New researches

Sunday, January 24, 2021

Museum of Chinese in America, Google Search, Google Chrome, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, January 24, 2021

Museum of Chinese in America, Google Search, Google Chrome, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, January 24, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Art Newspaper: A year after fire, Museum of Chinese in America launches digital platform with Google to celebrate its historical treasures. “A year after a fire broke out in its New York archive, prompting a herculean effort to salvage its historical artefacts, the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) today launched a digital platform with Google Arts & Culture to make hundreds of digitised images of its treasures available online. The chief attraction is a new virtual exhibition titled Trial by Fire: The Race to Save 200 Years of Chinese American History, which traces the recovery effort after the fire nearly destroyed the museum’s collection of more than 85,000 items on 23 January 2020.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Blog: A Google designer takes us inside Search’s mobile redesign. “The beginning of a new year inspires people everywhere to make changes. It’s when many of us take stock of our lives, our careers or even just our surroundings and think about what improvements we can make. That’s also been the case for Google designer Aileen Cheng. Aileen recently led a major visual redesign of the mobile Search experience, which rolls out in the coming days.”

Neowin: Google Chrome adds experimental share button in Custom Tabs. “In 2015, Google introduced Custom Tabs to Chrome on Android to provide a smooth transition from app to web content without resorting to a WebView. Compared to WebViews, the feature loads faster and allows apps to customize their web experience. However, Custom Tabs do not have a default sharing experience on the app bar that users can tap to post content to their social media accounts, for example.”

NiemanLab: After the Capitol riots, platforms, archivists, conspiracists, and investigators collide. “Some of the entries in our 2021 predictions package proved gloomily prescient this week as a mob stormed the Capitol, incited by Trump’s baseless claims that he won the election. ‘A lot of America slipped into conspiracy thinking during this pandemic, and they got there from yoga Instagrams and NFL forums and private church choir Facebook groups that were systematically invaded by QAnon and anti-vax recruiters,’ NBC’s Ben Collins had written in his prediction. ‘It’s going to be a rude awakening in the next few months as we find out which of our friends got sucked into truly astonishing tales of New World Orders and Great Resets that helped them cope — and just so happen to be spectacularly wrong.'”

USEFUL STUFF

Mashable: Never trust a single source: The new rules for learning anything online. “If you’d like to learn more on any topic without getting drunk, or just brush up your research skills before annoying your family again, here’s my advice, drawn from years in the internet trenches in the ongoing war between fact and falsehood. You shouldn’t just take my word for it, of course, so I’ve included links to further reading after each guideline.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Guardian: Rolling Stone seeks ‘thought leaders’ willing to pay $2,000 to write for them. “Rolling Stone magazine is offering ‘thought leaders’ the chance to write for its website if they are willing to pay $2,000 to ‘shape the future of culture’. The storied magazine, which has published journalism by writers including Hunter S Thompson, Patti Smith and Tom Wolfe, approached would-be members of its new ‘Culture Council’ by email, telling them that they had the chance to join ‘an invitation-only community for innovators, influencers and tastemakers’.”

CR Fashion Book: The Lure Of Luxury: Why Tiktokers Are Buying $20 Chanel Cotton Pads. “With TikTok’s popularity and the fact that it’s a video platform, it seems natural that the new unboxing trend would emerge there. So what exactly is this new trend? TikTok users have been going viral for unboxing the cheapest items from luxury brands like Chanel, Hermes, Dior, and more. The TikTok shopping hack went viral after several users started buying Chanel Le Coton, the $20 extra soft cotton from the brand.”

CNET: Bernie Sanders’ inauguration mittens meme: The funniest versions. “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn in as president and vice president on Wednesday in a fanfare-filled inauguration ceremony. But neither set the national meme machine churning in quite the same way as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. An image of him sitting with his arms crossed, wearing a mask and big, cozy mittens, has been shared and tweaked endlessly — and even inspired a bobblehead figurine.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: CISA: Hackers bypassed MFA to access cloud service accounts. “While threat actors tried gaining access to some of their targets’ cloud assets via brute force attacks, they failed due to their inability to guess the correct credentials or because the attacked organization had MFA authentication enabled. However, in at least one incident, attackers were able to successfully sign into a user’s account even though the target had multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled.”

