Capitol riot comments. “Microsoft-owned GitHub, the code sharing site for software developers, said on Sunday that the company’s head of human resources resigned after an investigation into the company’s dismissal of a Jewish employee found ‘significant errors of judgment and procedure.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

MakeUseOf: How to Protect Yourself From Fraudulent Stores on Shopify. “A recent Fakespot report found roughly 20 percent of stores on Shopify are ‘related to fraudulent practices.’ This analysis found further startling information: of the nearly 26,000 stores found to be fraudulent, 39 percent percent had counterfeit issues, brand infringements, or a poor reputation; 28 percent had privacy leaks and suspiciously cheap listings; and 17 percent had negative reports from consumers. Here are some of the ways these fraudulent Shopify stores try to scam you.”

Politico: Census Bureau says Trump’s push to exclude undocumented is dead. “Outgoing President Donald Trump’s plan to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census totals used to apportion congressional seats is officially dead. The Census Bureau announced Saturday that data on apportionment — and a related calculation of the number of undocumented immigrants Trump has specifically requested — would not be released until after President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Phys .org: New mangrove forest mapping tool puts conservation in reach of coastal communities. “Approximately 35 percent of global mangrove cover was lost in the 1980s and ’90s. While the rate of loss slowed in the past two decades—to an estimated four percent between 1996 and 2016—many regions remain hotspots for mangrove loss, including Myanmar. My colleagues and I use satellite imagery and field measurements to study mangrove ecosystems in several countries. We’ve developed an accessible and intuitive tool that provides coastal managers with the accurate, reliable, up-to-date and locally relevant information they need for effective community-based conservation of these critical blue (marine) forests.”

FedTech: Air Force, Google Strike Agreement to Modernize Flight Training. “The Air Force has invested in virtual reality platforms in recent years to train pilots, and now is taking another leap forward in how it uses technology to prepare airmen to fly in actual, multimillion-dollar aircraft. In December, the Air Force, along with the Defense Department’s Defense Innovation Unit, announced an agreement with Google Cloud to modernize aspects of flight training via the use of cloud-based tools.” Good evening, Internet…

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January 19, 2021 at 05:37AM
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Weird Rabbit Hole: Spam on Medium

Weird Rabbit Hole: Spam on Medium
By ResearchBuzz

I don’t read Medium posts as much as I used to since the paywall was put in place. But I still keep an eye on it; there are plenty of good writers on there and I’ve found some great content. One thing I hadn’t spotted on Medium was spammy content. I’d seen more crap on Academia.edu. If you’d asked me I would have told you that there wasn’t any spam on Medium.

Well, if you’d asked me before today, anyway.

I was wondering about the news this evening, not sure if there was going to be the regular news lineup as it’s a federal holiday. So I googled msnbc schedule january 18 2021 as you might. Here’s what I got:

I looked at the first result from MSNBC and it had a lot of boilerplate, so I went back to the results page. The next few results looked spammy, but then I saw a link from Medium. It didn’t surprise me that Rachel Maddow might have a Medium presence; many media outlets do. Since it had the date in the title I was hopeful it was a schedule lineup and not just a description of the show.

Here’s what I got:

 

It looks okay for a second but then you realize everything’s stock and the text looks vaguely familiar. A quick googling of “With honesty and rigor, Rachel Maddow uniquely connects dots to advance stories.” takes you a ton of TV listings site. It’s all boilerplate.

As a matter of fact, using that boilerplate surfaced more Rachel-related spam on Medium. When I did a search for “With honesty and rigor, Rachel Maddow uniquely connects dots to advance stories.” site:medium I got no less than 599 search results, Just looking at the first page tells you that this is a search result full of pork shoulder and ham.

 

I took a look at a few of the sites. They look somewhat different but tend to follow a pattern: Stock information about the Rachel Maddow Show with dates covering the last couple of months, a ton of garbage text, and a repeat of the Rachel Maddow Show information.

Junk text meets Maddow boilerplate in screenshot of Medium spam site.

 

Obviously if someone went to this much trouble to create a Rachel Maddow Medium Spam Network they were trying to make money. I went looking for links and found https://cutt.ly/djIyMe5 and https://cutt.ly/ijvw8GR for example. The first one unshortens to http://watchhotx.dplaytv.net/series/181561/2021/9 , while the second one unshortens to http://putlocker.online-tvs.com/series/181561/2021/4 .

