New researches

Wednesday, March 23, 2022

England Aerial Photography, Baseball: America’s Home Run, EPA Notifications, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 23, 2022

England Aerial Photography, Baseball: America’s Home Run, EPA Notifications, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 23, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

BBC: In pictures: Thousands of aerial images of England online for first time. “Historic England has published more than 400,000 aerial photographs online for the first time, including hundreds of locations in the East. The pictures include historic landmarks and cropmarks showing hidden archaeology beneath the surface. Historic England hopes to add more than six million aerial images to its explorer tool in the coming years.”

GlobeNewswire: Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum To Open Baseball Exhibition (PRESS RELEASE). “A special website makes available the stories, themes and historical artifacts presented in the exhibition, and it provides multi-media storytelling by some of the most significant organizations and people associated with the game of baseball. Schedules and information regarding public programing and events associated with the exhibition are outlined as well, providing experiences for both on-site and online visitors.”

EPA: New EPA Tool Provides the Public with Customized Updates on Local Enforcement and Compliance Activities. “Through ECHO Notify, users can signup to receive weekly emails when new information is available within the selected geographic area, such as when a violation or enforcement action has taken place at a nearby facility.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Blog: Get organized with a little Google Photos spring cleaning. “Flowers are blooming, the weather’s getting warmer, the days are a little longer — which means it’s also time for spring cleaning. Over the coming weeks, we’re starting to roll out some updates to Google Photos to make it even easier to sort through your albums, import photos and videos you have saved somewhere else, see your shared content and find screenshots. Let the decluttering begin!”

The Verge: Snap bans anonymous messaging features from third-party app integrations. “Snap is banning anonymous messaging features from third-party apps that integrate with its platform over concerns that they could be used for bullying and harassment. The change comes after a lawsuit last year sought to hold Snap liable for misuse of its platform linked to the death of a teenager who was being bullied on two Snapchat-connected apps.”

KnowTechie: TweetDeck might turn into a Twitter Blue perk. “Fans of TweetDeck, Twitter’s alternative social management tool, might have to pony up for the privilege of using it in the future. That’s according to code found by Jane Manchun Wong, famed app-diver and finder of hidden features.”

USEFUL STUFF

PetaPixel: Chrome Extension Can Detect Fake Profile Pictures with 99.29% Accuracy. “V7 Labs has created a new artificial intelligence-based (AI) software that works as a Google Chrome extension that is capable of detecting artificially generated profile pictures — like the ones above — with a claimed 99.28% accuracy.” Note this is for detecting GAN-generated images, not deepfakes.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNN: The dark side of Discord for teens . “When a mother in Washington state learned her teenage daughter was on Discord, a popular social media platform, she felt reasonably comfortable with the idea of her using it to communicate with members of her high school marching band. But in September, the mother discovered the 16-year-old was also using the audio and chat service to message with someone who appeared from his profile picture to be an older man.”

The Justice: English professor develops virtual Open Corpus Project. “Prof. Dorothy Kim (ENG) is currently working to develop a virtual corpus, or collection of written texts, of Early Middle English language. This would give researchers the opportunity to search across multiple archives and databases of manuscripts. The current status of the Open Corpus Project, as the site is titled, was unveiled at a Faculty Lunch Symposium on Thursday, March 17.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: US Justice Department says Google misuses attorney-client privilege to hide documents. “The US Department of Justice has accused Google of training its employees on how to shield business communications from discovery in cases of legal disputes “by using false requests for legal advice.” As Axios reports, the DOJ has told the judge overseeing its antitrust case against the tech giant that Google instructs employees to add in-house lawyers to written communication, apply attorney-client privilege labels to them and make a request for legal advice even when it’s not needed.”

