NEW RESOURCES

Crack Magazine: You Can Now Stream Aphex Twin’s Massive Online Back Catalogue. “Earlier this year, Aphex Twin launched a mysterious countdown on his website. The countdown has finished today (20 July) and in its place is an online archive of material that you can stream now – complete with comments from the artist himself and the Field Day exclusive London 03.06.17. There’s also new material within the archive and a web shop on the site.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Twitter says it’s making progress battling abusive behavior. “After years of struggling to manage abusive tweets, Twitter says it’s made some short-term progress tackling the problem. The social network said Thursday it’s been clamping down on 10 times as many abusive tweeters as it did a year ago, though it declined to say how many accounts it’s disciplined. The efforts do appear to be making the community more hospitable: Twitter said it’s seeing fewer repeat offenders and fewer users tapping features to shut off abusive tweeters, such as blocking their accounts.” Really do not recommend the comments on this one.

Soundcloud has apparently requested that the Internet Archive stop archiving its content.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Newsweek: Cancer Clinical Trials: How New Search Tools Make It Easier For Patients To Find The Treatment They Need. “[Tom] Marsilje—who took care of his mother before she passed away from pancreatic cancer and watched several other family members fight cancer—studied medicinal chemistry and became an oncology and drug discovery researcher at Novartis, working primarily on lung cancer. He helped design and synthesize a lung cancer drug. In June 2012, his colleagues presented their Phase I clinical trial data at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. ‘It really had felt like we struck a blow to cancer,’ Marsilje says. Six hours later, cancer struck back. The 40-year-old Marsilje had a colonoscopy and got a diagnosis of Stage III colorectal cancer (CRC). He had surgery two days later. The cancer caretaker turned cancer researcher was suddenly a cancer patient. A short time later, he would also become a cancer activist, contributing one big solution to the daunting challenge many patients face of finding a clinical trial that offers them real hope.”

The Atlantic: How Twitter Fuels Anxiety. “I joined Twitter in 2009 at the urging of my husband, who works in technology. ‘What am I going to do, tell the internet what I ate for breakfast?’ I asked him. Eight years later, I’m the one checking Twitter over my morning toast while he gets ready for work. Twitter has become the place where I get my news, where I check in on my friends, where I go to make jokes and read good essays. As a lifelong sufferer of anxiety, it is where I go to talk about what I’m feeling when I’m anxious, and maybe find some camaraderie. And as a lifelong sufferer of anxiety, using Twitter is also making my anxiety worse. The like-minded community I’ve built on Twitter has made confessing anxiety easier than ever, but the comparison Twitter enables has made the experience of anxiety worse. And when it comes to Twitter, you have to take the good with the bad.”

Vanity Fair: Fixing Twitter’s Louise Mensch Problem. “Twitter, which has historically been quick to verify accounts belonging to journalists and public figures, officially describes the blue checkmark as nothing more than a symbol that an account is authentic—meaning that it belongs to the person they claim to be and not an imposter. In reality, it means much more: once invite-only, now anyone can apply to become verified. The blue checkmark reads as a status symbol, and creates a sense of legitimacy. You may be more likely to trust a verified account simply because it’s been ‘verified,’ even though the designation signifies nothing more than an account belonging to a person ‘of public interest.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: Update your Apple devices. Right now.. “Apple has released a software update to iOS and macOS that you should download right away. The security update patches a dangerous vulnerability in WiFi chips that allows hackers to ‘execute arbitrary code’ — industry-speak for taking over your device. Through the WiFi chip, a hacker may be able to assume control of your device’s processor, the central computer that runs everything else.”

ZDNet: Hackers are using hotel Wi-Fi to spy on guests, steal data. “The so-called ‘DarkHotel’ group has been active for over a decade, with a signature brand of cybercrime that targets business travellers with malware attacks, using the Wi-Fi in luxury hotels across the globe. Hotel Wi-Fi hotspots are compromised in order to help deliver the payload to the selected pool of victims. The exact methods of compromise remain uncertain, but cybersecurity experts believe it involves attackers remotely exploiting vulnerabilities in server software or infiltrating the hotel and gaining physical access to the machines.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Digital Trends: Snap A Photo, Get A Recipe: Pic2recipe Uses A.I. To Predict Food Ingredients. “Scrolling through food photography can bring on the desire to recreate a dish at home, but what if the ingredients aren’t listed? Could there be a way to find out just by analyzing the image? That’s what researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked when they set out to create a deep learning algorithm that could predict a recipe based just on a photo. The research, published on July 20, resulted in a program called Pic2Recipe that could accurately predict a dish’s recipe based on a photo, with a 65 percent success rate.”

Phys.org: ‘Social media triangulation’ provides new approach for emergency responders. “During emergency situations like severe weather or terrorist attacks, local officials and first responders have an urgent need for accessible, reliable and real-time data. Rob Grace, a doctoral student in Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), and his colleagues at the Center for Crisis, Community, and Civic (3C) Informatics are working to address this need by introducing a new method for identifying local social media users and collecting the information they post during emergencies.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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