NEW RESOURCES

A digital archive has already been started for the protests which took place last Saturday. From the “About Us” page: “The Trump Protest Archive is an entirely self funded digital archiving project, collecting items of material culture from protest events relating to the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump. The Trump Protest Archive was founded by Eric Nolan Gonzaba (left), a PhD candidate in American history at George Mason University.”

Canonical has launched Tutorials Ubuntu. “Ubuntu tutorials are a topic-specific walkthroughs, giving you a very practical experience on a particular domain. They are just like learning from pair programming except you can do it on your own! They provide a step-by-step process to doing development and devops activities on Ubuntu machines, servers or devices.”

The Vatican Museums has launched a new Web site. “The new director of the Vatican museums, Barbara Jatta, presented a new multimedia web site to journalists at the Vatican press office on Monday. The user-friendly site, available in Italian, English, French, Spanish and German, contains thousands of images plus over fifty videos and virtual tours and has taken almost three years to complete.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, is expanding its People Not Property – Slave Deeds of North Carolina project. “An expansion of the UNCG University Libraries’ Digital Library on American Slavery will provide a unique, centralized database of bills of sales indexing the names of enslaved people from across North Carolina.”

New York Times: Snapchat Discover Takes a Hard Line on Misleading and Explicit Images . “The new rules more explicitly restrict publishers from posting questionable pictures on Discover that do not have news or editorial value. Snapchat also clarified guidelines that prevent publishers from including reports or links to outside websites that could be considered fake news, saying that all content must be fact-checked and accurate.”

BBC: China to crack down on censor-busting services. “The nation’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has announced plans to ‘clean up’ unauthorised internet connections. The 14-month campaign will target the virtual private networks (VPNs) and dedicated lines many use to go online.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 5 Dropbox Tips to Get More Done. “Did you know that Dropbox has a lot more features than just cloud storage? It’s great for storing your files in a place where you can always access them. In addition, Dropbox offers some great productivity tools.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

A very extensive article from Exposing the Invisible: Investigating Google’s revolving door. “Google portrays a fun, friendly, informal image that effectively distracts from the company’s ever-increasing accumulation of wealth, information and influence. We decided to look beyond the primary colours to something darker and investigate one specific aspect of this activity: the revolving door between Google and public institutions (specifically, European institutions). We were able to find a surprising amount of information online, from publicly-available sources – the trick often just lay in knowing where to look.”

Terrific story from The Gadgeteer: Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) are using VR and AR for their course catalog. “The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) just released their course catalog that is unlike any college catalog that I’ve ever seen. The SCAD catalog has over 380 pages that come to life with AR (augmented reality) through 1,000 videos, graphics, and animations.”

Oh boy. From TechCrunch: The SEC is reportedly investigating why Yahoo took so long to disclose that it was hacked. “As if two massive data breaches affecting more than one billion users isn’t enough, Yahoo is now under investigation from the SEC for not disclosing the hacks sooner, according to a Wall Street Journal report.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

You remember those hacks on MongoDB databases I mentioned? They’re spreading. “For the past week, unknown groups of cyber-criminals have taken control of and wiped data from CouchDB and Hadoop databases, in some cases asking for a ransom fee to return the stolen files, but in some cases, destroying data just for fun. These incidents come after crooks hijacked and held data ransom from MongoDB databases since the start of the year.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Phys.org: Psychological ‘vaccine’ could help immunize public against ‘fake news’ on climate change. “In medicine, vaccinating against a virus involves exposing a body to a weakened version of the threat, enough to build a tolerance. Social psychologists believe that a similar logic can be applied to help ‘inoculate’ the public against misinformation, including the damaging influence of ‘fake news’ websites propagating myths about climate change.” Good morning, Internet…

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