CNET: Internet Crime Cost People More Than $6.9B in 2021, FBI Says. “People lost more than $6.9 billion to internet crimes in 2021, a jump of more than $2 billion from 2020, according to the FBI’s annual Internet Crime Report. The report, released Tuesday, contains ‘information about the most prevalent internet scams’ reported to the federal law enforcement agency’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: How Native Americans Are Trying to Debug A.I.’s Biases. “Ms. [Chamisa] Edmo explained that tagging results are often ‘outlandish’ and ‘offensive,’ recalling how one app identified a Native American person wearing regalia as a bird. And yet similar image recognition apps have identified with ease a St. Patrick’s Day celebration, Ms. [Davar] Ardalan noted as an example, because of the abundance of data on the topic. As Mr. [Tracy] Monteith put it, A.I. is only as good as the data it is fed. And data on cultures that have long been marginalized, like Native ones, are simply not at the levels they need to be.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!

March 23, 2022 at 06:14PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/cpYdXSb

Tuesday, March 22, 2022

Information Warfare in the Russian-Ukraine Conflict, Fortnite Fundraising, Unencrypted Communications, More: Ukraine Update, March 22, 2022

Information Warfare in the Russian-Ukraine Conflict, Fortnite Fundraising, Unencrypted Communications, More: Ukraine Update, March 22, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

EVENTS

UNC: Information Warfare in the Russian-Ukraine Conflict. “This moderated panel will explore the information war underway in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. In addition to discussing the many challenges facing journalists covering the conflict, the panelists will explore how social media has changed information warfare and impacted intelligence gathering and analysis, evaluate how social media platforms and journalists handle mis- and disinformation, and offer media literacy tips to our audience.” This virtual event takes place March 24 at 4pm EST. As far as I can tell it’s free.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Tubefilter: ‘Fortnite’ offered to donate proceeds to Ukraine humanitarian efforts. A day later, it’s raised $36 million.. “In slightly over 24 hours, Fortnite developer Epic Games raised a whopping $36 million for humanitarian relief in Ukraine. Epic announced yesterday that from March 20-April 3—the first two weeks of Fortnite‘s new in-game season—it would donate all proceeds from Fortnite purchases to relief efforts.”

CNET: Russia Reportedly Bans All Meta Platforms, Except WhatsApp. “A Russian court in Moscow on Monday found Meta Platforms guilty of ‘extremist activity,’ according to a report by Reuters. Russia had already blocked Facebook and Instagram, but the court reportedly says the decision will not affect WhatsApp.”

USEFUL STUFF

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: 10 must-read Twitter threads on the war in Ukraine. “If you follow any of the Bulletin’s editors on Twitter, you know that we regularly retweet threads we find particularly interesting. We don’t have room to share them all here, but what follows is a sampling of some thoughtful threads on Ukraine.”

The Quint: Russia’s Claims of Bioweapons in Ukraine Expose the Dangers of Disinformation. “Here are four articles from our archive to help you understand how Russia used disinformation to justify the invasion, how disinformation fits into Russia’s use of technology in warfare, what makes disinformation so challenging, and how targets of Russia’s disinformation have learned to respond.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

NiemanLab: How maps show — and hide — key information about the Ukraine war. “Geographers often speak in terms of what they call the ‘silences’ of maps — what’s missing and unseen, hidden in the margins. Those silences are just as meaningful as what’s on the page. It’s important to ask what has been left out. That’s certainly true when looking at maps depicting aspects of Russia’s war on Ukraine. News organizations around the world have published many maps of the crisis, but their standard views are not the only way maps can help people understand what is happening in Ukraine.”

Mashable: Russians are downloading Wikipedia en masse as possible ban looms . “Reporting for Slate, writer Annie Rauwerda dove into Kiwix’s public stats and found that the number of downloads of the Russian-language Wikipedia have spiked in recent weeks. It’s already been downloaded 148,457 times this month so far. As Rauwerda points out, that’s more than a 4,000 percent uptick in downloads in March when compared to January of this year. Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media (abbreviated as Roskomnadzor), aka its censorship agency, threatened to block Wikipedia in the country earlier this month.”

