NEW RESOURCES

Awesomely Luvvie: A List of 100+ Black Women Running for Office in 2018 . “…below is a list of Black women who are running for office around the United States. The list was able to happen because of a Twitter thread started by Jeff Yang, which he then turned into a spreadsheet that he will continuously update. That, along with a Facebook thread I started and the handiwork of three other women who put in some about 20 reak hours (hey Sili, Lucrecer, Candace), we were able to come up with this list of 100+ Black women who are running for office. Its alphabetized by state.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: The FCC officially votes to kill net neutrality. “Despite overwhelming opposition from Congress, technical experts, advocacy organizations and, of course, the American people, the FCC has voted to eliminate 2015’s Open Internet Order and the net neutrality protections it established.” Lawsuits are already flying through the air. I won’t link to every development on this because I don’t want to overwhelm ResearchBuzz, but I’ll try to hit the highlights.

Library of Congress: 2017 National Film Registry Is More Than a ‘Field of Dreams’. “Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden today announced the 2017 selections to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Selected for their cultural, historic and/or aesthetic importance, these 25 motion pictures range from an early film of the New York subway in 1905 and the musical biopic “La Bamba” to the holiday action thriller “Die Hard” and “The Goonies,” the adventure tale of a band of misfits.”

Digiday: Facebook plans to stop paying publishers to make news feed videos. “Three publishing sources whose companies were paid by Facebook said the platform plans to end the program that paid publishers and other video makers every month to produce on-demand and live videos for the news feed. Under the deals, most of which are set to expire by the end of the year, content providers were required to produce a minimum number of minutes per month in order to get paid by Facebook. This included both on-demand and live videos. Additional requirements stated that on-demand videos had to be at least 90 seconds long, and live videos had to be at least six minutes long — the minimum requirements under which Facebook could test mid-roll ad breaks within those videos.”

USEFUL STUFF

Techradar: Using a VPN? Find out whether it is leaking data with this set of tools. “VPN provider, ExpressVPN, unveiled a suite of free online security tools that allow consumers to test if their VPN provider is leaking data. Leaks occur if a VPN fails at protecting a device’s DNS queries (despite the fact that the rest of the traffic is safe behind a VPN).”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

IOL: Protest at Google, Facebook ‘bullying’ of bare-breasted maidens. “CULTURAL groups and traditional values enforcers say they feel bullied and are concerned that media giants Facebook and Google continue deleting online pictures of bare-breasted maidens. More than 200 maidens yesterday protested against the media companies, accusing them of discriminating against African culture.” I wasn’t sure that I understood what the “maidens” were in this context, but Wikipedia helped with an article about the Reed Dance Ceremony. WARNING: As you might expect, there are breasts visible in this article.

Merriam-Webster: Merriam-Webster’s 2017 Words of the Year. “Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2017 is feminism. The word was a top lookup throughout the year, with several spikes that corresponded to various news reports and events. The general rise in lookups tells us that many people are interested in this word; specific spikes give us insight into some of the reasons why.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Business Insider: Lawsuit based on a surreptitiously recorded phone call claims Google doesn’t refund advertisers who spend money on fraudulent clicks. “A web advertising company named AdTrader, whose staff surreptitiously recorded a phone conversation with a Google executive, claims in a class-action lawsuit that Google does not refund money to advertisers when it discovers that those advertisers have spent money on fraudulent or invalid clicks.”

POGO: Revealing the Lost World of Government Reports. “The Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act (H.R. 4631) is a bipartisan bill championed by Representative Mike Quigley (D-IL) in the House, and introduced by Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) in the Senate. It would require that federal agencies forward copies of their reports to the Government Publishing Office (GPO), which would then post them online, allowing free access with modern search features. Congress, the public, and journalists could then easily find the reports. The Library of Congress would provide additional accountability by creating a list of all mandated reports so Congress and the GPO can double check for missing reports.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Guardian: The new cold war: how our focus on Russia obscures social media’s real threat. “Washington used to worship Silicon Valley. Few things made politicians’ hearts beat faster than the bipartisan love for big tech. Silicon Valley was building the future. Government’s role was to offer compliments and get out of the way. Recently, however, the mood has shifted. ”

UC San Diego: Computer scientists develop a simple tool to tell if websites suffered a data breach. “The concept behind the tool, called Tripwire, is relatively simple. DeBlasio created a bot that registers and creates accounts on a large number of websites—around 2,300 were included in their study. Each account is associated with a unique email address. The tool was designed to use the same password for the email account and the website account associated with that email. Researchers then waited to see if an outside party used the password to access the email account. This would indicate that the website’s account information had been leaked.” The researchers are not planning to go further with Tripwire. I hope someone else picks this up. Good morning, Internet…

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