NEW RESOURCES

Something a little different from the Digital Library of Georgia: Unique view of Athens arts and music scene from 1987-2012 in Flagpole Magazine. “Flagpole Magazine, Athens’ popular alternative newsweekly is the latest addition to the Georgia Historic Newspapers Archive (GHN) … part of the Digital Library of Georgia, based at the University of Georgia Libraries. The release of this new collection coincides with the 30th anniversary of Flagpole.”

Commonwealth War Graves Commission: CWGC Launches New Online Archive. “The new CWGC Archive Catalogue has initially made more than 600 items available online to the public. This includes digitised copies of the first 572 Commission Meeting Minutes from 1917 to 1986, and 96 Commission Annual Reports from 1919 to 2015. This is the first time the Commission has digitised and released documents about its own history and the cemeteries and memorials it maintains. There will be regular releases of new digitised content over the next 12 months, including staff records, photographs, and architectural drawings and plans.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Politico: FCC to seek total repeal of net neutrality rules, sources say. “FCC Chairman Ajit Pai will reveal plans to his fellow commissioners on Tuesday to fully dismantle the agency’s Obama-era net neutrality regulations, people familiar with the plans said, in a major victory for the telecom industry in the long-running policy debate.”

TechCrunch: Roomba gets IFTTT functionality. “Robot’s been talking a lot about its plans to make the Roomba an essential part of the connected home. The process has been a bit slow going — the company added WiFi connectivity in 2015 and Alexa functionality this year — but it’s getting there, slowly but surely. Today, the world’s best selling robotic vacuum takes another important step with the addition of IFTTT functionality.”

USEFUL STUFF

ZDNet: How to tweak the new Firefox 57 Quantum browser to suit your preferences. “Mozilla’s new Firefox 57 Quantum browser has been well received, with TechRepublic claiming that it ‘could take Chrome’s position as the king of browsers’. If you are thinking of trying it, here are some tips on setting it up. Indeed, Firefox has changed so much has that current users may also learn a few things. I had to.”

The Register: DNS resolver 9.9.9.9 will check requests against IBM threat database . “The Global Cyber Alliance has given the world a new free Domain Name Service resolver, and advanced it as offering unusually strong security and privacy features. The Quad9 DNS service, at 9.9.9.9, not only turns URIs into IP addresses, but also checks them against IBM X-Force’s threat intelligence database. Those checks protect agains landing on any of the 40 billion evil sites and images X-Force has found to be dangerous.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Gulf News: Dubai Municipality quashed 60 social media rumours in two years. “In over two years after it launched a service to verify the authenticity of rumours spread through social media, Dubai Municipality thwarted 60 of them, an official said on Monday. The municipality verified 15 rumours in 2015 after the launch of the ‘Confirmed News’ service on July 23 that year, said Khater Hassan Al Nuaimi, director of Customer Relations and Partners Department in Dubai Municipality.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Berkeley Blog: The dangerous data hack that you won’t even notice. “A recent wave of cyberattacks — from WannaCry and Equifax to the alleged Russian influence on the U.S. election — has demonstrated how hackers can wreak havoc on our largest institutions. But by focusing only on hackers’ efforts to extort money or mess with our political process, we may have been missing what is potentially an even scarier possibility: data manipulation.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself. “I led Facebook’s efforts to fix privacy problems on its developer platform in advance of its 2012 initial public offering. What I saw from the inside was a company that prioritized data collection from its users over protecting them from abuse. As the world contemplates what to do about Facebook in the wake of its role in Russia’s election meddling, it must consider this history. Lawmakers shouldn’t allow Facebook to regulate itself. Because it won’t.”

Phys.org: Materialists collect Facebook friends and spend more time on social media. “If you’re materialistic, you’re likely to use Facebook more frequently and intensely. A new paper in Heliyon reveals that materialistic people see and treat their Facebook friends as ‘digital objects,’ and have significantly more friends than people who are less interested in possessions. It also shows that materialists have a greater need to compare themselves with others on Facebook.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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