ZDNet: Hackers publish thousands of files after government agency refuses to pay ransom. “The hackers behind the ransomware attack on the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) have published thousands of stolen files after the organisation refused to pay the ransom.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

BBC: How to investigate a firm with 60 million documents. “Ms [Yousr] Khalil and a 70-strong team faced an ocean of files, transaction data and emails spanning worldwide activities, most of them entirely innocuous. So how did they plot a course through? Artificial intelligence (AI) and a bespoke computer unlike any PC you have ever worked on played a big part in this epic data trawl. A daunting collection of 500 million documents and transactions had to be whittled down.”

Phys .org: Experts call for more pragmatic approach to higher education teaching. “In a new paper, Professor Newton, Dr. Ana Da Silva and Sam Berry argue that the findings of higher education research are not being used to develop and benefit educational practice. They say belief in ineffective methods such as Learning Styles persist, teaching quality and teacher performance are measured using subjective and potentially biased feedback while university educators have limited access to professional development.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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January 25, 2021 at 12:27AM
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Saturday, January 23, 2021

Arnold Edmondson, Malware Strains, Tucows, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 23, 2021

Arnold Edmondson, Malware Strains, Tucows, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 23, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Charleston City Paper: Over 40 years of Arnold Edmondson’s art cataloged in digital archive. “Art historian Naomi Edmondson, the daughter of late Lowcountry artist Arnold Edmondson, recently created an online archive of her father’s expansive body of visual art pieces. Through the archive, Naomi is attempting to digitize over 40 years of visual art from Arnold’s career.”

ZDNet: New website launched to document vulnerabilities in malware strains. “A security researcher launched this month a web portal that lists vulnerabilities in the code of common malware strains. The researcher hopes other security professionals will use the bugs to crash, disable, and uninstall malware on infected hosts as part of incident response operations.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Tucows closes its once-popular software download site. “It was inevitable, really. In the early days of the internet, Tucows was known as a reliable place to find and download new software. Today, however, most people are happy to use a modern App Store — Microsoft and Apple both run their own — or navigate to developer websites directly. And if you’re looking for inspiration, there’s always Product Hunt. Tucows has decided, therefore, to finally shut down Tucows Downloads.”

NPR: Fast-Growing Alternative To Facebook And Twitter Finds Post-Trump Surge ‘Messy’. “Shortly after the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Facebook and Twitter kicked off Trump and cracked down on groups involved in organizing the insurrection. By now, many of those users — and those who sympathize with them — have found alternative platforms on which to spread their messages.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: How to Delist Your Facebook Profile From Search Engines. “Facebook allows search engines like Google to index your profile and publicly available information. But if you don’t want people to be able to look up your social profile outside of Facebook, you can choose to delist it. Here’s how.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Dublin People: National Library receives records of #WakingTheFeminists movement for future digital preservation. “The National Library of Ireland has today announced the donation of the archive of the #WakingTheFeminists movement to the national collection. The donation was marked by an online event, attended by Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin. #WakingTheFeminists was a highly successful grassroots campaign for equality for women in Irish theatre that ran from 2015-2016.”

USA Today: Racist falsehoods about George Floyd, Jacob Blake and Breonna Taylor are still on Facebook, Avaaz report finds. “Fabricated claims debunked by fact-checkers targeting victims of police brutality George Floyd, Jacob Blake and Breonna Taylor remain on Facebook, despite pledges by the social media giant to support the Black community, a new investigation from human rights group Avaaz found.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

JD Supra: New Law Gives Pennsylvania Executors Power Over Decedents’ Social Media And Other Digital Content. “Pennsylvania recently became one of the last states to enact a law treating digital assets and electronic records as tangible property, which allows executors, trustees, guardians, and agents to access and manage the digital assets of decedents. Now beneficiaries have access to and may take possession of their loved ones’ photos, music, videos, email messages, and other digital content that are hosted on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram and stored by tech giants like Apple and Google.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Wired: The Strange Theater of Watching the Inauguration on Social Media. “The laser focus on Wednesday’s inauguration was to be expected—they always draw large audiences—but the attention paid to the symbols was significant. It was reflective of a populace craving a sign, and also wanting it to be more than that. Purple is nice, but it can’t manifest bipartisanship. Calling attention to that fact, even via tweet, is a way of both acknowledging the shift in priorities that comes with the new administration and promising to hold them accountable. The web is watching.”

WLRN: Florida Unveils New Statewide Sea Rise Mapping Tool. “Florida environmental regulators say they are creating the state’s first uniform sea rise level projections as part of a new law to better prepare coastal projects paid for with state money. A draft version of the new mapping tool was unveiled Tuesday as part of a workshop on rules to implement the law.”

January 24, 2021 at 01:33AM
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Saturday CoronaBuzz, January 23, 2021: 21 pointers to updates, useful stuff, research news, and more.

