New researches

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Singapore Wildlife, New Zealand Biodiversity Data, New Mexico Higher Education, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, April 27, 2022

Singapore Wildlife, New Zealand Biodiversity Data, New Mexico Higher Education, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, April 27, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Youthtopia: New initiative launched to promote coexistence with wildlife in Singapore, website set up to provide information on species. “A new islandwide initiative was launched last Friday (Apr 22) to raise awareness and understanding of Singapore’s wildlife…. To kickstart the initiative, a new website has been set up as a one-stop platform for the public to learn about the natural habitats and behaviour of the wildlife species. Members of the public can also pick up tips on what to do and avoid when encountering wildlife in various situations.”

National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA): Easy access to environmental research data. “New Zealand’s seven Crown Research Institutes (CRIs) have created the National Environmental Data Centre (NEDC) website to make the environmental information held by CRIs more accessible to all New Zealanders. The datasets include a huge range of information from climate and atmosphere, freshwater, land and oceans, including biodiversity and geological data.”

Roswell Daily Record: The Education Plan announces launch of new website. “The Education Plan, New Mexico’s 529 education savings program, has launched a new website with enhanced tools and resources to help parents, grandparents and individuals plan and save for future education…. The site features analysis of education costs, a glossary that defines common terms related to savings plans, a breakdown of tax benefits, an overview of qualified expenses and an interactive map to determine the 529 savings opportunities in each state, among other content and tools.”

Lifehacker: Let This Free App Explain How to Play a New Board Game (So You Don’t Have To). “Dized is a free app designed to walk players through new board games with engaging tutorials uniquely created for each title….When you first choose a tutorial, you see an initial summary screen, which includes the estimated duration one game will take, the number of players that can play at once, and the appropriate age rating. You’ll also see a summary of what the game’s all about, and have the option to check out either a tutorial or the rules.” The app currently has full tutorials for 39 games, but rule lists for many more.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Google Play launches its own privacy ‘nutrition labels,’ following similar effort by Apple. “The company says it will begin to roll out the new Google Play Data safety section to users on a gradual basis, ahead of the July 20th deadline that requires developers to properly disclose the data their app collects, if and how it’s shared with third parties, the app’s security practices and more.”

CNET: Google Misses Earnings Expectations Amid Light Revenue. “Google parent Alphabet posted first-quarter earnings that missed analyst expectations as the search giant’s revenue came in softer than anticipated. For the quarter ended March 31, Alphabet reported $68 billion in sales, slightly below the $68.1 billion forecast by analysts surveyed by Yahoo Finance. Earnings per share totaled $24.62, below the $25.94 forecast.”

BusinessToday: Twitter’s India rival Koo undergoes a makeover aimed to grow user engagement. “As microblogging site Twitter takes centrestage with its $44 billion acquisition by tech billionaire Elon Musk, Indian homegrown rival Koo is planning a design revamp for an immersive browsing experience. Koo said that the new design features will be accessible to users across iOS and Android operating systems. The move, as per the social media company, is aimed to enhance user engagement on the platform.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

RadioToday: Dedicated social media network for radio people launched. “Tracey Lee from OnAirCoach and her partner Nails Mahoney have launched a new social media network just for radio people. The Radio Space will cater for presenters, programmers, producers, consultants and more.”

Marketplace: What social media advertising tells us about inflation. “Social media companies’ earnings reports are coming out this week, including those from Twitter and Facebook, and advertising accounts for a big piece of their business. But when Snap Inc. reported earnings last week, the company flagged problems that could hurt demand for ads. The issues are familiar — supply chain snags and inflation.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Nationwide News Australia: Major deadline looms for Facebook and Google as Labor unveils multinational tax plan. “Multinationals will have more to answer for after the next election with the two major parties eyeing reform for tax-dodging giants. Announcing Labor’s economic plan on Wednesday, shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers said his party would ‘level the playing field for Australian businesses’ by forcing multinationals to pay their share of tax.”

