New researches

Monday, June 20, 2022

UCL MotionInput Version 3, DuckDuckGo, Adding Site Search, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 20, 2022

UCL MotionInput Version 3, DuckDuckGo, Adding Site Search, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 20, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University College London: Students develop software to revolutionise computer use for millions. “The software could revolutionise the way that millions of people use computers by allowing those with mobility issues to easily interact with their PCs without the need to buy adapted computers and use pointer devices. It has already been endorsed by charities including the International Alliance of ALS/MND Associations, which supports people with Motor Neurone Disease (MND) around the world and is making a positive impact on people’s daily lives.” And it’s free for individual users.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Roundtable: DuckDuckGo On The Decline In 2022. “Looks like DuckDuckGo, the privacy focused search engine, is on the decline. In January 2021 it broke the 100 million searches per day mark but since April 2022 of this year, it has dipped below that mark each month. I plotted the average queries per day by month from DuckDuckGo’s traffic numbers and you can see, the big dip started to happen in March 2022 with April for the first time going below the 100 million mark since 2021.” When I saw they were allowing Microsoft trackers I DuckDuckWent.

USEFUL STUFF

Smashing Magazine: Adding Search To Your Site In 15 Minutes. “Do you need search for your site, but haven’t found the time to add it? Within 15 minutes, Leonardo Losoviz explains how you can add a super powerful search that also looks super good. In this article, you’ll learn how to go from 0 to 100 with search.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

NBC News: How one young history buff is preserving the Gullah Geechee community on TikTok . “The Gullah Geechee people make up one of the oldest and most extraordinary communities in the United States. But if you’ve never heard of them, it might be because their history is often sifted out of textbooks, and the longevity of their culture is now in danger. This distinctly African American community began on the eastern coastal islands — spanning from Florida all the way up to North Carolina in the 1600s. Slaves, mostly from West Africa, lived in complete isolation from the continental United States, separated by rivers, swamps and waterways that weren’t easy to cross.”

Times of India: E-archive To Collate Data On Ancient, Colonial Indian Laws For Easy Access And Awareness. “To make sources of legal history easily available to scholars, lawyers and judges, and to raise awareness among present and future generations about ancient and medieval Indian laws, the Centre for Studies In Legal History of the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS), Kolkata, will establish an electronic archive on legal history comprising ancient, medieval and colonial Indian laws up to 1947 that are still being used in the country.”

New York Times: Google Says It’s Time for Longtime Small-Business Users to Pay Up. “While the cost of the paid service is more of an annoyance than a hard financial hit, small-business owners affected by the change say they have been disappointed by the ham-handed way that Google has dealt with the process. They can’t help but feel that a giant company with billions of dollars in profits is squeezing little guys — some of the first businesses to use Google’s apps for work — for just a bit of money.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Japan set to fine Twitter, Meta, Google if they neglect domestic registry – Nikkei. “The Japanese government is set to levy fines against 48 tech companies… for failing to register their headquarters in the country, the Nikkei newspaper reported on Monday.”

CNBC: FBI says fraud on LinkedIn a ‘significant threat’ to platform and consumers. “Fraudsters who exploit LinkedIn to lure users into cryptocurrency investment schemes pose a ‘significant threat’ to the platform and consumers, according to Sean Ragan, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the San Francisco and Sacramento, California, field offices.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Google AI Blog: Scanned Objects by Google Research: A Dataset of 3D-Scanned Common Household Items. “Historically, deep learning for computer vision has relied on datasets with millions of items that were gathered by web scraping, examples of which include ImageNet, Open Images, YouTube-8M, and COCO. However, the process of creating these datasets can be labor-intensive, and can still exhibit labeling errors that can distort the perception of progress. Furthermore, this strategy does not readily generalize to arbitrary three-dimensional shapes or real-world robotic data.”