Saturday CoronaBuzz, January 23, 2021: 21 pointers to updates, useful stuff, research news, and more.
By ResearchBuzz

Please wear a mask. Wash your hands. Stay at home if you can. Please be careful. I love you.

NEW RESOURCES – MEDICAL/HEALTH

New York Times: See How the Vaccine Rollout Is Going in Your State. “The New York Times surveyed all 50 states and found that 43 states and Washington, D.C., have begun giving shots to older people. Many of those states initially offered vaccines only to medical workers and nursing home residents. And 39 states and Washington, D.C., have expanded their occupation-based vaccination programs to include some non-medical workers, such as police officers, teachers, grocery store employees or others at risk of being exposed to the virus on the job. The sudden expansion of vaccine eligibility has caused problems as states sought to increase capacity and people tried to figure out how to sign up for appointments. The table below, which will be updated regularly but may lag slightly, shows who is eligible for vaccination in each state.”

NEW RESOURCES – STATE-SPECIFIC

WFTV: State launches vaccine locator website but omits some counties, locations. “A new tool is showing Florida residents where to get the COVID-19 vaccine But like the rest of the rollout, the new locator is not perfect, because some counties are missing from the tool.”

UPDATES

BBC: Coronavirus vaccine delays halt Pfizer jabs in parts of Europe. “Vaccinations in parts of Europe are being held up and in some cases halted because of a cut in deliveries of the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine. Germany’s most populous state and several regions in Italy have suspended first jabs, while vaccinations for medics in Madrid have been stopped too. The US pharmaceutical firm has had to cut deliveries temporarily while cases in many European countries surge.”

SOCIETAL IMPACT

BuzzFeed News: Six Trans People Talk About Their Pandemic Bodies. “That said, not everyone is experiencing positive or affirming changes to their gender because of the conditions created by the pandemic, especially those who feel most affirmed within their communities. Still, many people are taking time to think more deeply about their gender and how it plays out in the world at large, whether that means not shaving for a prolonged period of time, choosing different clothing, or adjusting their pronouns in their Zoom window. I opened my inbox to people who are experiencing changes in their gender during the pandemic. Here are a few of their stories.”

HEALTH CARE / HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS

BBC: Serum Institute: Fire at world’s largest vaccine producer kills five. “Five people have been killed in a fire at the site of the world’s largest vaccine producer in western India. The blaze started at a building which was still under construction at the Serum Institute of India’s facilities in Pune on Thursday afternoon.”

Texas Tribune: Facing a crush of COVID-19 patients, ICUs are completely full in at least 50 Texas hospitals. “More than 50 Texas hospitals are currently reporting that their ICUs are 100% full or higher, and a dozen of them have been full for more than half of the 24 weeks since hospitals began reporting that information in July, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of data released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.”

BUSINESS / CORPORATIONS

BBC: Shoppers stuck at home shun new clothes in 2020. “Shoppers bought far fewer clothes last year as lockdowns meant people had less opportunity to socialise and go out. Clothes sales slumped 25%, the biggest drop in 23 years when records began, official figures suggest. While shops have reported demand for certain clothing such as pyjamas and loungewear has risen, demand for going-out items has fallen sharply.”

STATE / LOCAL GOVERNMENT

SF Gate: Did shutting down outdoor dining contribute to California’s COVID-19 surge?. “There has been no such linkage between outdoor dining and COVID-19 transmission, but California banned the activity in most of the state in early December, despite being one of the few states with a winter climate that would support it. Despite the ban, California has had one of the worst winter COVID-19 surges in the country, which begs the following question: Is it possible that shutting down outdoor dining made the state’s surge even worse? Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at UCSF, believes it’s highly likely.”

COUNTRY / FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

BBC: Biden to sign 10 executive orders to tackle Covid. “President Joe Biden is set to sign 10 executive orders to boost the fight against Covid which has ravaged the US. Vaccination will be accelerated and testing increased. Emergency legislation will be used to increase production of essentials like masks.”

Politico: ‘Packed us together like sardines’: Guard deployed to Capitol struggles to contain Covid. “The National Guard has struggled to implement a plan to test troops flowing into and out of Washington, D.C., for Covid-19, with some Guard members being forced to find their own tests and others pressured to leave their quarantine early to report to duty.”

NPR: At First Wary Of Vaccine, Cherokee Speaker Says It Safeguards Language, Culture . “The Cherokee Nation is using its first doses of coronavirus vaccine to preserve culture in addition to saving lives. Cherokees, based in eastern Oklahoma, have directed some of their early doses of vaccine to frontline medical workers and the elderly — and have reserved some doses for Cherokee language speakers. The Cherokee Nation has had more than 11,000 positive cases of COVID-19 and 63 deaths, including at least 20 Cherokee speakers.”