Bloomberg Law: Postal Service Social Media Tracking Tests Crime Unit’s Power. “Tracking by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s online investigative program has coincided with Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol in 2021, according to government reports. In certain cases, it has exceeded the agency’s legal powers over postal crimes, according to a recent watchdog report by the USPS Office of Inspector General. The report calls for a review of the program by September.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EFF: EFF to European Court: No Intermediary Liability for Social Media Users. “Courts and legislatures around the globe are hotly debating to what degree online intermediaries—the chain of entities that facilitate or support speech on the internet—are liable for the content they help publish. One thing they should not be doing is holding social media users legally responsible for comments posted by others to their social media feeds, EFF and Media Defence told the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).”

Washington Post: Why is the U.S. still probing foreign visitors’ social media accounts?. “The government has never adequately explained, let alone provided evidence of, the need for this policy. Obama-era pilot programs failed to show that social media screening is a useful visa vetting tool. And during the early days of the Biden administration, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which analyzes the cost and benefits of regulations, rejected a previous DHS proposal to expand the State Department policy; it concluded that DHS had failed to demonstrate the policy’s ‘practical utility’ and to justify its ‘monetary and social’ costs. And yet the Biden administration is now doubling down on the Trump-era policy by expanding it.” Good morning, Internet…

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April 27, 2022 at 06:42PM
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Ukraine Support Tracker, Christie’s Auctions, Disinformation Efforts, More: Ukraine Update, April 27, 2022

Ukraine Support Tracker, Christie’s Auctions, Disinformation Efforts, More: Ukraine Update, April 27, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Spotted via Reddit: the Ukraine Support Tracker. From the front page: “The Ukraine Support Tracker (Beta) lists and quantifies military, financial and humanitarian aid transferred by governments to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion on February 24, 2022. We focus on support by 31 Western governments, specifically by the G7 and European Union member countries. The database is intended to support a facts-based discussion about support to Ukraine. Because we focus on government to government transfers into Ukraine, we do not include private donations or transfers by international organizations in this version of the database.”

EVENTS

Christie’s: Christie’s Launches Art Relief Initiatives for Ukraine. “This April and May, Christie’s will present an international program of exhibition and sales initiatives from London to New York to benefit Ukraine. Partnering with three major non-profit organisations—the World Monuments Fund (WMF), Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and CORE (Community Organized Relief Effort) Effort, Christie’s joins together with artists, consignors and collectors to raise essential funds in support of humanitarian aid and cultural heritage preservation efforts in Ukraine.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

NHK World Japan: Ukraine reports over 240 cases of damage to cultural heritage by Russian forces. “Ukraine says it has documented at least 242 instances of Russian occupiers’ war crimes against cultural heritage. Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture and Information Policy on Saturday revealed the numbers. By region, 84 instances were reported in Kharkiv, 45 in Donetsk and 38 in Kyiv.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: The War in Ukraine Has Unleashed a New Word. “‘Pашизм’ is a word built up from the inside, from several languages, as a complex of puns and references that reveal a bilingual society thinking out its predicament and communicating to itself. Its emergence demonstrates how a code-switching people can enrich language while making a horrific war more intelligible to themselves. Putin’s ethnic imperialism insists that Ukrainians must be Russians because they speak Russian. They do — and they speak Ukrainian. But Ukrainian identity has as much to do with an ability to live between languages than it does with the use of any one of them.”

Rolling Stone: Pro-Russia Social Media Accounts Spread Obviously Fake Zelensky Cocaine Video. “A video spreading across social media of Volodymyr Zelensky with a bag of cocaine on his desk is – of course – fake, and the latest in an ongoing smear campaign against the Ukrainian president.”

