NEW RESOURCES
Regina Flores Mir has mashed up hip-hop and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it’s so wonderful. “A new project from Regina Flores Mir, an MFA candidate in the Parsons design and technology program, couples hip hop lyrics with the Met’s collection for a curated art tour. She came up with the idea while interning at the museum, inspired by a group of students she knew at a housing project in Jamaica, Queens who had never been, despite living just a few miles away.” You get the song, lyrics, and matching items from the Met’s collection. Now the downers: there’s only one song per artist, and only 13 artists. Missy Elliot and Queen Latifah are here, but I want to see Monie Love, MC Lyte, and Kool Moe Dee. (Remember back in the 80s when there was a big LL Cool J vs Kool Moe Dee thing? I was a total Kool Moe Dee fan.)
His user name is Davismv. He worked at Kmart for ten years. That’s all I know. But he saved the tapes that were played on the Kmart PA and now he’s uploaded them to the Internet Archive. Most of them are about 90 minutes each and there are about 50, spanning the early 1990s. Obviously I have not listened to them all, but it’s a lot of easy listening, PA announcements, etc. They are weirdly glorious. (Hat tip to John S for bringing them to my attention and making me spit tea on the screen.)
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
I’m not going to lie to you: I use an ad blocker. I felt like I had to do that after the auto-playing audio at 2am, the browser crashes, and the malvertising scares. I want to support publishers, but do I have to do it at the cost of my own productivity? I hope this gets resolved one day. Anyway, I used AdBlock. And yesterday I discovered that AdBlock has been bought. I don’t know who bought it though, because the buyer wants to remain anonymous. I also learned that AdBlock will be participating in what’s called “The Acceptable Ads program,” where some group of individuals decides what’s a non-annoying ad and lets it through AdBlock. I don’t even care about that, though. You know why? Because according to the Chrome store, AdBlock can both read and change all the data on all the sites you visit, as well as read your browsing history. And if I’m going to get some anonymous company run an extension that can do that on my computer, I’m even dumber than I look. If anyone’s got a suggestion for another ad blocker, leave a comment.
AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD
From Aljazeera.com: the top Google searches in Syria. “AJ+ spoke to Google to find out what Syrians are searching for and found that according to search volumes over the past fortnight, people have been searching for their closest hospitals, how to treat burns at home and how to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But the most popular search terms were about finding a way to Europe, and more specifically, how to reach Germany.”
Politico: Can anyone save the Library of Congress? Yes. But it won’t be James Billington and I’m glad he’s gone. Brewster Kahle, please.
Congratulations to Project Gutenberg for the release of its 50,000th ebook. Michael Hart would be proud. “Project Gutenberg is thrilled to achieve the milestone of eBook #50,000. In honor of Project Gutenberg’s founder, Michael S. Hart, a special title was selected. “John Gutenberg, First Master Printer, His Acts, and most remarkable Discourses, and his Death” is now available at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50000.”
SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES
Apparently Scottrade has been hit with a hack. (Based on the number of things I’ve got in my Pocket queue, you’re going to see several such stories in ResearchBuzz shortly. “Welcome to Day 2 of Cybersecurity (Breach) Awareness Month! Today’s awareness lesson is brought to you by retail brokerage firm Scottrade Inc., which just disclosed a breach involving contact information and possibly Social Security numbers on 4.6 million customers.” And guess what? It looks like the actual hack was over 18 months ago.
You may remember last year, the developers of TrueCrypt abandoned it, saying it wasn’t secure and suggesting no one use it. There wasn’t a lot of explanation at the time. Well now we have more details: TrueCrypt has critical security flaws. “Google Project Zero researcher James Forshaw found two ‘privilege elevation’ holes in the popular software that would give attackers full access to your data. Worse yet, TrueCrypt was audited earlier this by a crowdfunded team of iSec security researchers and found to be error-free.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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Try Privacy Badger
Re Adblockers
I only use the Firefox browser. (Old-fashioned, but it has its benefits).
The AdBlock Plus extension is OK, provided you untick the box for ‘Allow approved adverts’.
Include at least the Easylist and EasyPrivacy filters. Many more are available.
Recently I have been using uBlock Origin instead, as it seems to run faster. It uses the same filters as AdBlock Plus, but is not as user-friendly to non-techie people. But that’s OK for me.
Slashdot and The Register are reporting that Adblock has been bought by Adblock Plus. So if you untick the ‘Acceptable Ads’ box, it should be OK to use.
And maybe add some extra filters?
uBlock Origin is still faster if you can face the learning curve.
Note: uBlock is a different program from uBlock Origin. The uBlock Origin software is maintained by the original author.