NEW RESOURCES

Black Cab London: Sherbert Dab: An Oral History of the London Taxi. “Organised by the educational charity, Digital Works in conjunction with Unite and the London Transport Museum, this ambitious venture introduced 26 London cabbies to pupils from St George the Martyr school, Holborn and Westminster Cathedral school, Pimlico. The children conducted in-depth interviews with each of the London taxi drivers, covering topics such as family backgrounds, what it was like to study The Knowledge in their particular era, interesting stories which have occurred whilst driving a cab and much, much more.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Independent: Trump administration ends national database for ‘evidence-based’ mental health programmes. “Donald Trump’s administration has suspended a programme that helps people find intervention methods for preventing and treating mental illness and substance use disorder. The National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices has existed since 1997 and was designed to provide information about evidence-based mental health.”

TechCrunch: Google temporarily bans addiction center ads globally following exposure of seedy referral deals. “Google is temporarily halting advertisements worldwide for addiction and rehabilitation centers, following a report last week showing it was acting as a platform for shady referral services earning huge undisclosed commissions.”

Linux Journal: Introducing the CAPS0ff Project. “It’s no secret that I love classic video games. Fortunately, thanks to emulation, many of the classic arcade games still can be enjoyed and forever will be available via digital copies of the ROM chips. Sadly, some older systems have protection, making them impossible to dump into ROMs properly. If the chips can’t be dumped, how will you ever get a digital copy of the ROM data? Well, the folks over at the CAPS0ff blog actually are disassembling the original chips and painstakingly transcribing the contents one bit at a time. They’re literally looking at the chips and determining the 1s and 0s burned onto them. Yes, there are a lot of chips. Yes, it takes a long time to copy the bits one by one. And yes, you can help. When a chip is stripped down literally to its bits (using various acid baths and so forth), it is scanned at high resolution. Then, pieces of the chips are put into a database, and people like you and me can transcribe the photos into 1s and 0s for the project!”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BuzzFeed: In October, Twitter Promised An Ad Transparency Center In ‘Coming Weeks.’ Where Is It?. “In October 2017, as Congress probed Russia’s suspected manipulation of Twitter’s platform, the company pledged to within weeks establish an ‘industry-leading transparency center’ that would provide visibility into political and issues-based ads. More than two months later, the center is nowhere to be found.”

Wired: Investors Join Calls For Facebook, Twitter To Take More Responsibility. “A BIG PENSION fund and an activist investment firm Thursday said they had filed shareholder proposals pushing Facebook and Twitter to take more responsibility for managing content on their platforms, including mistreatment of women, fake news, election interference, violence, and hate speech—in other words, the same issues that have kept social-media giants in the crosshairs for the past year.”

The Verge: Keeping Spectre Secret. “When Graz University of Technology researcher Michael Schwarz first reached out to Intel, he thought he was about to ruin the company’s day. He had found a problem with their chips, together with his colleagues Daniel Gruss, Moritz Lipp, and Stefan Mangard. The vulnerability was both profound and immediately exploitable. His team finished the exploit on December 3rd, a Sunday afternoon. Realizing the gravity of what they’d found, they emailed Intel immediately.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

LJWorld: Can KU discipline students for social media posts? Recent appeals court decision leaves issue unsettled. “A University of Kansas student affairs administrator is immune from paying damages to a student who sued her after being expelled over social media posts, a federal appeals court has affirmed. The opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit was filed Friday, Jan. 5. It affirms a judge’s dismissal of the case in U.S. District Court in Kansas more than a year earlier, which the student appealed But the newly issued opinion doesn’t attempt to answer a First Amendment question some free-speech advocates hoped the KU case might resolve: Can universities discipline students for things they post off-campus on social media?”

TorrentFreak: Pirate Streaming on Facebook is a Seriously Risky Business. “This week it was revealed that a UK man is on the hook for at least £5,000 in settlement fees after his Sky and Facebook accounts were used to live-stream a boxing match. Forget about the supposed risks of using pirate Kodi addons, this is the kind of piracy that the UK public need to steer clear of. While it’s ridiculously easy, it could land people in prison.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Boing Boing: Study finds municipal broadband is up to 50% cheaper than telcos. “Telcos despise community-owned broadband, and fight like mad whenever a city announces it’s going to build its own network. Why? Because when communities provide their own broadband, it costs users way less than broadband from telcos.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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