Ukrinform: Russia spins disinformation, claiming its forces seize “OSCE archive” in Mariupol. “Russian propaganda pundits are circulating misinformation about the alleged seizure of documents from the OSCE archives in Mariupol, which allegedly testify to the ‘crimes committed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Herald (Scotland): Who is the Dundee comedian now ‘committing war crimes’ in Ukraine?. “GRAHAM Phillips could soon be the first comedian from Dundee to end up in The Hague. He was condemned by MPs in the House of Commons this week for his interview with a British prisoner of war taken captive by the Russians during the Ukraine conflict. In the 45-minute video film, Phillips interrogates Aiden Aslin, who surrendered to Russian forces after fighting in the besieged city of Mariupol last week.”

Vedomosti, and machine-translated from Russian: Movies, series and music from unfriendly countries legalized through compulsory license. “The Russian authorities have found a way to keep films, series, music and other intellectual property in the country from companies from unfriendly countries that have announced they are leaving or suspending their activities in Russia. For this, a bill is being developed that expands the effect of a compulsory license, two interlocutors familiar with the discussion of the initiative told Vedomosti.”

C4ISRNET: How one US intelligence agency is supporting Ukraine. “The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which collects, analyzes and distributes satellite imagery in support of U.S. national security, is monitoring events in Ukraine and sharing intelligence with partner nations engaged in joint missions, its director said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Guardian: The big idea: can social media change the course of war?. “Social media users do not just watch these events unfold in real time; they react to and interact with them. Gestures such as incorporating a Ukrainian flag into one’s username may be merely symbolic, but when users lobby politicians online, donate money, or even offer up their own homes to refugees, their engagement with the war begins to have real-world consequences. Invading Russian forces seem to be aware of the potential of social media: they have targeted Ukrainian mobile communications networks, launching a missile attack on Kyivstar’s hub in Okhtyrka on 11 March, and reportedly going after communications infrastructure in Mariupol as well.”

The National Interest: Ukraine Can Show Taiwan How to Win a Cyberwar With China. “Prior to the invasion, many had warned that China was closely watching the events in Ukraine and, if Russia invaded, may be prompted to attack Taiwan. Given many Russian military failures, observers pointed out the challenges that China could face if and when it decides to attack Taiwan. While the Ukrainian case study shows that cyberwarfare is not to be paralleled with traditional kinetic warfare, it is worth asking whether Taiwan will face similar attempts to sabotage and disrupt its infrastructure and services.”

Yusof Ishak Institute: 2022/44 “The Russia-Ukraine War: Unpacking Online Pro-Russia Narratives in Vietnam” by Hoang Thi Ha and Dien Nguyen An Luong. “The Russia-Ukraine war’s ramifications for Vietnam are felt beyond the economic and diplomatic realms. It has in fact become an online hotbed of conflicting and confounding narratives that demonstrate different worldviews and political leanings among Vietnamese netizens. An examination of 28 Facebook pages/groups active in trending pro-Russia narratives finds an ‘echo chamber’ that is on a constant lookout for Russian, Western and even Chinese news sources that peddle and amplify pro-Russia and anti-Western voices.”

April 27, 2022 at 05:53PM
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Concert Archives, Tom Kromer, Clermont Lee, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 26, 2022

Concert Archives, Tom Kromer, Clermont Lee, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 26, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from The Crimson: Concert Archives is the ‘Goodreads’ Concert-Lovers Never Knew They Needed. “Similar to the way Goodreads creates an interactive and archivable reading experience, Concert Archives is a hybrid platform that allows users to catalog every concert they have attended on the app or website. In an interview with us, founder Justin Thiele describes it as the ‘home for concerts to live beyond just the time that you’re at a concert.’ Part crowd-sourced database and part social media, Concert Archives provides music lovers an innovative and unique way to find community while displaying their love of live music.”

Huntington Herald-Dispatch: Decades after his death, Marshall students archive forgotten Huntington writer’s work . “”Students at Marshall University got a chance this semester to embrace Appalachian literature, while also making sure a Huntington writer will not be forgotten again. Michael Martin and Krys Smith, sophomores at Marshall, said they signed up for professor Stefan Schoberlein’s Appalachian literature class this spring expecting to read books and take quizzes, but the professor had other plans in mind after he heard of writer Tom Kromer on NPR.”