CNN: Biden inheriting nonexistent coronavirus vaccine distribution plan and must start ‘from scratch,’ sources say. “The Biden administration has promised to try to turn the Covid-19 pandemic around and drastically speed up the pace of vaccinating Americans against the virus. But in the immediate hours following Biden being sworn into office on Wednesday, sources with direct knowledge of the new administration’s Covid-related work told CNN one of the biggest shocks that the Biden team had to digest during the transition period was what they saw as a complete lack of a vaccine distribution strategy under former President Donald Trump, even weeks after multiple vaccines were approved for use in the United States.”

Brussels Times: Covid-19: Once vaccinated, details go on a Belgian online database. “The storage of data of anyone who has been vaccinated is being described as a service for the public, to allow them to present a certificate of vaccination to anyone who may demand it. Examples include the authorities of other countries who require visitors to show a certificate to enter the territory and escape quarantine.”

BBC: Coronavirus: Hungary first in EU to approve Russian vaccine. “Hungary has become the first country in the European Union to give preliminary approval to the Russian coronavirus vaccine, Sputnik V. On Thursday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff confirmed both the Russian jab and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine had been given the green light by the health authorities.”

MIT Technology Review: This is Biden’s seven-point plan for tackling the pandemic. “The plan is a distillation of a 200-page strategy document which sets out his intentions, some of which have already started to be put into action through executive orders. Thousands of Americans are currently dying of covid-19 every day, and the US death toll is just weeks away from reaching half a million, so the task could not be more urgent.”

INDIVIDUALS / BANDS / GROUPS

CBC: This N.S. historian spent years researching the Spanish flu. Now she’s living in a pandemic. “When historian Ruth Holmes Whitehead started research in 2017 for a book looking at the Spanish flu outbreak in Nova Scotia a century prior, she had no idea she’d end up living in a pandemic. ‘It’s awful because you sort of automatically have this [bad] feeling … how this is going to turn out,’ said the author of Nova Scotia and the Great Influenza Pandemic, 1918-1920, which was published last November.”

Pitchfork: Dave Chappelle Tests Positive for COVID-19, Cancels Texas Shows. “Dave Chappelle has canceled performances scheduled at Stubbs in Austin, Texas after testing positive for COVID-19, TMZ reports and Chappelle’s representative confirmed to Pitchfork. The canceled dates were among a handful the comedian had booked through this weekend. He had already performed the first of the Austin gigs on Wednesday. Tickets are being refunded.”

New York Times: Prompted by the Pandemic, Opera Philadelphia Innovates Online. “What can an opera company actually do in a pandemic? Yes, some previously planned performances can be turned into livestreams, and broadcasts of past stagings can be made freely available — if only to remind the public what it’s missing. But where some companies might be resigned to only that, Opera Philadelphia pluckily spent 2020 commissioning new work and launching its own streaming service.”

CRIME / SECURITY / LEGAL

Coconuts KL: Police investigating COVID-19 patients who turned MAEPS quarantine center into mini casino (Video). “The police are looking into a series of videos circulating online that showed COVID-19 patients purportedly gambling while isolating at the Malaysia Agro Exposition Park Serdang, or MAEPS. At least four videos had shown men gathering at a bunk bed and playing what appears to be the Chinese game Big Two, or Dai Di with money.”

BBC: Tunisia youths warned over riots amid Covid curfew. “Protesters who broke a coronavirus curfew to continue riots for a fifth night have been warned by Tunisia’s prime minister to stop their violence. More than 600 people, mainly between the ages of 14 and 15, have already been arrested after police clashes. Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi acknowledged their anger about a range of economic and social hardships.”

CNET: COVID-19 vaccines offered by email or text? How to identify a phishing scam. “Online scammers have used crises and major events to con people for years. The pandemic has created an appealing situation because the entire world is aware of the disease and the hardship it’s caused in everyone’s lives. On top of that, the virus has pushed many work from from home offices, where they still have access to sensitive workplace information. From a criminal’s perspective, it’s a great opportunity to get lots of people to act against their better judgment.”

CoronaBuzz is brought to you by ResearchBuzz. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment, send resource suggestions, or tag @buzz_corona on Twitter. Thanks!