New York Times: As Big Shows of Russian Art End in Europe, Some Wonder What’s Next. “A blockbuster show at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, on the outskirts of Paris, has been seen by over a million people since it opened in November. Known as the Morozov collection, it includes paintings by Picasso, Gauguin, Renoir and Van Gogh, as well as some of Russian’s most renowned painters….In more normal times, the works would be packed into boxes and returned to Russian museums after the exhibition closes on April 3. Now, because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is unclear when those works will get home.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Foreign Policy: ‘The Ukrainians Are Listening’: Russia’s Military Radios Are Getting Owned. “One European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak about recent military intelligence, said the failure of Russia’s encrypted systems has also helped Ukrainian forces drive up the body count among opposing generals. In one striking example, internet sleuths at the investigative outlet Bellingcat discovered Russian reconnaissance officers in the field using unencrypted communications systems to send word of the death of Maj. Gen. Vitaly Gerasimov back home. Gerasimov, believed to be the nephew of Russia’s top military officer, was killed during fighting with Ukrainian forces in Kharkiv in early March.”

New York Times: Biden warns the private sector that Russia is exploring options for cyberattacks. “President Biden warned on Monday that Russia is exploring the possibility of waging potential cyberattacks against the United States in retaliation for economic penalties imposed on Moscow for the invasion of Ukraine.”

The Verge: After ‘protestware’ attacks, a Russian bank has advised clients to stop updating software. “In a recent announcement, the Russian bank Sber advised its customers to temporarily stop installing software updates to any applications out of concern that they could contain malicious code specifically targeted at Russian users, labeled by some as ‘protestware.'”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Verge: Russian government bars its scientists from international conferences. “Russian scientists will not participate in international conferences this year, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation said via its Telegram channel. The decision comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has strained the relationships between Russian scientists and the international research community.”

March 23, 2022 at 03:26AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/lbAnjxK

Ohio Fishing Tournaments, YouTube, TikTok, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 22, 2022

Ohio Fishing Tournaments, YouTube, TikTok, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 22, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Sandusky Register: State agency lists fishing tournaments on website. “Anglers have a new way to find out about fishing tournaments taking place in Ohio. And with fishing an important part of the Sandusky area’s tourist scene, local hosts for fishing tournaments have a new way to publicize their events. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources has announced a new website to publicize and schedule fishing tournaments.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Journal: YouTube Launching 5 New Features For Livestreams. “YouTube announces five new features for livestreams, some of which are currently in testing and others that will roll out later this year.”

Tubefilter: That TikTok food video making you hungry? Order the ingredients on Instacart.. “Whether you prefer the high-energy cooking of Nick DiGiovanni or the adorable cat chef That Little Puff, there’s plenty of delectable food videos to discover on TikTok. Now, thanks to Instacart, those videos can go straight from your For You feed to your shopping list.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: Adventure Somewhere New With These 4 Exploration Apps. “Want a change of pace from your usual walking path or loop around the block? There’s a whole selection of apps designed to take your walk or run to the next level. With these inventive apps, you can get your steps in while discovering your neighborhood and exploring entirely new places.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

AGDAILY: The history of New Farmers of America to be digitized. “When it comes to remembering our history, one of the most important steps is to have the recorded documents easily assessable to the public. North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University has been awarded a new grant to digitize its unique collection of materials belonging to a former national youth organization that helped train generations of Black farmers and leaders. The project will digitize an estimated 150,000 pieces of memorabilia from New Farmers of America.”

Hongkiat: What is Virtual Land in Metaverse – Explain Like I’m Five. “So, what are virtual lands? What is their purpose? And why do investors pay millions of dollars just to own one? Let us dive deep into this matter and understand the underlying reason to see what the hype is all about!” The article itself is a bit on the hype-y side, but has lots of information and links.

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Verge: Inside The Fight To Save Video Game History. “As games age and as companies continue to remove the means to properly purchase and download them, people are looking at other, less than legitimate options to continue to play the games they enjoy. It’s created tension between players and companies. While it’s unrealistic to expect publishers to maintain their prolific libraries in perpetuity, it’s also not ideal that large swathes of games can, at any time, just disappear on the whims of the store operator. So how can we ensure that older games can be enjoyed by future generations without the expense of maintaining aging digital infrastructure or violating existing copyright laws? Video game preservationists are doing the work at the intersection between these two points.”