The Atlantic: Is Google Dying? Or Did the Web Grow Up?. “The internet has grown exponentially and Google has expanded with it, helping usher in some of the web’s greediest, most extractive tendencies. But scale is not always a blessing for technology products. Are we wringing our hands over nothing, or is Google a victim of its own success, rendering its flagship product—Search—less useful?” This essay made me swear out loud, shake my head repeatedly, and throw a pillow across the room. It posits arguments with which I do not agree. It is still worth reading. Good afternoon, Internet…

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June 21, 2022 at 12:41AM
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The Black Curation, Watergate Trial Records, Adobe Photoshop, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, June 20, 2022

The Black Curation, Watergate Trial Records, Adobe Photoshop, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, June 20, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from Arizona State University: ASU alumna creates resource to find Black-owned galleries. “In February 2021, [April Hobby] founded The Black Curation, a website that focuses on highlighting Black-owned art galleries and art experiences. Specifically, she created a map and directory of Black-owned art galleries worldwide. Hobby sourced these galleries through researching online publications and receiving feedback from artists, gallery owners, art collectors and art enthusiasts.”

NARA: Watergate Trial Records Digitized Ahead of Scandal’s 50th Anniversary. “For the first time since the Watergate scandal broke nearly 50 years ago, the paper records, exhibits, and artifacts from the United States v. G. Gordon Liddy trial are digitized and available to view in the National Archives Catalog.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Adobe plans to make Photoshop on the web free to everyone. “Adobe has started testing a free-to-use version of Photoshop on the web and plans to open the service up to everyone as a way to introduce more users to the app.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Poynter: News organizations have a social media problem. “News outlets often ask their journalists to promote their work and to engage with their audience on Twitter and other social media platforms. Some even use social media to promote their own ‘brand.’ (That’s a whole other topic, but I generally get it, because it helps the news outlet, too.) However, when you’re interacting with people on Twitter, for instance, and writing about controversial issues, someone is eventually going to tweet something that someone might find offensive or confrontational.”

Global News: Google apologizes to B.C. business owner after maps error sends customers to wrong location. “[Gerry] O’Neil’s horse drawn tours have been a fixture in Vancouver’s Stanley Park for 40 years. His business is located at 735 Stanley Park Drive. However, O’Neil said about a year ago, customers would enter his business address into the Google Maps app only to arrive at another location in the park.”

Canada NewsWire: Government of Canada invests in over 800 projects to advance social sciences and humanities research (PRESS RELEASE). “Projects will explore a range of topics, including inclusive policing, the transition to a sustainable economy, First Nations self-determination, and achieving Canada’s net-zero emissions target. Other funded projects will examine motor skill intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder, domestic violence prevention, and partnerships to prevent and end homelessness.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Krebs on Security: Ransomware Group Debuts Searchable Victim Data. “Cybercrime groups that specialize in stealing corporate data and demanding a ransom not to publish it have tried countless approaches to shaming their victims into paying. The latest innovation in ratcheting up the heat comes from the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group, which has traditionally published any stolen victim data on the Dark Web. Today, however, the group began publishing individual victim websites on the public Internet, with the leaked data made available in an easily searchable form.”

CNN: US is worried about Russia using new efforts to exploit divisions in 2022 midterms. “Homeland and national security officials are worried about how Russia could significantly exploit US divisions over the November midterms, considering scenarios like Russia staging smaller hacks of local election authorities — done with the deliberate purpose of being noticed — and then using that to seed more conspiracies about the integrity of American elections.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

PsyPost: New study examines the link between Trump’s offline speeches and QAnon-related Twitter discourse on January 6. “New research sheds light on how Donald Trump’s offline rhetoric might have mobilized online political discussions related to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The findings have been published in the journal Frontiers in Sociology.”

Route Fifty: State Turns to Data Tools to Root Out Social Services Fraud. “The Texas Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general is turning to data modeling and visualization tools to investigate Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cases with an increased risk of fraud. Using funds from the SNAP Fraud Framework Implementation Grant, the Texas Office of Inspector General’s Benefits Program Integrity (BPI) division recently developed a data visualization dashboard that will help unit managers oversee high-volume investigative caseloads.”

Wilson Center: Canada, a Country Without a History?. “Stacks of archival records from the Cold War remain inaccessible at Library and Archives Canada. Take, as just one example, this run of folders on the Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian states, starting with the first one in 1955. Open the tabs in the online catalogue and there’s a list of 32s. In other words, even though it’s been 67 years since the first conference, we still can’t see Canadian assessments regarding how and why this gathering might have mattered from Ottawa’s vantage point. By the time we are into records from the 1970s and 1980s, the situation is far worse.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

NASA: New Images Using Data From Retired Telescopes Reveal Hidden Features. “New images using data from ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA missions showcase the dust that fills the space between stars in four of the galaxies closest to our own Milky Way. More than striking, the snapshots are also a scientific trove, lending insight into how dramatically the density of dust clouds can vary within a galaxy.”Good morning, Internet…