Digital Library of Georgia: Savannah’s pioneer female landscape architect Clermont Lee transformed our public spaces. Now you can see her drawings online. “Drawings by Georgia’s first female landscape architect Clermont Lee are now publicly available online thanks to a collaboration between the Georgia Historical Society and the Digital Library of Georgia. From 1940 through the mid-1980s, she made landscape designs for clients in Savannah, Georgia, and throughout the Southeast.”

Motherboard: Every Teen in the US Can Now Get Free Access to Banned Books. “Books UnBanned is a teen-led initiative from [Brooklyn Public Library] that aims to push back against recent attempts to remove reading materials from schools and libraries in the U.S. By giving people ages 13 to 21 a library card, the program is providing access to BPL’s digital catalogs regardless of location, with the hope of reaching marginalized teens who frequently find themselves targets of bigoted and racist attacks.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

How-To Geek: What’s New in Chrome 101, Arriving Today. “Chrome hit the big 100 in March 2022, but the celebration is over now. We’re back already with another release in April. Chrome 101 includes more improvements to the new download UI, saving Tab Groups, and the password manager. Let’s take a look.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Library of Congress: Library of Congress Acquires Papers of Award-Winning Playwright Neil Simon. “The Library of Congress has acquired the manuscripts and papers of playwright and screenwriter Neil Simon, the most commercially successful American playwright of the 20th century.”

CNN: Here’s what Elon Musk has tweeted over the years … about Twitter. “Following a whirlwind few weeks marked by a very public back-and-forth between Musk and Twitter, the company said Monday that it had agreed to sell itself to the world’s richest man in a roughly $44 billion deal that will take it private. The deal, which is expected to close this year, puts a new spotlight on the billionaire’s ever evolving and sometimes erratic views towards Twitter over the years, many of which he has shared on Twitter itself.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Musk, Twitter Must Comply With EU Rules, Official Says. “While some people wonder what changes might come to Twitter after Elon Musk on Monday struck a deal to purchase the social media platform for $44 billion, the European Commission is warning that Musk ‘must comply’ with its rules, specifically the Digital Services Act.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT News: Estimating the informativeness of data. “Not all data are created equal. But how much information is any piece of data likely to contain? This question is central to medical testing, designing scientific experiments, and even to everyday human learning and thinking. MIT researchers have developed a new way to solve this problem, opening up new applications in medicine, scientific discovery, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.”

Consumer Reports: How to Delete 100,000 Emails From Your Gmail Account in Two Days. “All told, I had a bit more than 20GB of email in my inbox, well past the 15GB limit for free account storage. If I wanted to avoid paying Google another $30 this year to maintain more than a decade’s worth of junk, I had to act fast. So about a week ago, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.” Good afternoon, Internet…

April 27, 2022 at 12:51AM
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Tuesday, April 26, 2022

UK Court Judgments, San Francisco Disco Sets, Australia Opera, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, April 26, 2022

UK Court Judgments, San Francisco Disco Sets, Australia Opera, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, April 26, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

UK Government: Court judgments made accessible to all at The National Archives. “As the official archive and publisher for the UK Government, The National Archives has long-standing experience in storing and publishing information securely. Under the Archive’s expertise, they will be preserved, managed and made widely accessible for years to come. New court and tribunal decisions from the superior courts of record – The Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court, and Upper Tribunals – will now be available on The National Archives Find Case Law site.” This archive is still being populated and will expand over time.

New-to-me, from KCRW: SF disco is the sound of gay liberation. Historic reels go digital. “The SF Disco Preservation Society touts more than 2,000 records from when disco was the soundtrack of gay liberation, with queer men flocking to San Francisco, LA, and New York to dance, sing, and mingle. The archive is run singlehandedly by Jim Hopkins, who became a DJ at age 16 in 1981. He notes that many DJs in SF died of AIDS, and he wanted to preserve their legacies.” The archive is a Soundcloud collection of over 275 DJ sets of disco music. Most is from the 1970s or early 1980s, but there are few from the mid-90s.

