NEW RESOURCES

Miami Herald: Israel National Library launches digital manuscript archive. “Israel’s National Library has launched an online database aggregating tens of thousands of digitized Jewish manuscripts belonging to collections from across the globe. From Wednesday, scholars and laypersons can access almost half of the known handwritten Jewish texts from Spain to Afghanistan, which have been digitized and catalogued online.”

China Daily: Archive to shed light on Briton’s Chinese adventure. “A collection of more than 400 letters and documents written two centuries ago will be digitized and made available to the public by the end of the year, something that is likely to shed light on Britain’s intellectual engagement with China in the 19th century. The papers, produced by Thomas Manning, who lived from 1772 to 1840 and who was one of Britain’s first scholars of Chinese language and culture, will be made available by the London-based Royal Asiatic Society.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Next Web: Google Earth’s fantastic new app is now on iOS. “Google Earth got its biggest update in years back in April, but only on Android and the Web. Now the same new features have come to iOS. As a refresher, that update introduced detailed 3D maps for various locations that allowed you to virtually fly through a landscape. You can even shoot shareable ‘postcards’ using the renders.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Register: Facebook pulls plug on language-inventing chatbots? THE TRUTH. “If you thought artificial intelligence was already overhyped to death, this week will have given you a heart attack. On Monday, excitement levels among hacks hit the roof amid claims Facebook had scrambled to shut down its chatbots after they started inventing their own language.” A nice antidote to all the AI hype that’s been floating around.

Motherboard: Long Live Gopher: The Techies Keeping the Text-Driven Internet Alive. “The Gopher protocol isn’t supported by the modern web basically at all, but despite this, it lingers on, a quarter century from its peak. Here’s how.” I love this.

Miltech: Experts Convene in Research Triangle to Discuss Ambitious New Scientific Database Project (PRESS RELEASE). “Next week, a select group of scientists, engineers, industry researchers, environmental health specialists, national security experts, and philanthropy executives will meet in Raleigh for a two-day conference to explore the potential future uses of a massive new database of chemical information.”

Ars Technica: UCF kicker ruled ineligible, loses scholarship after monetizing YouTube videos. “University of Central Florida place-kicker Donald De La Haye had to choose between making YouTube videos and playing college football, and he chose YouTube. UCF announced Monday that De La Haye has been ruled ineligible to play for the school’s team. The decision came after De La Haye refused to agree to an NCAA waiver that dictated the types of videos he could create and post to his monetized YouTube channel under the name ‘Deestroying.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wordfence: Hackers Find Fresh WordPress Sites Within 30 Minutes. “One of the interesting presentations at DefCon this year discussed a way for attackers to quickly find new WordPress installations to target. The presentation was given by Hanno Böck, and in it he discusses a method attackers can use to find a WordPress website just 30 minutes after it has been installed for the first time.”

CNET: Ransomware shuts down 1 in 5 small businesses after it hits. “When it comes to ransomware, it only takes one person to cripple the kingdom. That’s the assessment of cybersecurity company Malwarebytes, which has found as many as one third of small-to-medium-sized businesses were hit by ransomware last year, and that ‘the human factor’ is increasingly behind large-scale outages.”

USA Today: Anthem contractor stole info on 18,580 Medicare beneficiaries . “Anthem is facing a privacy breach involving 18,580 Medicare beneficiaries after a vendor employee copied company files to his personal email last summer.” Anthem’s not got a great track record…

RESEARCH & OPINION

Kalev Leetaru at Forbes: Is Social Media Really A Public Space? “As elected officials turn to social media to communicate with their constituents and social platforms themselves deploy new features to help connect citizens with their representatives, the interaction between the governed and those they elect to govern them is increasingly occurring on private digital property with membership rules and codes of conduct not subject to any of the protections traditionally afforded the public sphere.”

Phys.org: Celebrity Twitter accounts display ‘bot-like’ behavior. “‘Celebrity’ Twitter accounts – those with more than 10 million followers – display more bot-like behaviour than users with fewer followers, according to new research. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, used data from Twitter to determine whether bots can be accurately detected, how bots behave, and how they impact Twitter activity.” Good morning, Internet…

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