June 20, 2022 at 05:32PM
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Sunday, June 19, 2022

Business Spinoffs, Goodbye Sciblogs, LinkedIn, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, June 19, 2022

Business Spinoffs, Goodbye Sciblogs, LinkedIn, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, June 19, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Chemical & Engineering News: New database on university spinouts highlights dissatisfaction. “A new open source database on university technology spinouts, also referred to as spin-offs, detailing terms negotiated between academic institutions and research entrepreneurs indicates a high level of dissatisfaction among company founders, especially those spinning out of universities in the UK.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Sciblogs: Bidding farewell to Sciblogs. “For 13 years, Sciblogs has been a staple in New Zealand’s science-writing landscape. Our bloggers have written about a vast variety of topics from climate change to covid, and from nanotechnology to household gadgets. But sadly, it’s time to close shop. Sciblogs will be shutting down on 30 June.”

Search Engine Land: The LinkedIn Funny emoji is here. “LinkedIn has finally added one of the most requested features. The Funny emoji started rolling out to LinkedIn users at some point in the last couple of hours.”

TechCrunch: Reddit is buying machine learning platform Spell. “Spell was founded by former Facebook engineer Serkan Piantino in 2016 to provide a cloud computing solution to allow anyone to run resource-intensive ML experiments without the high end hardware that would normally be necessary. The company defines its mission as the pursuit of ‘the best possible platform for anyone looking to develop powerful, reliable, and safe software using Machine Learning and AI,’ according to their website.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: SEO For Non-Profits: 7 Tips To Help Your Organization Get Found. “I have had the opportunity to work with many spanning focuses and missions aimed at healthcare, education, performing arts, adoption, orphanages, and more. Within each non-profit, I have found tips that help regardless of most focuses and circumstances. From solid funding to grassroots organizations, there’s a lot to be gained by focusing on seven SEO tips to help your organization get found.” As I have said before, I hate SEO. But I realize it’s important, and I will share articles that have a high useful-to-garbage ratio. SEJ is always quality.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

ProPublica: Google Says It Bans Gun Ads. It Actually Makes Money From Them.. “For roughly two decades, Google has boasted that it doesn’t accept gun ads, a reflection of its values and culture. But a ProPublica analysis shows that before and after mass shootings in May at a New York grocery store and a Texas elementary school, millions of ads from the some of the nation’s largest firearms makers flowed through Google’s ad systems and onto websites and apps — in some cases without the site or app owners’ knowledge and in violation of their policies.”

Deutsche Welle: Google’s data plans in Saudi Arabia ‘will risk lives’: activists. “Internet giant Google is creating a ‘cloud region’ in Saudi Arabia. It says it will protect users there. But digital rights activists argue the firm will be putting the lives of government critics at risk.”

CNBC: TikTok exec: We’re not a social network like Facebook, we’re an entertainment platform. “TikTok is fully aware that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is retooling the Facebook and Instagram apps to be more like its own popular short video service. But TikTok has no interest in mimicking Facebook.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Publishers Weekly: Internet Archive, Publishers to Seek Summary Judgment in Book Scanning Lawsuit. “A federal court in New York has ordered motions for summary judgment by early summer in a lawsuit filed by four major publishers against the Internet Archive over its scanning and lending of print library books, putting the fate of the closely watched copyright case on track to be in the court’s hands by early fall.”

Ars Technica: Tsunami of junk traffic that broke DDoS records delivered by tiniest of botnets. “A massive flood of malicious traffic that recently set a new distributed denial-of-service record came from an unlikely source. A botnet of just 5,000 devices was responsible, as extortionists and vandals continue to develop ever more powerful attacks to knock sites offline, security researchers said.”

Techdirt: New Report Offers Solutions For Our Never Ending Robocall Hell. ” Every single month U.S. residents receive an estimated 4 billion robocalls. About a billion of those are illegal, outright scammers. That’s more than 33 million illegal scam robocalls every day. As a result, 70% of Americans no longer answer the phone if it’s an unrecognized number. We’ve just ceded a major tech platform to scumbags. The National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) has spent years providing insights and solutions on this problem. They’ve issued a new report that’s worth a read if you’re at all curious why we’ve allowed a major communications platform to be hijacked by garbage merchants and snake oil salesmen.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Analytics India: Amazon Prime video: The little search engine that couldn’t. “Interestingly, Amazon accounts for 54 percent of all product searches on the internet and has one of the best recommendation systems and search engines in the business. However, Amazon Prime Video–available in nearly 200 countries– has a bad search engine. To make matters worse, Prime Video’s clunky UI is a real pain in the neck.”

