NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me: a database of movies made from video game cutscenes. “GMDb (Game Movies Database) is a website featuring free-to-watch game movies (Or all cutscenes movies).”

Irish Genealogy News: Buried in Fingal: a new database for North Co Dublin. “The free database includes searchable details of more than 65,000 people interred between 1905 and 2005 in 33 of the burial grounds in the council’s care in North County Dublin. The site is searchable by name and graveyard. Search returns provide date of interment, area of last residence, and precise grave plot identifiers plus, in most cases, a link to a clear image of the register entry. The oldest burial record dates to 1877 and the most recent to 2013.”

Xinhuanet: China builds Mongolian language database with cloud computing . “Experts in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region have developed a Mongolian language database containing over 19 million words and phrases in an effort to protect ethnic culture and language.”

The state of South Dakota has launched a new jobs site. “The new software searches the internet to ‘scrape’ job listings from other South Dakota employer sites. We are no longer limited to data listed only by employers who use our system. The system also details both job titles and needed skills, allowing any user easily to identify skill supply and demand information in real-time. We can now view, at any given time, everything from the most in-demand skills for job listings to the education level of current job seekers to occupational wage data.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Facebook adds food ordering so you never have to leave . “The Facebook additions are coming fast and furious these days, with possible Instagram notifications, a revamped Marketplace, and a new visual style for comments. TechCrunch reports that the latest feature, rolling out to select users today, brings online food ordering into the social network app and website. Now you can order your favorite takeout from the restaurant up the street without leaving the safe confines of the social network.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Advertising Age: A ‘Contrite’ Facebook Refunds Advertisers, Who Still Want Oversight. “It wasn’t much of a refund. But in this case it might be the thought that counts. Facebook is cutting checks to advertisers after it found a flaw in the way it measures certain video. It’s the first time Facebook has been public about a problem measuring ads that involved billing since it started disclosing such reporting errors last year. Previously the discrepancies affected unpaid posts.” OVER and OVER and OVER…

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

BBC: FCC votes to overturn net neutrality rules. “The US Federal Communications Commission has voted to overturn rules that force ISPs to treat all data traffic as equal. Commissioners at the agency voted two-to-one to end a ‘net neutrality’ order enacted in 2015.”

Neowin: CIA-created spyware called Athena released by WikiLeaks, targets all major Windows versions. “Codenamed ‘Athena’, the spyware was apparently created by the CIA in conjunction with Siege Technologies, a New Hampshire cyber tech firm. Athena allows an attacker to take total control of a computer, send and retrieve data to and from remote locations, such as CIA servers, delete data and also upload other malicious code onto the computer, thereby introducing even more infections. It also works for any version of Windows from Windows XP to Windows 10, marking it as particularly potent in both its capabilities and its reach.”

Digital Trends: Zomato Hacked, 17 Million Users’ Accounts Compromised By Data Theft . “Early on Thursday, online restaurant guide Zomato revealed it’d been hit by hackers, estimating that login details had been stolen from 17 million of its 120 million users.” Read the article: the hacker is working with Zomato.

RESEARCH & OPINION

Techxplore: Researchers look to add statistical safeguards to data analysis and visualization software. “Modern data visualization software makes it easy for users to explore large datasets in search of interesting correlations and new discoveries. But that ease of use—the ability to ask question after question of a dataset with just a few mouse clicks—comes with a serious pitfall: it increases the likelihood of making false discoveries.”

TechCrunch: Project recreates cities in rich 3D from images harvested online. “People are taking photos and videos all over major cities, all the time, from every angle. Theoretically, with enough of them, you could map every street and building — wait, did I say theoretically? I meant in practice, as the VarCity project has demonstrated with Zurich, Switzerland.”

Quartz: How do we make the internet faster? Let algorithms bicker over what we send. “The internet has become a visual place—with companies like Snapchat, Facebook, and Google reinventing their services around your phone’s camera. As a result, the need to relay visual information with less data is becoming increasingly important. Artificial intelligence may solve that problem.” Good morning, Internet…

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