Ubergizmo: Scammers Have Found New Ways Of Installing Malicious Apps On iOS Devices. “There are still some people who believe that due to Apple’s walled garden approach that its devices, like the iPhone and iPad, are ‘immune’ to malware, but over the years, this has been proven wrong again and again. In fact, more recently a blog post by security research firm Sophos has uncovered a couple of new ways that scammers are taking advantage of.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Atlantic: Trolls Aren’t Like the Rest of Us. “Many people who engage in online harassment are not what most of us would consider to be well-adjusted. In 2019, scholars writing in the journal Personality and Individual Differences surveyed 26 studies of internet ‘trolling,’ cyberbullying, and related antisocial online behaviors. They found significant associations with psychopathy, Machiavellianism, sadism, and narcissism, in that order. In other words, just as you would conclude that a stranger attacking you in person is badly damaged, you can conclude the same about a stranger attacking you on social media.”

Search Engine Journal: Nearly 50% Of Twitter Users Tweet Less Than 5 Times A Month. It most definitely not me. “A new study from Pew Research Center finds 49% of US adults on Twitter qualify as ‘lurkers.’ Pew Research Center defines lurkers as infrequent tweeters who have posted less than five tweets per month since they first opened their account. Moreover, when lurkers do tweet, they’re more likely to reply to someone else’s tweets rather than post their own.” Good afternoon, Internet…

March 23, 2022 at 12:42AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/VM7Wexo

Local Government Leadership, J.R.R. Tolkien, Color Calibration, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, March 22, 2022

Local Government Leadership, J.R.R. Tolkien, Color Calibration, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, March 22, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Route Fifty: New Data Show a Major Gender Gap in Local Government Leadership. “Fewer than one in three top appointed local officials are women, according to the analysis. Curious how your state stacks up? Tools released with the research allow users to look at trends and comparisons across the country.”

Smithsonian Magazine: Rarely Seen Paintings by J.R.R. Tolkien Portray a Lush ‘Lord of the Rings’ Landscape. “The Lord of the Rings author was also a skilled artist who sketched, painted and mapped the worlds that he was imagining as he wrote about them. Many of the original illustrations in the Hobbit were created by Tolkien himself. Audiences can now view a selection of Tolkien’s rarely seen Lord of the Rings artworks for free via the Tolkien Estate’s newly updated website, reports Sarah Cascone for Artnet. The portal, which debuted last month, also allows viewers to explore documents, images and audio clips related to Tolkien’s personal life and his lesser-known pursuits as a mapmaker, calligrapher and artist.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mozilla Blog: Firefox Extension Helps Bring Movie Magic To Theaters Near You. “Color calibration — the process of adjusting colors in order to display images consistently in color and brightness across monitors — is a critical component of visual effects. As visual effects studios and their vendors transitioned to remote work due to the coronavirus pandemic, this process that was easy to manage in-office suddenly became difficult to achieve. Over the past year, Firefox worked with Industrial Light & Magic to build a game-changing solution and developed the Extended Color Management Add-On.”

The Register: MATLAB expands to reach self-driving, wireless biz. “MathWorks, maker of the long-standing MATLAB suite, is focusing its latest software updates on reaching beyond its traditional scientific base – and eyeing up autonomous vehicle developers, makers of devices with wireless communications, and others.”

USEFUL STUFF

From Wonder Tools, with a thanks to Paul P. for pointing it out: New ways to record conversations. “Recording conversations is easy. Doing it well is harder. Welcome to this week’s Wonder Tools post, focusing on helping you record interviews more effectively.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Globe and Mail: TikTok and Instagram have made personal finance cool: The trick is finding the good stuff. “Bloggers and YouTubers have been creating down-to-earth and friendly financial content since well before the pandemic. But financial advice on platforms like TikTok and Instagram exploded when COVID-19 restrictions and a 21-month stock market rally drew scores of home-bound millennial and Gen Z novices to financial markets and to seek out online money-management information. Of course, plenty of financial advice on social media is factually wrong or outright fraudulent. But some successful financial influencers, or finfluencers, see themselves as educators who can speak to individuals and life challenges often neglected by traditional sources.”