Iowa State University: Engineers develop cybersecurity tools to protect solar, wind power on the grid. “Solar panels and wind turbines, now projected to produce 44% of America’s electricity by 2050, present cybersecurity challenges. They have sensors, controllers, actuators or inverters that are directly or indirectly connected to the internet. They’re distributed far and wide across the country and the countryside. Many have insecure connectivity to legacy electric grid systems. They have complex physics. They’re subject to advanced persistent threats. And there will be more and more of them going online.” Good morning, Internet…

June 19, 2022 at 05:31PM
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Saturday, June 18, 2022

Finding Baby Formula, India Textiles, Google AI, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 18, 2022

Finding Baby Formula, India Textiles, Google AI, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 18, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Mashed: A New Website Is Hacking The Baby Formula Shortage. “[The site], which launched on June 16, compiles inventory data from major retailers and allows parents to search for the closest supply of baby formula by state, zip code, preferred formula brand, and other specifiers, a rep told Mashed.” I tried it briefly. It’s running very, very slowly.

Microsoft News: This museum is using AI to remind us of all the threads we have in common. “On the INTERWOVEN website, a single click on the image of a mid-19th-early 20th century Kashmiri shawl fragment with the paisley motif leads one on a cultural odyssey that takes you to dozens of places where the motif appears. This includes a church in Britain, a chasuble from Italy, and a cloth panel from ancient Persia among others.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Business Insider: The transcript used as evidence that a Google AI was sentient was edited and rearranged to make it ‘enjoyable to read’. “A Google engineer released a conversation with a Google AI chatbot after he said he was convinced the bot had become sentient — but the transcript leaked to the Washington Post noted that parts of the conversation were edited ‘for readability and flow.'”

Engadget: Twitch opens up ads program to more streamers and increases payout. “More Twitch streamers will find invites to join the platform’s Ads Incentive Program now that the company is opening up the opportunity to welcome ‘more… Partners than ever.’ In addition, Twitch will stop paying streamers in the program using a fixed CPM structure — instead, it will use a percentage-based revenue share model to increase ad payouts.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Register: Telegram criticizes Apple for ‘intentionally crippling’ web app features on iOS. “A week after confirming plans for Telegram Premium, the messaging platform’s CEO, Pavel Durov, is again criticizing Apple’s approach to its Safari browser for stifling the efforts of web developers.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

AFP: Google Fined $245 Million By Mexican Court Over Defamatory Blog. “A court in Mexico City on Friday ordered Google to pay $245 million to a Mexican lawyer who said the US tech giant allowed the dissemination of a blog that accused him of money laundering.”

TechRadar: Over a billion Google Play Store app downloads could be infected by malware. “Banking apps for the Android ecosystem have more than a billion downloads between them, and according to a new report from the mobile security platform Zimperium, all of these at risk from dangerous trojans.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Guardian: Researchers use whale photo archive to help protect important WA calving site. “Researchers are combing through thousands of whale photos to help protect a calving site off Western Australia’s coast that was severely impacted by the whaling industry. The researchers believe that Geographe Bay off south-west WA is an important calving ground in need of environmental protection, and are using a 30-year archive of images to determine how many southern right whales have visited the area over time.”

WWF: WWF kickstarts ShellBank – a global genetic database to trace and protect sea turtles from poaching and the illegal trade. “Building off the success of a ground-breaking pilot in Australia called ‘Surrender Your Shell’, where over 300 tortoiseshell products were donated to help trace the illegal trade, WWF’s ShellBank is gearing up for uptake across Asia Pacific and globally.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

The Spaces: A London art installation is preserving Beirut’s at-risk buildings. “Architect Annabel Karim Kassar has brought a life-size recreation of one of old Beirut’s Ottoman-Venetian homes to the V&A Museum in London. Part of an exhibition entitled The Lebanese House: saving a home, saving a city, the installation pays homage to the many historic homes destroyed or damaged in the 2020 explosion – caused by badly stored ammonium nitrate chemicals in the Lebanese capital’s port.” Good afternoon, Internet…

