NEW RESOURCES

Now available: a database documenting aboriginal veterans from Canada (PRESS RELEASE). “The [World Wars Aboriginal Veterans Portal (WWAVP)] documents the lives of 8,300 individuals through images, biographies, and transcriptions of all known or accessible biographical details about the soldiers. New records, features and descriptive information will continue to appear through to spring of 2017. Users can query the database using a variety of fields, including name, geographical locations, nation or band, and military units.”

A new database of multiple sclerosis (MS) clinical data is now available. “A new database containing nearly 2500 patient records from the placebo arms of nine multiple sclerosis (MS) clinical trials is now available for research by qualified investigators. A review board will screen requests for access to the MS placebo arm database, using the process established for another successful C-Path effort in sharing placebo data, namely, the Alzheimer’s disease database….”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

The Sydney Opera House has joined the Google Cultural Institute. “The Google Cultural Institute provides a new digital home for the Sydney Opera House, bringing together more than 1,000 artifacts and 60 years of history in a single online platform. From architect Jørn Utzon’s early designs, to the inner workings of the world’s biggest mechanical organ, to spectacular late night shows, these 50 online exhibits capture the Sydney Opera House from every angle.”

WordPress 4.5.1 is now available. “This release fixes 12 bugs, chief among them a singular class issue that broke sites based on the Twenty Eleven theme, an incompatibility between certain Chrome versions and the visual editor, and an Imagick bug that could break media uploads.”

Google has returned in-depth articles to its search results.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Beit Haftutsot, the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, is launching a crowdfunding campaign to digitize its music collection. “Inside the museum’s Feher Jewish Music Center is one of the world’s largest archives of Jewish music. The center — a treasure trove for lovers of Jewish song and lyrics — has been collecting and preserving the global musical heritage of the Jewish people for more than 30 years. But today, with that heritage locked into decaying technologies of vinyl records and magnetic cassette tapes, the museum is on a mission to transfer its sounds online, where it can be safely stored for future generations.”

A bunch of companies have gotten together to start a coalition for self-driving cars. “Ford, Volvo, Google, Lyft and Uber announced on Tuesday they had started the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, which will work to promote autonomous driving technology with lawmakers, regulators and the public.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Wait, what? Getty Images is going after Google. (And apologies for having an RB with so many security/legal topics. Just shook out that way this morning.) “Getty Images has announced it will file a competition law complaint against Google with the European Commission. The photo library’s beef with Google is that in 2013 it changed its image search service so that it instead of displaying thumbnail images users were instead offered ‘high res large-format content.'”

Do you use Google’s traffic app, Waze? There’s a security issue you need to know about. “Researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara recently discovered a Waze vulnerability that allowed them to create thousands of ‘ghost drivers’ that can monitor the drivers around them—an exploit that could be used to track Waze users in real-time. They proved it to me by tracking my own movements around San Francisco and Las Vegas over a three-day period.” And then there’s the ghost traffic jams…. no, really.

Amazon is continuing its crackdown on fake reviews. “Amazon’s beef isn’t with fake reviewers, per se—it’s with the dealers, the websites that promise fake five-star reviews for cash. Amazon sued various websites in April and October of last year, and doesn’t appear to be letting up. In this round, it’s hitting the owners of five sites, including paidbookreviews.org and the not-so-subtle buyamazonreviews.info.”

The latest organization to offer a bug bounty? Why, it’s MIT! “The program is in an experimental phase and is open to current MIT students and affiliates, and includes a limited number of domains. Those submitting severe bugs will have money dropped into MIT accounts that can be spend around campus, and will get to keep their MIT Kerberos identity once they leave the ivory walls for the real world.”

For some reason I can’t fathom, there are over 1200 apps related to the US Presidential primaries. And the majority of them leak personal data. “Symantec looked at 1,217 apps and found that 654 were exposing data, explained Shaun Aimoto, principal software quality assurance engineer at Symantec. The company only looked at Android apps as part of its research and did not analyze iOS apps.” Good morning, Internet…

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