Mashable: TikTok meets meditation: The singing bowl is a hit. “[Elizabeth] Jasmine, whose videos have garnered 32,000 followers and half a million likes, is part of a fast-growing ‘singing bowl’ or ‘sound bowl’ community on the app. The hashtag #singingbowl has 106 million views on TikTok, while #singingbowlmeditation has 5.3 million. Videos are often saturated in colors such as violet or midnight blue, which creators hope will evoke the calming sensation their sound is known for.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Techdirt: (Corporate) Information Wants To Be Free. “…the average American citizen cannot approach private companies and demand access to communications, contracts, or regulatory compliance activities. Instead, they have to approach it obliquely, asking government agencies for permission to view (some) of this (secondhand) information. This is rarely successful. Corporations love tax dollars but they have almost zero interest in being honest with taxpayers. Private companies have inserted themselves into court proceedings to prevent people accused of crimes from examining the (private company-supplied) evidence used against them. And when FOIA requesters come knocking on federal or local government doors, corporations swear on all that is profitably unholy that any information leak might destroy their competitive advantage.”

The Daily Swig: Downdetector: How the popular site outage tracker is helping to improve web security. “…losing access to the internet or an online service is frustrating, and not all organizations are transparent about outages. By looking at Downdetector or other crowdsourced data, users can at least start to determine if the problem is their local connection, at the service provider, or somewhere in between. Over the years, though, Downdetector has also been adopted by online businesses themselves, feeding the data into their network operations centres.”

Reuters: Google Settles Over Firing of Workers Protesting Immigration Cloud Deal . “Alphabet Inc’s Google has settled with six current and former employees who had alleged the company unfairly stifled worker organizing, an abrupt ending to a trial that had been paused for several months, legal filings show.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

VentureBeat: Language models that can search the web hold promise — but also raise concerns. “In a paper published early this month, researchers at DeepMind, the AI lab backed by Google parent company Alphabet, describe a language model that answers questions by using Google Search to find a top list of relevant, recent webpages. After condensing down the first 20 webpages into six-sentence paragraphs, the model selects the 50 paragraphs most likely to contain high-quality information; generates four ‘candidate’ answers for each of the 50 paragraphs (for a total of 200 answers); and determines the ‘best’ answer using an algorithm.”

University at Buffalo: What’s the prevailing opinion on social media? Look at the flocks, says UB researcher. “…collective views on a topic or issue expressed on social media, distinct from the conclusions determined through survey-based public opinion polling, have never been easy to determine. But the ‘murmuration’ framework developed and tested by Yini Zhang, PhD, an assistant professor of communication in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, and her collaborators addresses challenges like identifying online demographics and factoring for opinion manipulation that are characteristic on these digital battlegrounds of public discourse.” Good morning, Internet…

March 22, 2022 at 05:34PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/klhDSCN

Monday, March 21, 2022

Using ResearchBuzz and ResearchBuzz Firehose for Ukraine News

Using ResearchBuzz and ResearchBuzz Firehose for Ukraine News
By researchbuzz2

When Russia invaded Ukraine, it filled my brain with questions: What will this do for existing disinformation operations and information warfare? How will social media companies respond? Will social media companies and social media company employees respond in a complementary way? What about ostensibly neutral sources like Wikipedia? What will all the Russian influencers and YouTubers do?

And then, since I’ve been doing ResearchBuzz for almost 24 years, my questions took a different tack: What about all the cultural heritage? Are Ukraine’s monuments going to suffer the same fate as the Buddhas of Bamiyan? Who are the people who are protecting the archives and figuring out how to keep Ukraine’s culture safe? (I know they exist and I know they’re doing their best, that’s not a question.)

Maybe you have similar questions about Russia and Ukraine. Maybe you have questions more specific to your interests. I’ve been indexing news about Russia and Ukraine since the invasion, with a separate newsletter since March 9. In this article I’m going to outline how you can use ResearchBuzz and ResearchBuzz Firehose to stay informed about Russia and Ukraine for various topics.Topics not included: politics, military strength, finance, business, etc. Topics included: disinformation, information warfare, social media, search engines, Internet culture, OSINT, cultural heritage, etc.

Quick Overview

ResearchBuzz is my main site. I’ve been writing about search engines and online information collections since 1996 and started the site/blog in 1998. The “official” domain is ResearchBuzz.com but it resolves to ResearchBuzz.me so I’ll be using that domain name for this article. ResearchBuzz publishes full articles and newsletters.

