NEW RESOURCES

In development: a big digital archive of butterflies and moths. “Funded by the National Science Foundation, the project is a collaboration between 27 museums throughout the country to create high-resolution photographs of their butterfly and moth specimens and digitally transcribe the tiny paper labels that detail where, when and by whom they were collected. All of the images and data will be made publicly available via an online portal.”

In development: a massive digital archive of 3D-scanned Greek and Roman sculpture. “The project between the Uffizi, one of the oldest and most renowned art museums in the world, and IU’s Virtual World Heritage Laboratory will create high-resolution 3-D digital models of the Uffizi sculptures and make them freely available online by IU’s bicentennial in 2020. The Uffizi collection is located at the gallery as well as the Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens, other famous cultural sites in Florence. The 1,250 works of art comprise the third largest collection of its kind in an Italian state museum. Largely assembled by the Medici family from the 15th to the 18th centuries, the sculptures include some of the most admired classical antiquities in the history of art, notably the Medici Venus, the Medici Faun, the Niobids and the Ariadne.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

It’s inescapable: Facebook will start showing ads to non-users. “Facebook will now display ads to web users who are not members of its social network, the company announced Thursday, in a bid to significantly expand its online ad network. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Facebook will use cookies, ‘like’ buttons, and other plug-ins embedded on third-party sites to track members and non-members alike. The company says it will be able to better target non-Facebook users and serve relevant ads to them, though its practices have come under criticism from regulators in Europe over privacy concerns. Facebook began displaying a banner notification at the top of its News Feed for users in Europe today, alerting them to its use of cookies as mandated under an EU directive.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 7 Chrome Extensions for Google Calendar. Toggl looks good!

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Wow: Vietnam blocked access to Facebook during Barack Obama’s visit? “That’s according to free speech advocates at Access Now, who pulled together evidence that the social network was shuttered in its entirety over the weekend. That’s opposed to a partial block, which authorities have favored lately. Vietnam, you may recall, blocked Facebook earlier this month on account of coverage of citizen protests which spread across the social network, which counts more than 30 million members in Vietnam.”

Holy cow, Snapchat has raised $1.8 billion in funding. Of course, that was over the course of about fifteen months. That’s a lot of ping pong tables. “While most start-ups raise money by putting together a group of investors who buy a specified amount of stock at a particular time, Snapchat collected the capital over more than a year. Snapchat, based in Los Angeles, said in the filing that it began raising the latest round on Feb. 17, 2015.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Ooof. A big phishing campaign was aimed at Amazon users. “Fatih Orhan, director of technology at Comodo and the Comodo Threat Research Labs, said the attack occurred on May 17 and lasted about 12 hours and is estimated to have pushed out as many as 30 million spam messages purporting to be an update from Amazon on a shipping order. Orhan told Threatpost the spear phishing campaign is notable not just because of its size, but also because the attackers were able to manipulate email header data to trick sender policy framework (SPF) controls on email gateways.”

Facebook helped catch a robber. “A robber who was caught after one of his victims recognised him on Facebook has been jailed. Omar Famuyide was spotted on the website’s ‘people you may know’ feature by the victim of a knifepoint car robbery in Birmingham.”

Here’s your new security vocabulary word: pastejacking. “This side of haptic gloves, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V is as close as we can get to reaching out and grabbing something off the web. It’s the cyber-grab you cyber-learn in your cyber-infancy and never cyber-forget because you endlessly cyber-repeat it. Repetition teaches us that what goes in to our hand when we Ctrl+C (grab something) comes out of our hand when we Ctrl+V (let it go). But what if it didn’t? What if you reached out to grab one apple but when you opened your hand you had a pear? Or a piranha?”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Why is it so important to understand how Facebook surfaces news and distributes posts? because of the number of people who rely on it as a news source. “A majority of U.S. adults – 62% – get news on social media, and 18% do so often, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center, conducted in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In 2012, based on a slightly different question, 49% of U.S. adults reported seeing news on social media.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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