June 19, 2022 at 12:42AM
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University of Michigan Black Student Database, COVID-19 Government Policies, Snapchat, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, June 18, 2022

University of Michigan Black Student Database, COVID-19 Government Policies, Snapchat, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, June 18, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University of Michigan: U-M Black student database through 1970 is now public. “A new public database of African American students created by the University of Michigan documents students who attended U-M between 1853 and as recently as 1970. A comprehensive compilation of this nature did not previously exist at the university and remains very rare for universities across the country. In the process, hundreds of compelling stories have been uncovered surrounding segregated housing, relocation after slavery and ‘segregation scholarships,’ which originated in the 1920s.”

EurekAlert: Massive dataset reveals which governments have best responded to COVID-19 pandemic. “[Olga] Shvetsova’s lab compiled a massive database comparing pandemic-related governmental policies in 82 countries on both the national and subnational levels, as part of the COVID-19 Protective Policy Index (PPI) project. The data covers the entire year of 2020, and is publically available for researchers’ use.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Snap is working on a paid subscription called Snapchat Plus. “Snap is doing internal tests of a paid subscription called Snapchat Plus, which will apparently give users early access to features, as well as other abilities.”

Genealogy’s Star: MyHeritage adds 1.3 BILLION historical records in 37 collections in April and May. “Yes, you did read that right. MyHeritage.com did add an additional 1.3 billion records in April and May, 2022.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Find Public Google Docs (and Slides, Forms, Sheets, and Drawings too). “Similarly, you can easily find public Google Docs, Slides, Forms, Drawings, and Sheets using some easy but Advanced Search operations and tools. In this article, we’ll show you some simple tricks to help you find public Google Drive files including Slides, Forms, Sheets, and Drawings.” Joy Okumoko does it again. I didn’t know about Heystack.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

WKSU: The Cleveland Press folded 40 years ago. Can the history in its pages be preserved?. “The Plain Dealer is still printed a few days each week, and its archive is also online. But The Cleveland Press is mostly offline. That’s a problem, said Kristen Hare, who is part of the local news faculty at the Poynter Institute. ‘I don’t know how future generations will understand us if they’re just looking at our TikToks,’ she said. ‘That’s not going to be enough.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

WIRED: Police Linked to Hacking Campaign to Frame Indian Activists. “POLICE FORCES AROUND the world have increasingly used hacking tools to identify and track protesters, expose political dissidents’ secrets, and turn activists’ computers and phones into inescapable eavesdropping bugs. Now, new clues in a case in India connect law enforcement to a hacking campaign that used those tools to go an appalling step further: planting false incriminating files on targets’ computers that the same police then used as grounds to arrest and jail them.”

Axios: Sweeping reporting failures may compromise the FBI’s 2021 crime data. “Nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies nationwide, including the New York City Police Department and Los Angeles Police Department, failed to report their 2021 crime data to the FBI, according to data provided to Axios Local from a partnership with The Marshall Project.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

FTC: FTC Report Warns About Using Artificial Intelligence to Combat Online Problems . “The use of AI, particularly by big tech platforms and other companies, comes with limitations and problems of its own. The report outlines significant concerns that AI tools can be inaccurate, biased, and discriminatory by design and incentivize relying on increasingly invasive forms of commercial surveillance.”

Brown University: Brown Library, Together with Emory University, Releases Report on Digital Scholarly Publishing. “Report presents key findings of a summit on digital monographs; calls for an increase in access, equity, and inclusion in the digital development and dissemination of humanities scholarship.”

Newswise: Spending Time Online Can Boost Children’s Well-Being – Depending on Their Social Framework . “The concern that media access may be harmful to children and adolescents has been a topic of public debate since long before the existence of the smartphone.This debate has picked up pace with the increased use of digital technology. The researcher Jean Twenge, for example, wrote a book in 2014 that would become very influential, in which she argued that smartphones contribute towards lowering the quality of life of adolescents. A new study indicates that this is incorrect.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Amateur Photographer: Brian May Reveals Plans For First International Stereoscopy Day. “The event is planned to be a new international celebration of the birth of stereoscopic 3D. It will celebrate the inventor of stereoscopy, the British genius and polymath Sir Charles Wheatstone (who revealed his stereoscope in 1838), its early pioneers and their successors up to the present day.” Good morning, Internet…

June 18, 2022 at 05:28PM
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Friday, June 17, 2022

New York Internet Access, Destination Distillery, Discord, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 17, 2022

New York Internet Access, Destination Distillery, Discord, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 17, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

WKBW: Governor Hochul’s office unveils interactive broadband service map. “The state’s new interactive broadband service map is part of a $1 billion initiative called ConnectAll. The map provides detailed information on the broadband infrastructure of neighborhoods around the state by allowing users to search their addresses and see which providers are available, the technology those providers use and what speeds are available in their area.”

