NEW RESOURCES

China Daily: Judicial case database goes online. “A judicial database, which aims to improve legal services for residents, was put online on Thursday, China’s top court said. The database, designed and operated by a legal research institute under the Supreme People’s Court, collects judicial data from 3,523 courts nationwide, including how many cases judges handle and what kind of cases a court hears most, and updates the information every five minutes, according to a statement from the top court.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Art News: The Louvre Was the ‘Most Instagrammed Museum’ in 2017 . “The fine folks over at Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app, revealed today the locations, tags, and accounts that were most popular this year with its users. The big winner: the Louvre, which was the ‘most Instagrammed museum’ in the world in 2017, beating out the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, which took the number two and three spots.”

Techradar: Google’s new DIY kit for Raspberry Pi lets you build your own smart camera. “Following the release of its voice control kit earlier this year, Google has produced a new DIY kit for the Raspberry Pi which lets hobbyists turn the compact board into a computer vision system – or in layman’s terms, a smart camera capable of recognizing stuff.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: How to Block All the Troubling Stories in Your Social Media Feeds. “On Saturdays and Sundays, I don’t look at any media, social or otherwise. Those are nice days! It’s like a spa treatment for the brain. But unfortunately, my brain is addicted to social media, so come Monday I’m clicking and swiping and freaking out at every piece of horrifying information that comes across the transom. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to keep up with family and friends, and even a bare minimum of news, without being forced to see every dreadful thing that the Facebook sidebar throws in your face?”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

IJNet: Understanding social media in China. “Earlier this month, Tencent became the first Chinese tech giant to be valued at over $500 billion. This ranked the company, which owns the popular messaging service WeChat, ahead of Facebook. Tencent’s new status means that it’s now world’s fifth most valuable tech company (based on market value), behind Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft and Amazon. As the creative agency We Are Social has shown, China is home to some of the world’s largest social and messaging networks. Yet, outside of the region, often little is known about these platforms.”

New York Times: Vietnam Wants to Control Social Media? Too Late.. “The government cites growing concerns over cybersecurity and fake news as reasons to exert more control over social-media platforms. But internet access has also served as an outlet for political activism and exposés denouncing corruption and government misconduct. Vietnam has one of the highest rates of social-media usage among countries with comparable per capita incomes. There are about 52 million Facebook active accounts here, for a population of about 96 million. Google and YouTube also are very popular.” Tons of links in this article.

Bloomberg: FCC Got 444,938 Net-Neutrality Comments From Russian Email Addresses. “A study has found more than 7.75 million comments were submitted from email domains attributed to FakeMailGenerator.com, and they had nearly identical wording. The FCC says some of the nearly 23 million comments on Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal to gut Obama-era rules were filed under the same name more than 90 times each. And then there were the 444,938 from Russian email addresses, which also raised eyebrows, even though it’s unclear if they were from actual Russian citizens or computer bots originating in the U.S. or elsewhere.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Websites use your CPU to mine cryptocurrency even when you close your browser. “Researchers have discovered a new technique that lets hackers and unscrupulous websites perform in-browser, drive-by cryptomining even after a user has closed the window for the offending site.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

South China Morning Post: Hong Kong researchers build tool to predict personal details from photos on social media . “Researchers at a Hong Kong university have developed technology that can predict details about social media users by analysing the pictures they share online, without accessing their personal or sensitive information.”

Hyperallergic: Rising Sea Levels Threaten Over 13,000 Archaeological Sites in the US. “Rising sea levels will lead to the loss of more than 13,000 historic and prehistoric archaeological sites across the southeastern United States by the end of the century, researchers have found. These include sites such as the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, St. Augustine in Florida — considered by many to be the nation’s oldest city — many Native American settlements, and countless cemeteries. The study, recently published in PLOS ONE, analyzed data from the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA), an online database that collects archaeological and environmental data sets from a wide array of repositories, from JSTOR to the Digital Archaeological Record.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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