I had never heard of either of these sites. Dplaytv.net looks like some kind of video streaming site. Online-tvs.com I didn’t see directly, but I saw a lot of links to it. I also saw some Medium URLs, again, so I experimentally did a Google search for “online-tvs.com” site:medium.com and, well, 11,000 results kind of tells it like it is.

Searching Medium for mentions of online-tvs.com

 

That’s a pretty extensive network. (In fact it’s extensive enough that I wonder if Medium does in fact have what I consider classic spam, or in other words ads for sex drugs. So I goog’d for (“viagra without” | “cialis without”) site:medium.com . And I got results, but they were relatively limited — 112 results, far less than even the Maddow-specific spam content. Anyway.) I didn’t see any indication that the two streaming sites had affiliate programs, so I guess this is just a traffic push to make money on advertising?

I had never ascribed any automatic credibility to Medium because it’s more of a platform than a publisher, and I don’t consider these spam sites particularly hazardous, as they’re obvious garbage trying to get clicks. But isn’t it wild to see so much at once!

January 19, 2021 at 05:34AM
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January 6 Videos, Rhode Island Newspapers, Google Forms, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 18, 2021

January 6 Videos, Rhode Island Newspapers, Google Forms, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 18, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

ProPublica: Inside the Capitol Riot: What the Parler Videos Reveal. “Parler’s failure to ‘effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others’ led Amazon to expel the site from its cloud-hosting servers. Some people managed to grab the material before Parler went down, and one of them shared a trove of videos with ProPublica. We culled the collection to some 500 videos uploaded to Parler by people in the vicinity of the White House and Capitol on Jan. 6, and sorted them by time and location, thus giving the public an immersive experience that would previously have been impossible to achieve without being there amid the clouds of tear gas and pepper spray and the crush of bodies pressing toward their goal.”

US News & World Report: Historic Rhode Island Newspapers Digitized, Available Online. “The archives of several historic Rhode Island newspapers have been digitized and are now freely available for researchers, the Providence Public Library and the Rhode Island Historical Society said.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Parler vows to return after Amazon pulls hosting amid concerns over violent posts. “Parler CEO John Matze posted a message to the company’s website over the weekend, promising the Twitter alternative would return after it went dark when Amazon cut off hosting services.”

NPR: Social Media Site Gab Is Surging, Even As Critics Blame It For Capitol Violence. “The plans to storm the Capitol were unfolding online in plain sight on niche social media sites and Facebook and Twitter long before the attack happened on Jan 6. Critics say social media companies, to varying degrees, permitted talk of the violence to persist without cracking down enough. As federal investigators launch criminal cases against some of the perpetrators of the violence, a growing chorus advocates and lawmakers say tech companies bear some responsibility, too.”

USEFUL STUFF

Digital Inspiration: How to Send a File to Participants After they Submit your Google Form. “Google Forms for Giveways! How to send a file attachement like PDF ebook or MP3 music to form respondents after they complete the quiz or survey and submit your Google Form.”

ZDNet: How to switch from Windows 7 to Chrome OS CloudReady. “The main reason to use this as a Windows alternative is its ease of use. It’s also free for individual users who don’t require Google Admin tools. The only difference between the home version and the two business ones is is it doesn’t come with technical support or access to Google Admin Console. Besides giving your Windows 7 PC a new lease on life, you’ll find it will make it peppier. CloudReady is much lighter on system resources than any version of Windows.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

USA Today: Extremists exploit a loophole in social moderation: Podcasts on Apple, Google. “Major social platforms have been cracking down on the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories in the leadup to the presidential election, and expanded their efforts in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. But Apple and Google, among others, have left open a major loophole for this material: podcasts.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Al Jazeera: Pakistan court sentences three to death for blasphemy. “An anti-terrorism court in Pakistan has handed death sentences to three people for social media posts deemed insulting to Prophet Muhammad under the country’s blasphemy laws.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechCrunch: Zocdoc founder returns with Shadow, an app that finds lost dogs. “Every year, around 10 million pets go missing in the U.S., and millions of those end up in shelters where they aren’t always reunited with their owners, due to their lack of identification or a microchip. A new mobile app, Shadow, aims to tackle this problem by leveraging a combination of a volunteer network and A.I. technology to help dog owners, in particular.”