ResearchBuzz Firehose started in 2015. It indexes individual items from the ResearchBuzz newsletters and thoroughly tags them. It’s available at RBFirehose.com . It only publishes individual items, not newsletters or full articles. However, the plethora of tags makes it great for specific content monitoring. (Obviously a site filled with content hand-curated by one person is not going to compare to a search engine. On the other hand, ResearchBuzz Firehose has over 59,000 indexed articles so it covers at least a little ground.)

Please note that these instructions are only for those who are looking for specific content and don’t want to read all the ResearchBuzz and RB Firehose output. If you just want to read everything, you can go to ResearchBuzz and/or RB Firehose and find both an email newsletter sign-up form and an RSS link in the right column. It’s free, there are no ads, and the RSS feed is full-text.

Get the Basic Info Goodies

For regular newsletters about Ukraine: These go out whenever I index 12 relevant items. Currently that’s at least once a day and occasionally twice. The newsletters can be found at https://researchbuzz.me/tag/ukraine/ . That’s a Web page. If you’d rather have a dynamic RSS feed, you can use https://researchbuzz.me/tag/ukraine/feed/ .

For specific articles about Ukraine: Those are available via ResearchBuzz Firehose at https://rbfirehose.com/tag/ukraine/ . You can also get this page as an RSS feed at https://rbfirehose.com/tag/ukraine/feed/ .

Get the Specific Info Goodies

I consider the WordPress tag search setup to be underappreciated. You can set up fairly complex searches just by adding things to an URL. Let’s start with the base search for finding the latest news on Ukraine on ResearchBuzz Firehose:

https://rbfirehose.com/tag/ukraine/

You can add additional tags to the search by appending an + to the end of Ukraine and adding more tags. For example, this will search for articles tagged with both Ukraine and disinformation:

https://rbfirehose.com/tag/ukraine+disinformation/

You can find tags at the end of each indexed item on RB Firehose if you’re looking for ideas. If you can’t find a tag you’re looking for, use the search form in the right column to run a full-text search. That should take you to an appropriate article, which should in turn guide you to useful tags.

If you want to add a tag that’s a phrase, use hyphens instead of spaces when putting it in the URL:

https://rbfirehose.com/tag/ukraine+European-space-agency/

Can you search several tags at a time? Sure.

https://rbfirehose.com/tag/ukraine+disinformation+social-media+censorship/

Each of these URLs is a Web page, but you can make any of them an RSS feed by appending /feed/ to the end of the URL.

These tag searches should suffice if you’re monitoring general topics, but if you’re looking for really specific things (like town names, or surnames) then you might need to use the full-text search. Use the search form in the right column to run your search. The URL looks like this:

https://rbfirehose.com/?s=Ukraine+Unesco

You can monitor that as a static page, or get an RSS feed by adding &feed=rss to the end:

https://rbfirehose.com/?s=Ukraine+Unesco&feed=rss

March 22, 2022 at 06:05AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/H3PasGp

Russian Asset Tracker, Russian Oligarch Index, Say No to War Image Collection, More: Ukraine Update, March 21, 2022

Russian Asset Tracker, Russian Oligarch Index, Say No to War Image Collection, More: Ukraine Update, March 21, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

OCCRP: Russian Asset Tracker. “In the wake of Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine, governments around the world have imposed sanctions on many of Putin’s enablers. But they have learned to keep their wealth obscured, hiring an army of lawyers to hide it in secretive bank accounts and corporate structures that reach far offshore. Figuring out who owns what, and how much of it, is a tall order even for experienced police investigators. That’s why we decided to follow the trail, tracking down as many of these assets as possible and compiling them in a database for the public to see and use.”

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: List of oligarchs and Russian elites featured in ICIJ investigations. “Russian oligarchs have long been a prominent feature of ICIJ’s reporting on tax havens and financial secrecy, including 2013’s Secrecy for Sale investigation, the Panama Papers investigation of 2016, the Paradise Papers in 2017 and last year’s Pandora Papers, that revealed vast swathes of offshore wealth linked to powerful figures close to President Vladimir Putin. Today, we publish an index of prominent Russians who have featured in our reporting across our offshore investigations.”

