NEW RESOURCES

United Nations: United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs Launches the Disarmament Digital Documents Library. “The Disarmament Digital Documents Library is a specialised archive that provides quick and easy access to an extensive collection of United Nations disarmament-related documents in one convenient location. It includes historical documents of the first General Assembly session and reports from the Special Sessions on Disarmament (SSOD-I, SSOD-II and SSOD-III), disarmament-related meetings and conferences, and treaty review declarations.”

Bangkok Post: Archive showcases horrors of Thammasat massacre. “Former student activists and academics have teamed up to set up an online archive on the Thammasat massacre of Oct 6, 1976 to raise awareness and ensure that the public understands and remembers the tragedy….On that fateful day, soldiers and police, along with paramilitary forces, surrounded the Thammasat University campus in Tha Prachan and killed scores of student activists who had gathered to oppose the return of Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, the former dictator who was overthrown and fled the country after a popular uprising on Oct 14, 1973.” The Web site is in Thai but Google Translate handles it.

Google Blog: Bavarian State Library and Google celebrate 10 years of partnership. “Ten years ago the venerable Bavarian State Library from Munich (BSB) and the comparatively young Google started their joint adventure: the digitization of hundreds of thousands of historical writings from the archives of the BSB and its Bavarian regional libraries. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of our collaboration, we’ve published a digital exhibition on Google Arts & Culture.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: What Parents Need to Know About New “Honesty” Apps Sarahah and TBH. “We’re all curious about what others think of us. For teens, the yearning for validation is intense. Does anyone think I’m cool? Was the outfit I wore today too much? Am I fun to be around? Two new ‘honesty’ apps let them receive the peer feedback they crave, anonymously.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Wired: Why did Twitter trolls lie about Las Vegas? We asked them . “While the horror in Las Vegas was still unfolding, trolls were busy filling social media feeds with lies. ‘My dad is missing after Las Vegas shooting. Please RT and share. We are distraught,’ one person tweeted. It was sent at 23:23 Las Vegas time, just over an hour after a gunman started firing on thousands of people at a country music festival, killing 59 and injuring more than 500. But the person pictured in the tweet had nothing to do with the Las Vegas attack.”

Berkeley News: Scholars debate: Does social media help or hurt free speech?. “Social media and digital communication haven’t made it easier to talk about difficult, politically contentious ideas, or given under-represented voices equal footing with politicians and media elites, UC Berkeley Professor Robert Reich said Thursday. Reich, a professor of public policy, spoke at the start of a day-long campus event about free speech in the digital age. Ten years ago, he told the eager crowd in Banatao Auditorium, he thought platforms like Facebook and Twitter would open a great world of digital debate about policy, politics and the future of America.” There’s supposed to be video of this event but I can’t find it. I’ll update this post on Firehose when I can.

Gulf News: Saudi Arabia arrests 22 for social media videos. “Saudi Arabia has arrested 22 people, including a Qatari national, for ‘inciting public feelings’ on social media, authorities said Wednesday, following a crackdown on dissent. Those detained had posted video clips online, the official Saudi Press Agency said citing a security source, adding that authorities were investigating their motives and connections.”

Quartz: Snapchat has become the perfect tool for understanding tragedy. “…Snap Maps has become a deeply intimate way to view major news events in real time. Snap hired CNN political reporter Peter Hamby to run editorial coverage on Snapchat in 2015, and it places its own sourced work next to pieces from outlets like The Economist and The Wall Street Journal on the Discover section of its app. Snap Maps takes Snapchat’s proven ability to surface the emotions its users are sharing and place them where they are happening. When the earthquake started in Mexico, I picked up my phone and opened Snapchat, just as many on the streets of Mexico City did.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ZDNet: FDIC hit with more than 50 security breaches over two years. “The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) is facing another wave of cybersecurity woes this week following a new report from the Office of Inspector General. The report says the FDIC may have suffered more than 50 security breaches in 2015 and 2016 that compromised personal information on hundreds of thousands of US citizens.”

Hindu Business Line: Data of over 6,000 Indian organisations up for sale on Darknet, says Quick Heal. “Quick Heal Technologies’ enterprise security solutions unit has disclosed that it has discovered an advertisement on Darknet announcing secret access to the servers and database dump of over 6,000 Indian businesses — including ISPs, government and private organisations. The hacker has priced the information at 15 Bitcoins and is offering network takedown of affected organisations for an unspecified amount, it added.”

TechCrunch: How “anonymous” wifi data can still be a privacy risk. “The thorny issue of tracking of location data without risking individual privacy is very neatly illustrated via a Freedom of Information (FOI) request asking London’s transport regulator to release the ‘anonymized’ data-set it generated from a four week trial last year when it tracked metro users in the UK capital via wi-fi nodes and the MAC address of their smartphones as they traveled around its network.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Washington Post: Russian propaganda may have been shared hundreds of millions of times, new research says. “Facebook has said ads bought by Russian operatives reached 10 million of its users. But does that include everyone reached by the information operation? Couldn’t the Russians also have created simple — and free — Facebook posts and hoped they went viral? And if so, how many times were these messages seen by Facebook’s massive user base? The answers to those questions, which social media analyst Jonathan Albright studied for a research document he posted online Thursday, are: No. Yes. And hundreds of millions — perhaps many billions — of times.” Good morning, Internet…

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