NEW RESOURCES

Minneapolis Star Tribune: Website keeps track of Minnesota’s breeding birds. “A new website keeps track of wild bird breeding in Minnesota. The Minnesota Breeding Bird Atlas… launched last month, the Mankato Free Press reported . The resource has graphs, interactive maps and data including where, when and how many birds are breeding in the state. Almost 250 species were observed and more than 230 bird species were confirmed during the project.”

Big Island Now: New Online Tool Provides 2016 Election Data for Hawai‘i. “The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) recently released the EAVS Data Interactive, a new data visualization tool that allows users to pull data most relevant to them from the 2016 Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS). Described as ‘the most comprehensive nationwide data on election administration in the U.S.,’ EAVS allows users to examine specific data at both the state and local level, as well as compare individual jurisdictions side-by-side.” This new tool covers all 50 states, not just Hawaii.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bloomberg Quint: Google Changes Rules to Purge News That Masks Country of Origin. “Google moved to strip from its news search results publications that mask their country of origin or intentionally mislead readers, a further step to curb the spread of fake news that has plagued internet companies this year.” I’m kind of surprised this wasn’t already in place…

USEFUL STUFF

CogDogBlog: Storify Bites the Dust. If You Have WordPress, You Don’t Need Another Third Party Clown Service. “A monster post, some ranting on companies like Storify who offer free services that leverage our effort to get worth enough to get sold – when they do they just yank our content, an approach for local archiving your storify dying content, a new home spun tool for extracting all embeddable content links and how to use it to create your own archives in WordPress.”

Otaku No Culture: Remembering the Golden Oldies with Digital Archive Websites. “In the search for great comic books from the yesteryear, most aficionados will have to hit auctions and estate sales to find what they want. Titles from the Platinum Age (1897 – 1938) to the Golden Age (1939-1950), introduced the era of the superhero to more than just one generation of readers, but purchasing these comics now is near impossible. Unless you are rich, forget it. Thankfully, not everyone is out to make an investment with an Action Comics #1 so they can wind up having a million dollar nest egg to retire on sixty-five years later. There are digital archivists actively looking to preserve this bit of the past for readers preferring online content.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The New York Times: Google Thinks I’m Dead (I know otherwise.). “I’m not dead yet. But try telling that to Google. For much of the last week, I have been trying to persuade the world’s most powerful search engine to remove my photo from biographical details that belong to someone else. A search for ‘Rachel Abrams’ revealed that Google had mashed my picture from The New York Times’s website with the Wikipedia entry for a better-known writer with the same name, who died in 2013.”

The Telegraph: Google faces fresh EU showdown as rivals attack search giant’s response to record fine. “Google is facing a new battle in Brussels as its opponents gear up to challenge the internet behemoth’s ‘inadequate’ response to a record monopoly fine. Several of Google’s rivals have held meetings with Margrethe Vestager, Europe’s competition commissioner, in recent weeks to express their dismay at the changes made to Google’s results in response to last summer’s fine.”

Ars Technica: “Suspicious” event routes traffic for big-name sites through Russia . “The unexplained incident involving the Internet’s Border Gateway Protocol is the latest to raise troubling questions about the trust and reliability of communications sent over the global network. BGP routes large-scale amounts of traffic among Internet backbones, ISPs, and other large networks. But despite the sensitivity and amount of data it controls, BGP’s security is often based on trust and word of mouth. Wednesday’s event comes eight months after large chunks of network traffic belonging to MasterCard, Visa, and more than two dozen other financial services were briefly routed through a Russian government-controlled telecom, also under suspicious circumstances.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Hill: Hackers demand ransom for California voter database. “Hackers have deleted a database of potential California voters with more than 19 million entries, demanding around $3,500 to restore it. Researchers at the security firm MacKeeper’s Kromtech research group first noticed the issue, but have not been able to identify the database’s owner to notify them.”

Komando: If you have satellite TV, hackers have access to your network. “If you are one of the millions of people with AT&T’s DirecTV service, you could be at risk of attack by hackers. That’s due to a vulnerability recently discovered by security researcher Ricky Lawshae. He said the flaw was found in DirecTV’s Genie digital video recorder (DVR) system. More specifically, Linksys WVBRo-25 model. The vulnerability is located in the wireless video bridge that lets DirecTV devices communicate with the DVR.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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