Australian Arts Review: Australian Opera championed in national first digital library. “Australia’s first digital library dedicated to Australian Opera has launched today thanks to State Opera South Australia. State Opera Artistic Director, Stuart Maunder said that the national online archive will champion all aspects of Australian Opera and is an important vehicle to protect the past, present and future of these great works.”

KSTP: High-dollar ACT prep goes online for free. “Tips and training for the ACT exam can cost $100 an hour with a tutor. ACT tutor Katie Halcrow says that most students can raise their score by 5 points by using them….After years of helping students prepare for the test, she has launched a non-profit called ‘Power Up Prep’ and has put all her material online for free. It’s material that is so valuable that a few schools around the metro are starting to use it in their classrooms.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Reddit launches $1 million fund to support user-driven projects. “You’ll finally have a chance to host that r/legaladvice happy hour, or take your friends from r/animalpics to the zoo. Reddit is investing $1 million in its Community Funds program, which aims to help users get their projects and ideas off the ground. ”

Ars Technica: Apple will delist App Store apps that haven’t been updated recently. “Apple plans to imminently remove games and apps on the App Store that have not been recently updated if developers don’t submit an update for approval within 30 days. This news comes from screenshots and claims shared by various app developers and reporting by The Verge.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: How To Find And Fix Broken Internal Links. “Broken internal links can frustrate visitors and cause them to leave your site. They can also hurt your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). But don’t worry. There are ways that you can easily find and fix these broken links yourself. It will take some time, but it will be worth it in the long run for both your users and your website.” The usual good work by Search Engine Journal.

ReviewGeek: The Best Visual Voicemail Apps. “When using visual voicemail through an app or your phone carrier or manufacturer, you can see all of your voicemails at once. Sometimes, you can even view a transcript preview of the call, so you know what the message is about before you even open it. Being able to see all your voicemails makes it much easier to maintain your messages and not end up with 20 messages that you just haven’t gotten around to deleting.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

AFP: Memory hole: Kashmir news archives vanish . “In recent months hundreds of reports chronicling decades of violence in the disputed Muslim-majority territory have disappeared from local media archives or been rendered unsearchable through a variety of methods. Critics say it is an Orwellian effort to expunge history and control the narrative going forward, with most pointing the finger at the Indian government. In many cases, newspaper reports are the only publicly-accessible primary-source records of events in Kashmir.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Krebs on Security: Leaked Chats Show LAPSUS$ Stole T-Mobile Source Code. “KrebsOnSecurity recently reviewed a copy of the private chat messages between members of the LAPSUS$ cybercrime group in the week leading up to the arrest of its most active members last month. The logs show LAPSUS$ breached T-Mobile multiple times in March, stealing source code for a range of company projects. T-Mobile says no customer or government information was stolen in the intrusion.”

ABC News: As NFT scams proliferate online, crypto sleuths are fighting back. “Spend enough time online, and you’re sure to run into scammers who try to steal your money by asking you to confirm your credit card information or sign up for fake PC protection plans. Now, online scams have reached the lucrative world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) — and a group of tech sleuths are fighting back.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Smithsonian Magazine: Researchers Develop a ‘Bear-Dar’ That Warns Humans of Approaching Polar Bears. “Whenever Alyssa Bohart heard a voice from her computer repeatedly chiming—status alert, status alert—the search was on. The warnings came from a radar device installed in Churchill, Manitoba—a modified military system programed with artificial intelligence (A.I.) and trained to detect polar bears. Bohart’s job was to remotely operate a camera and visually confirm that the AI was making the right call.” Good morning, Internet…

April 26, 2022 at 06:24PM
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Monday, April 25, 2022

Twitter, LGBTQ Elected Officials, Salt Lake Tribune, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 25, 2022

Twitter, LGBTQ Elected Officials, Salt Lake Tribune, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 25, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

The Verge: Twitter accepts buyout, giving Elon Musk total control of the company. “Twitter has accepted Elon Musk’s offer to purchase the company for $44 billion, the company announced in a press release today. Musk purchased the company at $54.20 a share, the same price named in his initial offer earlier this month.”