January 23, 2021 at 07:46PM
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January 6, Uffizi Museum, Windows 10, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, January 23, 2021

January 6, Uffizi Museum, Windows 10, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, January 23, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Wired: This Site Published Every Face From Parler’s Capitol Riot Videos. “Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared. The site’s creator tells WIRED that he used simple open source machine learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot that resulted in five people’s deaths.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Blooloop: Uffizi museum launches Superchef Facebook cooking show. “The Uffizi Museum has launched a Superchef Facebook cooking show. Italian chefs will cook recipes inspired by the Uffizi live on Facebook as the gallery extends its social media engagement.” The videos are in Italian.

BetaNews: Microsoft releases KB4598298 update to fix Windows 10 crashes and restart problems. “We might only be three weeks into 2021, but Microsoft has already issued a number of patches for Windows 10 — and now it’s time for another one. If you have been experiencing unexpected restarts in Windows 10, or crashes when using BitLocker, there’s a new update for you to install.”

USEFUL STUFF

Ghacks: NeeView is an open source image viewer that displays two images simultaneously like pages from a book . “Most image viewer programs allow you to view one image at a time. I’m not talking about thumbnails, but a larger view of the pictures. If you want to browse your photo directories and view two images simultaneously, you should try NeeView.”

Make Tech Easier: Free Tools to Check SD Card Speed and Capacity . “SD and microSD cards are used for storage in a variety of devices. For example, you may move your offline Spotify playlist to an microSD card. Unfortunately, there are many fake SD and microSD cards floating around on the Internet. Even reputable online marketplaces like Amazon aren’t immune to the influx of useless cards being flogged to unsuspecting consumers. That’s why you need a fake SD card test to avoid getting scammed.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Travel + Leisure: This Instagram Account Shows You the Most Insane Home Listings on Zillow. “If you’ve spent any time on the internet during the pandemic, odds are you’ve found yourself scrolling through Zillow listings a time or two. And, if you check Zillow listings daily, don’t worry. You’re not alone. According to The New York Times, Zillow usage is up more than 50 percent year-over-year. But, while looking through the listings, you’ve likely also found yourself saying ‘what the…’ about some of the truly zany homes with million-dollar price tags.”

Neowin: Mozilla sets out its four climate commitments. “Mozilla has set out its climate commitments today as it aims to significantly reduce its emissions and mitigate what it can’t avoid. Things it plans to implement include switching its offices to renewable energy, reviewing its travel policies, exploring cloud optimisation, and developing toolkits “for product integrity and design principles.” It will share more details of its plans as it works them out.”

New York Times: Inside Twitter’s Decision to Cut Off Trump. “Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, was working remotely on a private island in French Polynesia frequented by celebrities escaping the paparazzi when a phone call interrupted him on Jan. 6. On the line was Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top lawyer and safety expert, with an update from the real world.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BuzzFeed News: A Home Security Tech Hacked Into Cameras To Watch People Undressing And Having Sex, Prosecutors Say. “A home security technician admitted Thursday that he secretly accessed the cameras of more than 200 customers, particularly attractive women, to spy on while they undressed, slept, or had sex, federal prosecutors said. Telesforo Aviles, a 35-year-old former employee for the security company ADT, admitted he secretly accessed the customers’ accounts more than 9,600 times over more than four years, according to a guilty plea submitted in court.”

The Verge: House leader calls for FBI investigation into Parler. “In a letter sent to FBI Director Christopher Wray, House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) called for the bureau to ‘conduct a robust examination of the role that the social media site Parler played’ in the January 6th pro-Trump assault on the Capitol. Maloney said that the committee intends to open its own investigation and requested a meeting with FBI officials regarding the status and scope of any future investigation into the social media platform.”

Reuters: EU lawmakers want Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google CEOs at Feb. 1 hearing. “EU lawmakers have invited the chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet to a Feb. 1 hearing in Brussels as they try to crack down on the powers of U.S. tech giants.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNET: Microsoft patent details tech that could turn dead people into AI chatbots. “An AI chatbot that lets you interact with dead loved ones sounds like something straight out of science fiction. But if technology in a patent granted to Microsoft comes to fruition, interacting with a chatty 3D digital version of the deceased could one day become de rigueur.” Good morning, Internet…

January 23, 2021 at 06:25PM
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Friday, January 22, 2021

Berbice Slave Uprising, Project Loon, LowKey, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 22, 2021

Berbice Slave Uprising, Project Loon, LowKey, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 22, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Guardian: Dutch exhibition offers new insight into Berbice slave uprising. “The Dutch national archives are showcasing a unique set of letters sent by the leader of the first organised slave revolt on the American continent to a colonial governor, in which the newly free man proposed to share the land. The offer from the man known as Cuffy, from Kofi – meaning ‘born on Friday’ – is said to provide a new insight into attempts to resist the brutal regimes of the colonial period, often overlooked in histories of enslaved people.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Google parent Alphabet to shut down Loon, its internet-beaming balloon project. “The project was born out of X, Alphabet’s self-described moonshot factory for experimental projects, which has also developed the company’s driverless car and delivery drone services. Alphabet, however, deemed Loon’s business model unsustainable and said it couldn’t get costs low enough to continue operation.”