EurekAlert: Can we be manipulated into sharing private info online? Yes, says Ben-Gurion U. study. “Online users are more likely to reveal private information based on how website forms are structured to elicit data, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers have determined.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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January 19, 2021 at 12:51AM
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Women’s Rights, WhatsApp, Wikipedia, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, January 18, 2021

Women’s Rights, WhatsApp, Wikipedia, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, January 18, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

British Library: Creating a Web Collection for the exhibition – Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women’s Rights. “The core aim of the collection was to capture websites that reflect the activism around women’s rights online. From the beginning we also recognised that the scope for this collection was difficult to define and that sites relevant to this collection would come from many areas and would not focus solely on feminism, gender and women’s studies but also subjects such as family history, society and culture and welfare for example.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ghacks: WhatsApp makes data-sharing with Facebook mandatory. “One core difference between the new and the old privacy policy is that all users who accept the new privacy policy will have data shared with Facebook. Whatsapp is a Facebook company, as Facebook acquired the messaging service in 2015. Previously, existing users who accepted the revised privacy policy of 2019 could opt-out of having data shared with Facebook, provided that they did so in the first 30-days after accepting the terms.”

MarketWatch: Wikipedia turns 20 years old today — the free encyclopedia gets more traffic than Netflix. “Wikipedia was launched on Jan. 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as an English-language encyclopedia, according to — aptly — Wikipedia. Since then, the website has become every undergrad’s first stop when embarking on a research paper, the go-to site for cheating in trivia, and my personal favorite — The Wiki Game. Wikipedia is the 13th most popular website on the internet, ahead of Netflix NFLX and Reddit. With 55 million articles, the site attracts 1.5 billion unique visitors a month.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 7 Ways to Free Up Storage Space on Google Photos. “While Google Photos has proudly offered free high-quality photo storage for years, that’s changing in 2021. Beginning June 1, all ‘high-quality’ photos you upload to Google Photos will start to count against your Google account storage. If you relied on the free storage and are now worried about running out of space, you can prepare yourself and avoid paying for more storage by freeing up space in Google Photos. Follow the below tips to free up storage space in Google Photos—as a bonus, you’ll also clean up your photo library while at it.”

TechCrunch: PrivacyGrader is a free tool to help companies get smarter about data and disclosures. “In order to use PrivacyGrader, you need to have an authenticated email address tied to the website that you want analyzed — so you shouldn’t be able to see your competitors’ grades. Once your request and email address are validated, Vaidya said you should get an analysis back in less than 24 hours, which will score your site across more than 50 different factors, including trackers, storage of personal data and overall compliance with GDPR, CCPA and other regulations.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BBC: The Instagrammers who worry Iran. “As the only major social media network not blocked by the government, Instagram is a popular platform for young Iranians to express themselves. This has created a dilemma for the government, which experts say is loath to block the tool for fear of provoking unrest, hampering business owners who rely on it for advertising, and severing a useful means of communication with its citizens. Instead, the government has attempted to act as a moderator.”

The Guardian: Historians having to tape together records that Trump tore up. “The public will not see Donald Trump’s White House records for years, but there is growing concern the collection will never be complete – leaving a hole in the history of one of America’s most tumultuous presidencies. Trump has been cavalier about the law requiring that records be preserved. He has a habit of ripping up documents before tossing them out, forcing White House workers to spend hours taping them back together.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

KTLA: New app to help California family, friends schedule video visits with inmates at 4 state prisons. “The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has announced a new tool to help friends and family visit inmates. The Visitation Scheduling Application app can be accessed on smartphones, tablets and computers and allows approved visitors to easily schedule their own video visits and receive instant confirmation. The CDCR said the app will first be used to schedule video visits at four state prisons: San Quentin State Prison, Valley State Prison, the California Institution for Men and the Central California Women’s Facility.”

Reuters: Google Play is unsportsmanlike, U.S. states likely to argue in potential lawsuit. “State attorneys general are planning a third lawsuit against Alphabet Inc’s Google, this one focused on the search and advertising giant’s Play Store for Android phones, according to two sources familiar with the matter.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Techdirt: A Few More Thoughts On The Total Deplatforming Of Parler & Infrastructure Content Moderation. “I’ve delayed writing deeper thoughts on the total deplatforming of Parler, in part because there was so much else happening (including some more timely posts about Parler’s lawsuit regarding it), but more importantly because for years I’ve been calling for people to think more deeply about content moderation at the infrastructure layer, rather than at the edge. Because those issues are much more complicated than the usual content moderation debates.”

CNET: After Twitter banned Trump, misinformation plummeted, says report. “The week after Twitter banned President Donald Trump from its platform, online misinformation about election fraud fell by a whopping 73%, according to a Saturday report by The Washington Post. Talk around election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across a selection of social media sites, the Post reported, citing data from researcher Zignal Labs.” Good morning, Internet…

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January 18, 2021 at 06:20PM
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