This is from a few weeks ago, but I missed it and it’s too good to skip. Creative Boom: A growing resource for the creative industry of free stock images of the war in Ukraine. “The Say No to War image collection has been created by Vista’s Kyiv-based Depositphotos and VistaCreate, as Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine. Anyone can download the stock photographs for their blogs, publications, social media or even design projects and help show the world the impact of war inside the Eastern European country.”

RTE: People urged not to send refugee donations to Poland. “Meanwhile, a new website has been launched that will allow Irish businesses to make ‘welcome offers’ of free or discounted goods to people fleeing the war in Ukraine…. The website facilitates companies across Ireland to place a ‘welcome offer’ of discounted or free goods or services to those arriving in Ireland from Ukraine. Examples could include deals from all types of businesses, including grocery shops, cafés, gyms and pharmacies.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ZDNet: Russia remains connected to the internet. “After Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukraine asked the internet governing groups to cut Russia off from the internet. These bodies, including the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), refused. Two of the main backbone internet providers, Lumen Technologies and Cogent, indicated they would sever Russia’s internet ties. Their actions speak louder than their words though. Internet analysis company ThousandEyes has shown that Russia’s backbone Internet connectivity remains pretty much the same as ever.”

From Ukraine Pravda and translated by Google Translate: War with Russia: Drivers banned from using DVRs. “It applies to registrars in cars and motorcycles. Photographs and video filming of public roads, general purpose facilities, infrastructure facilities, roadblocks, fortifications, location, concentration or movement of military units (subdivisions) of defense forces are prohibited.”

USEFUL STUFF

OCCRP: FAQ: What is Plane Tracking?. “Russian oligarchs around the globe are facing sanctions, and all eyes are on the vast wealth of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. Besides the glitzy French villas and multi-million-dollar superyachts docked in Barcelona and Monaco, this mega-rich crowd is known for its private jets. OCCRP has long tracked the flight paths of the powerful, but as more countries block Russian flights from their airspace, plane tracking is more useful than ever before in helping us monitor sanctioned individuals and examine their next moves.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Poynter: Finding truth, avoiding jail: The news Russians can see in wartime. “The government has blocked Facebook, Twitter and news websites aimed at Russians, such as Latvia-based Meduza. It is a crime for the average citizen to publicly post information that contradicts the government line. To help us understand what Russians can read and watch, we texted with Alexey, a 30-something millennial in Saint Petersburg. Alexey painted a picture where much can be learned, but little can be shared. As he argues with older family members, he is the lone voice with accurate information.”

The Guardian: Ukraine to launch NFT to mark history of Russian invasion. “The Ukrainian government is to launch a non-fungible token marking the history of the Russian invasion with unique digital art, in its latest use of digital assets to fund its war efforts.”

TIME: Telegram Becomes a Digital Battlefield in Russia-Ukraine War. “It’s difficult to imagine how Russia’s war in Ukraine would be playing out without Telegram. The messaging app, which last year reached a billion downloads, has turned into the conflict’s digital battle space. It’s an instrumental tool for both governments and a hub of information for citizens on both sides. Ukrainian government officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, rely on the app for everything from rallying global support to disseminating air raid warnings and maps of local bomb shelters. So do both the Russian government and Russian opposition channels, who now find themselves cut off from most mainstream social media.”

Mashable: Epic Games is using the new ‘Fortnite’ season launch to support Ukraine . “As the hit battle royale remained offline Sunday morning ahead of Chapter 3’s second season launch, developer Epic Games announced its plans to support humanitarian relief efforts in Ukraine. All money earned in Fortnite between March 20, the day the new season kicks off, and April 3 will be split between four organizations that have been providing aid during the conflict.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NPR: The war in Ukraine has reintroduced these words and phrases into our vocabulary. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has many of us using new words and phrases, from geopolitical terms like ‘rump state’ to military lingo such as ‘MANPADS.’ We’re also learning to decipher slogans and spot differences between Russian and Ukrainian spellings during a conflict in which information is treated as its own battlefield. Tracking surges in the words we use is part of linguist Grant Barrett’s job. He is the co-host of A Way with Words, a public radio show about words and language, and a vice president of the American Dialect Society.”