USEFUL STUFF

The Register: LowKey cool: This web app will tweak your photos to flummox facial-recognition systems, apparently . “The application, called LowKey, is intended to protect people from unauthorized surveillance. It’s based on an adversarial attack technique developed by University of Maryland boffins Valeriia Cherepanova, Micah Goldblum, Shiyuan Duan, John Dickerson, Gavin Taylor, Tom Goldstein, and US Naval Academy researcher Harrison Foley. It alters images so facial recognition systems can’t easily use the data to find the depicted person in another image.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Boston Globe: Boston Globe launches ‘Fresh Start’ initiative: People can apply to have archive stories about them reviewed. “The Boston Globe announced a new program that will allow people to ask the newspaper to update or anonymize past coverage of them online. The ‘Fresh Start’ initiative is part of a broader effort to rethink the Globe’s criminal justice coverage and how it affects communities of color, amid a national reckoning over racial inequity. Similar to ‘right to forget’ programs that have cropped up in a number of newsrooms across the country, the undertaking is meant to address the lasting impact that stories about past embarrassments, mistakes, or minor crimes, forever online and searchable, can have on a person’s life.”

BuzzFeed News: Facebook Has Been Showing Military Gear Ads Next To Insurrection Posts. “In the aftermath of an attempted insurrection by President Donald Trump’s supporters last week at the US Capitol building, Facebook has served up ads for defense products to accounts that follow extremist content, according to the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit watchdog group. Those ads — which include New Year’s specials for specialized body armor plates, rifle enhancements, and shooting targets — were all delivered to a TTP Facebook account used to monitor right-wing content that could incite violence.”

ABC News (Australia): Rare soldier’s diary reveals secret massacre of Indigenous Tasmanians after almost 200 years. “A soldier’s diary disintegrating in Ireland’s national library has revealed disturbing evidence of an undocumented massacre of Aboriginal people in Tasmania in the colony’s early years. The diary belonged to Private Robert McNally, posted to Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s, and records in gritty detail colonial life and encounters with settlers and a notorious bushranger.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Australian competition watchdog warns Google, Facebook laws are just the start. “Australia’s competition regulator has warned that planned laws to make the country the first in the world to force Google and Facebook to pay for news content were likely just the start of more regulation for digital platforms.”

Bleeping Computer: Bonobos clothing store confirms breach after hacker leaks 70GB database. “Bonobos men’s clothing store has suffered a massive data breach exposing millions of customers’ personal information. Bonobos started as an online men’s clothing store but later expanded to sixty locations to try on clothes before purchasing them. Walmart bought Bonobos in 2017 for $300 million to sells its clothing on their Jet.com site.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Science: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub, the pirated-papers website. “Twitter… permanently suspended the account of Sci-Hub, the website that has posted millions of freely accessible copies of scientific articles pirated from subscription journals. Twitter said Sci-Hub had violated its policy against promoting ‘counterfeit goods,’ according to Sci-Hub’s founder, Alexandra Elbakyan.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

CNBC: How to put Bernie Sanders into any shot on Google Maps Street View or Snapchat. “An image of Sen. Bernie Sanders became an instant sensation Wednesday after the senator was photographed sitting cross-armed in knit mittens, a mask and a winter parka at President Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony. Before long, the image had spread far and wide as a reaction meme. People also quickly figured out how to help people make their own Bernie memes using Snapchat and a meme generator that uses Google Maps Street View.” Good afternoon, Internet…

January 23, 2021 at 03:36AM
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Mapping Insecurity, VoterFraud2020, Delaware Black History, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, January 22, 2021

Mapping Insecurity, VoterFraud2020, Delaware Black History, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, January 22, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

Hi. My mother went into ICU a week ago this morning. She got out yesterday. She’s doing better (knock wood knock wood KNOCK WOOD) and I might exhale sometime in the next week or two. Hug your people. Wear a mask. I love you.