NEW RESOURCES

Princeton University: New scholarly database documents the rise in publicly identifying LGBTQI+ elected officials across the globe. “Ranging from the few ‘out’ officials in the time of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk until now, the database in the new Queer Politics website shows the steady growth of people in office who publicly identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, non-binary, gender-non-conforming, queer and intersex. ”

University of Utah: Digitizing 133 years of Salt Lake Tribune newspapers. “Researchers, historians and genealogists now have an additional 1.6 million pages of The Salt Lake Tribune, at their fingertips. The recent digitizing process added issues dating from 1920 to 2004, to the existing online collection of issues between 1871 and 1919. All 133 years are now keyword searchable and available to the public thanks to a partnership between the U’s J. Willard Marriott Library, Newspapers.com, a division of Ancestry and The Salt Lake Tribune.”

Fold3: Introducing Our Collection of Morning Reports. “Morning reports are company-level reports that were filled out each day to reflect status changes for personnel assigned to that unit. These changes may include transfers, disciplinary actions, battle wounds, leaves, and those who were sick in quarters. We have just added a new collection, U.S. Morning Reports 1912-1946. This growing collection contains 2.33 million records with additional records coming. We currently have morning reports through the year 1939.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Twitter is reportedly working on a vibe check feature. “Twitter is reportedly working on a feature that allows users to set a status, codenamed ‘Vibe.’ The possible feature was first spotted by Jane Manchun Wong, a researcher and reverse engineer with a track record of spoiling upcoming app updates.”

Washington Post: Twitter bans climate change propaganda ads as deniers target platforms. “Under the new policy, advertisements that contradict the ‘scientific consensus’ on climate change will be prohibited along with other types of banned-ads such as campaigns that contain violence, profanity or personal attacks. Twitter will be relying on reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a unit within the United Nations, to inform its decisions about which advertisements break its rules, according to the company.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CBS News: TikTok’s teens want to be famous. But at what cost?. “[Jiggy] Turner is part of a growing wave of teen influencers eschewing traditional career paths in favor of a chance at celebrity. In a recent survey, 54% of Generation Z said they’d like to become an influencer, and 86% expressed interest in posting social media content for money. But lawmakers across the country are concerned that popular social media apps could be creating a mental health crisis for America’s youth.”

Herald Scotland: Fascinating trove of photographs shed light on a bygone era. “More than 1,500 of Duncan [Macpherson]’s images have been gathered and stored in archives, recognised for the remarkable insight they offer into bygone days and regarded as being of national importance. Now, the collection has almost doubled in size, after the surprise discovery of even more images and, sparking particular excitement, a bundle of five reels of moving film thought to date from the 1920s.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ITV: Online child sexual abuse at record high levels – with some exploited within minutes. “An Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) report says the greatest threat to children online is self-generated content where perpetrators groom and coerce children into creating images and videos of themselves. The offender records that content and shares it on the web. The IWF, which searches and removes vile abuse, says it has seen an ‘explosion’ in this type of crime over the past two years, with an increase of 374%.”

TorrentFreak: Google Voluntarily Removes More Pirate Sites From its Search Results. “Over the past months, it has become clear that Google is voluntarily helping rightsholders to tackle online piracy. The search giant has now removed another batch of ‘pirate site’ URLs from its results in the Netherlands, just days after a local ISP was ordered to block them. While it’s a big step to take, Google hasn’t yet commented on the matter.” Good afternoon, Internet…

April 26, 2022 at 01:21AM
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Sanctions Screening Tool (Crypto), Tinder Info-Smuggling, Viasat Satellite Hack, More: Ukraine Update, Afternoon, March 24, 2022

Sanctions Screening Tool (Crypto), Tinder Info-Smuggling, Viasat Satellite Hack, More: Ukraine Update, Afternoon, March 24, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

SecurityWeek: Meta Offers Rewards for Flaws Allowing Attackers to Bypass Integrity Checks. “Facebook parent company Meta today announced that its bug bounty program will cover vulnerabilities that can be exploited to bypass integrity safeguards. The program expansion, the company says, is meant to steer researchers’ attention to security issues that attackers may exploit to bypass specific integrity checks meant to limit abuse behaviors.”