BusinessWire: Distilled Spirits Council Launches DestinationDistillery.com Providing Interactive Map of U.S. Distilleries, Their Stories & the History of Spirits (PRESS RELEASE). “The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS) today launched Destination Distillery (https://ift.tt/k8XhqBr), a new website providing a tourism-driven experience and educational journey into the cultural heritage and history of spirits in America. Visitors to the website will be able to explore many of America’s most famous distilleries as well as up-and-coming ones, state-by-state trails, economic impact of the spirits industry by state, and important sites connected to the history of distilling and spirits in our country.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Digital Trends: Discord’s new content moderation tool will automatically block words and phrases. “In an effort to help its own moderators out, Discord has developed a new automated content moderation tool. Content moderation can be an exhausting, burnout-inducing task that requires community moderators to view upsetting content and then decide how best to handle such content and the user who posted it. Discord’s new tool, called AutoMod, is meant to help with that task.”

Android Central: Google finally shutters this long-defunct messaging service. “Google has completely pulled the plug on Talk, a legacy messaging service that you probably haven’t used in a very long time. Google Talk has remained operational for quite some time, even after it was retired a few years ago, but that officially ends today.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Government Executive: The EPA is Getting Rid of Its Online Archive and Groups Are Unhappy. “Content from the archive will be moved elsewhere when the archive is retired in July. The agency argues it is not compromising transparency by doing so, but a range of groups have voiced their concerns.” I mentioned this a while ago; this is a bit of an update.

RFI: RIP Internet Explorer: South Korean engineer’s browser ‘grave’ goes viral. “In honour of the browser’s ‘death’, a gravestone marked with its signature ‘e’ logo was set up on the rooftop of a cafe in South Korea’s southern city of Gyeongju by engineer Kiyoung Jung, 38. ‘He was a good tool to use to download other browsers,’ the gravestone’s inscription reads.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: How a Religious Sect Landed Google in a Lawsuit. “In a tiny town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, a religious organization called the Fellowship of Friends has established an elaborate, 1,200-acre compound full of art and ornate architecture. More than 200 miles away from the Fellowship’s base in Oregon House, Calif., the religious sect, which believes a higher consciousness can be achieved by embracing fine arts and culture, has also gained a foothold inside a business unit at Google.”

Security Week: 2,000 People Arrested Worldwide for Social Engineering Schemes. “As part of this operation, which ran between March 8 and May 8, police raided more than 1,700 locations, identified roughly 3,000 suspects, and arrested 2,000 individuals believed to be involved in illicit activities. Authorities also froze approximately 4,000 bank accounts and intercepted $50 million worth of illegal funds.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Fast Company: This new AI-powered paint tool helps you create custom colors with your voice. “If an architect wanted to create a building that matched the color of a New York City summer sunset, they’d have to pore over potentially hundreds of color cards designed for industry to get anything close, and still it’d be a tall order to find that exact match. But a new AI-powered, voice-controlled tool from Sherwin-Williams aims to change that. The paint brand recently launched Speaking in Color, a tool that allows users to tell it about certain places, objects, or shades in order to arrive at that perfect color.”

The Conversation: When texts suddenly stop: Why people ghost on social media. “I am a professor of psychology who studies the role of technology use in interpersonal relationships and well-being. Given the negative psychological consequences of thwarted relationships – especially during the emerging adulthood years, ages 18 to 29 – I wanted to understand what leads college students to ghost others, and if ghosting has any impact on mental health.” Good afternoon, Internet…

June 18, 2022 at 01:04AM
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Words Without Borders, Air Quality, LinkedIn, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 11, 2022

Words Without Borders, Air Quality, LinkedIn, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 11, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Facebook Is Changing Its Algorithm To Take On Tiktok, Leaked Memo Reveals. “In an internal memo from late April obtained by The Verge, the Meta executive in charge of Facebook, Tom Alison, spelled out the plan: rather than prioritize posts from accounts people follow, Facebook’s main feed will, like TikTok, start heavily recommending posts regardless of where they come from. And years after Messenger and Facebook split up as separate apps, the two will be brought back together, mimicking TikTok’s messaging functionality.”