NEW RESOURCES

The Soufan Center: Mapping Insecurity: Tracking Domestic Violent Extremism . “The Mapping Insecurity project is an interactive tracker that will allow users to follow the law enforcement response to the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, and will be updated to reflect the broader threat from domestic violent extremism. This initiative builds on longstanding work by The Soufan Center (TSC) to highlight the threat posed by domestic violent extremists, including white supremacists and violent anti-government groups. It includes a resource library of TSC publications and briefings, as well as an updated interactive map to track arrests across the United States, drawing on primary data provided by U.S. government sources.”

Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute: VoterFraud2020. “We are making publicly available VoterFraud2020, a multi-modal Twitter dataset with 7.6M tweets and 25.6M retweets from 2.6M users that includes key phrases and hashtags related to voter fraud claims between October 23rd and December 16th. The dataset also includes the full set of links and YouTube videos shared in these tweets, with data about their spread in different Twitter sub-communities.”

EVENTS

State of Delaware: Cultural Affairs division celebrates Black history. “During the month of February 2021, the Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs will be offering three virtual programs streamed live on the Web. Two of these programs will be presented in commemoration of National African American History Month, an annual observance celebrating the invaluable contributions that the Black community has made to the culture and history of the United States. All programs are free and open to the public.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ABC News: Facebook passes final decision to ban Trump to oversight board. “Facebook said Thursday it was referring the decision to indefinitely suspend Donald Trump’s account to its newly-formed oversight board to make the final call on what will happen to the former president’s accounts.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

TechCrunch: Google inks agreement in France on paying publishers for news reuse. “Google has reached an agreement with an association of French publishers over how it will be pay for reuse of snippets of their content. This is a result of application of a ‘neighbouring right’ for news which was transposed into national law following a pan-EU copyright reform agreed back in 2019. The tech giant had sought to evade paying French publishers for reuse of snippets of content in its news aggregation and search products by no longer displaying them in the country.”

CBC: Archive brings history of Nova Scotia’s aging LGBT community to life. “Researchers at Dalhousie University in Halifax are creating an archive of materials relating to the LGBT community in Nova Scotia dating back to the mid-1900s. Jacqueline Gahagan, lead researcher on the project, said living in Halifax where there’s a naval base and a strong military presence made the creation of the archive even more important because many LGBT people in that era were kicked out of the military after being outed.”

BuzzFeed News: “If They Won’t Hear Us, They Will Fear Us”: How The Capitol Assault Was Planned On Facebook. “Right-wing extremists used Facebook to make calls to overthrow the government and storm the US Capitol in the period leading up to a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, a tech watchdog group has found, contradicting attempts by the social media company to downplay the role of its platform in the affair.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BetaNews: Serious Windows 10 flaw could corrupt your hard drive if you open a folder. “A security researcher has revealed details of a strange bug that could result in an NTFS hard drive becoming corrupt in Windows 10, as well as the unsupported Windows XP. What makes the bug so serious and unusual is that it can be triggered without the user having to open a file.”

I apologize in advance for the language. Motherboard: ‘Your Cock Is Mine Now:’ Hacker Locks Internet-Connected Chastity Cage, Demands Ransom. “A hacker took control of people’s internet-connected chastity cages and demanded a ransom to be paid in Bitcoin to unlock it. ‘Your cock is mine now,’ the hacker told one of the victims, according to a screenshot of the conversation obtained by a security researcher that goes by the name Smelly and is the founder of vx-underground, a website that collects malware samples.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Nature: How to include Indigenous researchers and their knowledge. “Although racial-justice initiatives around the world have sparked a renewed focus on the need to recruit and retain more people from minority ethnic groups in STEM, Indigenous researchers — and Indigenous knowledge — remain at risk of being overlooked. Nature spoke to four Indigenous academic scientists about the challenges these early-career researchers face, and how scientists can respectfully and effectively bring together traditional knowledge and Western science.”

NiemanLab: A lot of Americans get news from social media, but they don’t expect it to be true. “During a year full of misinformation, from vaccines to voter fraud, Pew surveyed 9,220 U.S. adults between August 31 and September 7 about 11 different social media platforms. Of those who get news on social media at least ‘sometimes,’ 59 percent said they expect the information they find there to be inaccurate, a sentiment that remains unchanged from 2019.”