Bloomberg: Facebook Is Pulling Back From Its Foray Into Podcasting. “Facebook’s waning interest in podcasting is a disappointment for some in the growing industry because the scale of its platform offers a large potential audience, and with it, the possibility of more advertising revenue. Instead, parent company Meta Platforms Inc. is turning its attention to the metaverse and short-video projects amid increasing competition and a precipitous drop in its stock price.”

CNET: Meta Begins Monetizing Its Metaverse. “Magic butterfly wings that give you the power of floating across your favorite meditative VR world? Those can be had, at a price. Meta’s starting to unlock monetization in its open-world metaverse VR app, Horizon Worlds, beginning with items you’ll be able to buy in individual worlds. But these items won’t be things you can take with you to other worlds… at least, not yet.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Guardian: Facebook ‘lacks willpower’ to tackle misinformation in Africa. “Facebook has been accused of failing to invest sufficiently to combat misinformation as it pursues rapid growth in Africa, where the Covid pandemic has highlighted the outsize role played by social media in online discourse. Traditional media and governments have an increasingly limited ability to control information flows on the continent, as social media platforms including Facebook seek to expand rapidly, though largely without fanfare.”

The Verge: Mark Zuckerberg’s Augmented Reality. “Zuckerberg may have big hopes for smart glasses, but the near-term reality of the technology is far less lofty. The demonstrations during Zuckerberg’s Meta presentation, such as playing virtual chess on a real table with someone’s avatar, weren’t based on any functioning hardware or software. And Meta doesn’t yet have a working, wearable prototype of its planned AR glasses but rather a stationary demonstration that sits on a table.”

Gizmodo: Job Ad for Bureau of Prisons Touts Amazing Number of Mental Illnesses in U.S. Prison System. “The U.S. Bureau of Prisons purchased a number of Facebook ads recently in an attempt to hire new people in a variety of roles throughout the country. But one ad in particular is catching attention on social media for how bleak it seems. The Bureau of Prisons seems to be using the number of mental illnesses in the U.S. prison system as a career opportunity for any psychologists who happen to be job hunting right now.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Advocate: He livestreamed a killing. Facebook alerted police, deleted the video, but duplicates spread.. “One of the videos was viewed 16,000 times and shared 191 more. Another logged 56,000 views and 2,300 shares. There were at least 10, all showing Janice David being stabbed to death…. despite Meta’s efforts to stop the footage from circulating, clips of the video reposted by other users remained on Facebook for at least 24 hours after [Earl Lee] Johnson’s arrest. They ranged in length from 23 seconds to nearly two minutes.”

Times of Malta: Hackers target politicians’ social media accounts, police issue warning. “The police said they had received reports of fake social media accounts pretending to belong to politicians on Saturday, days after advising users to take extra precautions online. Politicians and individuals who are in the public eye have fallen victim to hackers, and fake Instagram and Facebook accounts have been set up to emulate them, the police said. No further details were given.”

TechCrunch: Meta subpoenaed tiny rival Dispo to prove it isn’t a monopoly. “On a quest to show the FTC that it isn’t a monopoly, Meta flooded a wide swath of major tech companies with subpoenas last month. But the company is apparently demanding documents from much smaller ‘rivals’ too.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Coda: How Silicon Valley is helping Putin and other tyrants win the information war. “From Afghanistan to Ukraine, and much of the rest of the non-English speaking world, journalists are losing their voice. Not only because of the increasingly oppressive governments that target them, but also because policies created in Silicon Valley are helping oppressors of free speech peddle disinformation.”