March 22, 2022 at 12:57AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/I9hMUCJ

New Hampshire Drug Overdoses, Capitol Riot Map, Science Fair Projects, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 21, 2022

New Hampshire Drug Overdoses, Capitol Riot Map, Science Fair Projects, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 21, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New Hampshire Bulletin: Little by little, the state is seeing progress in its efforts to reduce drug overdose deaths. “There is no question the state has made progress fighting the drug overdose epidemic. But evaluating that success – and deciding where to invest resources – requires looking at the details, not a single metric…. The Department of Health and Human Services also just unveiled a new website tracking trends associated with opioid use and the outcomes of treatment.”

Radical Reports: Capitol Riot Map: Briefing & Updates. “The Capitol Riot Insurrectionists Networks is a project to map the networks of the more than 700 individuals who have been arrested and charged in connection to the Capitol Riot on January 6th, as well as the more than 100 individuals and organizations issued subpoenas by the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.”

Spotted on Reddit and hosted on GitHub: ISEF Database. In this case ISEF is the International Science and Engineering Fair. “This is a simple web scraper which gets all of the projects and abstract information from Science for Society’s website… I want someone to get inspired to do a ‘meta’ science fair project.” Looks like it’s available either as a Kaggle notebook or a delimited text file of information.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

New York Times: Brazil Lifts Its Ban on Telegram After Two Days. “Brazil’s Supreme Court blocked Telegram on Friday. The messaging app then responded with measures to fight misinformation, and the court quickly lifted its ban.”

Ghacks: Google replaces reverse image search option in Chrome with Google Lens option. “Google Chrome users who have used the built-in reverse image search option of the web browser recently may have discovered that Google removed the option from Chrome. Right-clicking on images displays the new ‘search image with Google Lens’ option now in the browser and no longer the ‘search for image’ option.”

USEFUL STUFF

Online Journalism Blog: VIDEO PLAYLIST: Finding stories in company accounts. “Company accounts can be a goldmine of story leads — from ‘following the money’ and uncovering complex webs of relationships, to simply reporting concerns and individual payments. I’ve put together a playlist of videos covering a number of different techniques you can use to find stories.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Reuters: China requires Microsoft’s Bing to suspend auto-suggest feature. “Microsoft Corp’s Bing, the only major foreign search engine available in China, said a ‘relevant government agency’ has required it to suspend its auto-suggest function in China for seven days. The suspension marks the second of its kind for Bing since December, and arrives amid an ongoing crackdown on technology platforms and algorithms from Beijing.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ubergizmo: Fake Chrome Windows Make It Easier To Phish For Your Credentials. “One piece of advice that you usually hear and read to prevent yourself from being phished is to check the URL of the website you’re visiting. This is because if you’re trying to log into Facebook but the URL says something different, there is a very good chance that you’re being phished. You can also check URLs of popup windows used for single sign-ons like Google, Apple, Facebook, and so on, but thanks to security researcher mr.d0x, he has created a new Browser-in-the-Browser attack which in theory would let hackers recreate SSOs that display the ‘correct’ URL, thus fooling users into possibly handing over their login credentials.”

OpenGov Asia: New National Resilience Database Launched in Australia. “A tech start-up has launched a new digital initiative that seeks to reinvent the way the federal government responds to a crisis by giving them ready access to needed digital skills. The new National Resilience Database will allow Australian citizens with digital skills to register to volunteer their skills to government agencies during disasters and be paid for their contributions.

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: How AI helped deliver cash aid to many of the poorest people in Togo. “The simple idea behind this approach, as we explained in the journal Nature on March 16, 2022, is that wealthy people use phones differently from poor people. Their phone calls and text messages follow different patterns, and they use different data plans, for example. Machine learning algorithms – which are fancy tools for pattern recognition – can be trained to recognize those differences and infer whether a given mobile subscriber is wealthy or poor.” Good afternoon, Internet…

March 22, 2022 at 12:17AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/JznvkhL