Mashable: Instagram seems to have completely stopped caring about its users. ” When it comes to ads on platforms, there’s a point at which a user inevitably will throw their hands up in the air and say: enough. This level is different for everyone, but for me, Instagram has not only reached it — it’s running circles around it.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNET: Meta’s Investigation of Sheryl Sandberg Goes Back Several Years, Report Says. “The investigation is reportedly into whether Sandberg used Facebook staff to work on her personal projects, including her second book, her Lean In foundation and her second wedding. The scrutiny has been ongoing since last fall, the report said, with multiple Meta employees being questioned.”

Associated Press: Facebook fails again to detect hate speech in ads. “[Global Witness] created 12 text-based ads that used dehumanizing hate speech to call for the murder of people belonging to each of Ethiopia’s three main ethnic groups — the Amhara, the Oromo and the Tigrayans. Facebook’s systems approved the ads for publication, just as they did with the Myanmar ads. The ads were not actually published on Facebook.”

Washington Post: Facebook’s ban on gun sales gives sellers 10 strikes before booting them. “Facebook prohibits gun sales on its service. But buyers and sellers can violate the rule 10 times before they are kicked off the social network, according to internal guidance obtained by The Washington Post. The policy, which has not previously been reported, is much more lenient than for users who post child pornography, which is illegal, or a terrorist image on Facebook, which prompts immediate removal from the platform.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Tubefilter: The FTC says social media is rife with crypto scams—and victims are losing hundreds of millions of dollars. “The majority of people encountering crypto scams on social media did so on a platform owned by Meta. The FTC’s data shows that 32% of people who fell prey to a crypto scam last year originally found it because of a post on Instagram. A further 26% of victims encountered scams on Facebook, and another 9% did so on WhatsApp, the messaging platform Meta bought for $19 billion in 2014.”

Reveal: Facebook and Anti-Abortion Clinics Are Collecting Highly Sensitive Info on Would-Be Patients. “Facebook is collecting ultra-sensitive personal data about abortion seekers and enabling anti-abortion organizations to use that data as a tool to target and influence people online, in violation of its own policies and promises. In the wake of a leaked Supreme Court opinion signaling the likely end of nationwide abortion protections, privacy experts are sounding alarms about all the ways people’s data trails could be used against them if some states criminalize abortion.”

The Guardian: Meta banned firearms sales. Why are they still available on Facebook and Instagram?. “Meta policy since 2016 has banned the ‘sale or use of weapons, ammunition or explosives’ between individuals, including ‘firearms parts’. However, the study from Media Matters for America, a non-profit tech watchdog group, shows users of Instagram and Facebook can buy materials from unregulated sources to build high-powered, automatic weapons in just a few clicks.”

IANS: UK appeals court upholds ruling to block Meta’s Giphy acquisition. “An appeals tribunal in the UK has upheld a previous ruling directing Meta (formerly Facebook) to unwind its $315 million acquisition of online database and search engine Giphy.”

Fox 11 Los Angeles: Cybercriminal steals 1 million Facebook account credentials over 4 months, firm says. “Phishing scams are an ongoing problem for unsuspecting users on social media platforms when their personal information is stolen or compromised. Hundreds of Facebook users fell victim to this scam after an intelligence company discovered a cybercriminal stole one million Facebook account credentials in four months.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Slashgear: Meta Is In Serious Trouble. Here’s Why. “Meta is not exactly in the best shape right now. Reports suggest that the social network Facebook isn’t growing like it once was, and Meta’s other businesses in advertising, VR, and the metaverse aren’t doing particularly well at the moment. It would appear that the biggest hurdle that Meta faces is slowing revenue growth, something that has already started to show its effects on Meta’s plans.”

ZDNet: Why you can’t trust Instagram . “About once a day I get a message from someone asking for my help with restoring their Instagram account. Like me, they did all the right security things. They used two-factor authentication (2FA). They jumped through the hoops to restore their hacked Instagram account. None of it worked, so they ask me if I have a fix. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

June 17, 2022 at 08:23PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/6Y39CDy