ZDNet: Why all of Trump’s tweets and other social media posts must be archived for future historians. “It is important to think of this as a historical issue and not a political one. Electronic records are still rather new to our history as a nation, couldn’t even have been conceived of by our founders, and aren’t represented fully in many of our older but still-active laws. But now that digital messages are so relevant to our lives, and have become the chief way we communicate, we need to make sure we don’t delete them, allow them to conveniently slip through loopholes, or let them be consumed by bit rot.” Good morning, Internet…

January 22, 2021 at 08:36PM
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Thursday, January 21, 2021

University of Stirling, Editor & Publisher, Shanghai Laws, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 21, 2021

University of Stirling, Editor & Publisher, Shanghai Laws, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, January 21, 2021
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Brig Newspaper: University of Stirling Archives launches Brig Newspaper’s digital archive. “The digital archive was launched on this January 14 and aims to provide a ‘student-focused’ record of the university’s history. The archive currently contains the first 125 issues of Brig Newspaper and covers the years 1969 to 1987. Access to the archive is available through the university’s archived collections website in chronological order.”

Internet Archive: More than 100 years of Editor & Publisher Now Fully Accessible Online on the Internet Archive. “When Mike Blinder acquired Editor & Publisher magazine in October 2019, he inherited boxes of back issues that he put in a climate-controlled storage unit near his home in Tampa, Florida…. When Blinder called Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive and found out we had the microfilm for his back issues, he was very excited to find the microfilm was not only safe, but that the Internet Archive would digitize all of the issues at no cost to him. Blinder enthusiastically gave permission for the full 100-year history to be read and downloaded by anyone, anywhere – along with E&P’s International Yearbook and Market Guide.”

Shine: Bilingual search engine for city’s rules. “A bilingual search engine for current rules and regulations in the city was launched by the city’s comprehensive law-based governance commission on Wednesday. It is the first platform of its kind in China, the commission said. The public can access over 500 documents on the platform, called ‘A Collection of Regulations and Rules of Shanghai City,’ in Chinese and English.”

USEFUL STUFF

CNET: How to start bullet journaling for an organized 2021. “Although it seems the productivity craze of the 2010s has calmed down (thank goodness, because we all need to stop glamorizing hustle culture), some ‘life hacks’ really can help. Bullet journaling, for example, can turn even the most frenzied person into a productivity deity. This planning method involves organizing notes, events, tasks and plans into neat collections and logs — and it might be exactly what you need in 2021 after a turbulent year that squashed everyone’s plans and goals.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: The Lasting Lessons of John Conway’s Game of Life. “In March of 1970, Martin Gardner opened a letter jammed with ideas for his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Sent by John Horton Conway, then a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, the letter ran 12 pages, typed hunt-and-peck style. Page 9 began with the heading ‘The game of life.’ It described an elegant mathematical model of computation — a cellular automaton, a little machine, of sorts, with groups of cells that evolve from iteration to iteration, as a clock advances from one second to the next.”

Poynter: What to expect from fact-checking in 2021. “2020 has likely been the most chaotic year in the 21st century and certainly an overwhelming one for fact-checkers. The coronavirus pandemic not only shook the world in an unprecedented way, but it also redesigned how fact-checkers work, how we learn from one another and, most importantly, how we collaborate not only locally but globally.”

The Register: India’s top techies form digital foundation to fight Apple and Google. “The new Atmanirbhar Digital India Foundation (ADIF) has been founded by a group of execs whose Indian start-ups got big, fast, making them bywords for success and famous for having shown the nation can create big internet companies. The group’s name references the Atmanirbhar Bharat self-reliance program.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Hacker leaks full database of 77 million Nitro PDF user records. “A stolen database containing the email addresses, names, and passwords of more than 77 million records of Nitro PDF service users was leaked today for free. The 14GB leaked database contains 77,159,696 records with users’ email addresses, full names, bcrypt hashed passwords, titles, company names, IP addresses, and other system-related information.”

CNN: ‘123456’ tops list of worst passwords. “Perhaps you chuckled at the irony of making your password ‘password.’ Or you thought it was the right place to express affection for your favorite primate by choosing ‘monkey.’ More likely, you were lazy and wanted something easy to remember, like ‘123456.’ If you’re using any of these passwords, change them.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Smithsonian Magazine: Twenty-Four Ways to Turn Outdoor Passions Into Citizen Science. “The idea of crowdsourcing data from citizen scientists is far from new. But as more digital tools like drones and smartphones have entered the hands of ordinary people, projects looking to involve the outdoor-recreating public to collect data are getting more ambitious and diverse. Whether it’s collecting water samples, measuring snowpack or tracking wildlife, plenty of choices are available for people of every background and taste for adventure. As we consider our New Year’s resolutions, here is a roundup of suggestions for how to venture outdoors with a purpose.” Good afternoon, Internet…

January 22, 2021 at 12:51AM
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