The Guardian: A barrage of assault, racism and rape jokes: my nightmare trip into the metaverse. “Before I went into the metaverse, I’d read a few articles on it and people didn’t have the nicest things to say. But I wanted to see if that was true, or whether people were just trying to find negativity. I’m a heavy user of social media, so a 3D virtual space where you can interact with other people – where artists are doing concerts and fashion houses are doing shows? That’s exciting to me! But within the first 10 minutes of putting on a VR headset and entering a chat room, I saw underage kids simulating oral sex on each other. I experienced sexual harassment, racism and rape jokes. At one point, I heard someone say ‘I like little girls from the age of nine to 12: that’s just my thing.'”

BuzzFeed News: Toxic Pro–Eating Disorder Accounts On Instagram Could Be Reaching Nearly 20 Million Users, A Report Says. “Instagram’s recommendation algorithms push pro-anorexia and disordered eating content to millions of users, including those whose bios identify them as under 13 years old, according to a new report by Fairplay, an advocacy organization focused on children’s digital wellness.”

April 26, 2022 at 12:25AM
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If you like Google Sheets, RSS Feeds, and Auto-Translations, You’ll LOVE These Two New Tools

If you like Google Sheets, RSS Feeds, and Auto-Translations, You’ll LOVE These Two New Tools
By ResearchBuzz

I’ve been making attempts to gather more international news for a while now in an effort to make ResearchBuzz better. In 2017 I wrote an article about a simple way to generate country-specific Bing News RSS feeds, for example. But gathering news articles isn’t useful if I can’t read them.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, it became more urgent to me that I have a way to find and easily review RSS feeds that aren’t in English, but I could not find a solution that I could afford as a solo researcher with minimal scratch.

So I made one. Well, I made two.

There are overview/how-to articles for each, but I want to present them together here, because they’re meant to be complementary. They’re both Google-Sheets based, and because the sheets are self-contained, you can make your own copies.

(Quick Tip: For the sake of non-complicated discussion I will refer in this article to non-English feeds, which adds the unspoken assumption that they will be translated to English. However, I made the translation tool so it can easily translate to your preferred language; you just have to change one variable.)

Generate Non-English RSS Feeds: The RSSinator

The RSSinator is a Google-Sheet based tool for generating non-English RSS feeds.

Enter the query you want to translate and the country from which you want news (German offers six countries/territories, Spanish offers 20, and French offers 29) and the RSSinator generates an RSS feed and shows you a preview of the first five items of the feed in the original language, then machine translated into English.

You can get a more complete overview of the tool at https://researchbuzz.me/2022/04/19/how-to-make-foreign-language-bing-news-rss-feeds-and-review-them-before-you-commit/ . Since I wrote the article last week I added German and French to the original Spanish translation tab, so the article is a little outdated.

If you don’t want to read any more of my nonsense and just want to play with the tool, you can grab your own copy at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cgpPsyN8C0Xgl_bxZ5CKcIz3EKTwlKwEoJQQ1H1qXd8/copy

Translate Non-English RSS Feeds: the Translate Google Apps Script

Of course, once you have a non-English RSS feed, you need to be able to translate it. My solution to that is an IFTTT recipe that aggregates RSS feed items and a Google Apps Script to translate them.

You’ll start out with an IFTTT recipe which makes a Google Sheet like this:

And by using that new “Translation” menu item, you’ll get a new worksheet of translated content that looks like this with just one click:

You’ll need to have an IFTTT account connected to your Google Drive in order to use this tool. Read more about it and how to grab the IFTTT recipe and use the script at

https://researchbuzz.me/2022/04/22/need-to-translate-rss-feeds-it-s-easy-with-ifttt-and-this-google-apps-script/ .

This was my first experience creating a Google Apps Script from scratch and I learned a lot. In fact, it gave me a lot more ideas about more tools. If you have any ideas about how I could extend them, or there are some other tools you’d like to see, drop a comment.

And thanks for reading!

April 25, 2022 at 08:22PM
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