NEW RESOURCES

EIN Presswire: Ogonek Digital Archive, from 1923 (PRESS RELEASE). “Ogonek, the popular newsweekly that has embodied Russian life and culture since early in the Soviet era, is now available as a digital archive from East View….With exacting bibliographic rigor, the Ogonek Digital Archive reproduces in full image (including searchable full text) all 225,000 pages of the 4,700 issues published since 1923, including 440,000 photographs. The Ogonek Digital Archive is cross-searchable with related e-content on East View’s robust Web platform.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Fort Lauderdale Daily: South Florida’s Waterways To Be The First Featured On Google Maps Technology. “Drivers love Google Maps, and soon boaters will too. Marine Industries Association of South Florida (MIASF), the largest marine trade organization in the Southeast United States, has announced its partnership with the region’s certified Google Street View content provider. Together they will bring Google Street View technology onto the Intracoastal Waterway and the network of connected waterways, as well as many waterfront and land-based businesses serving boaters. The new mapping system is called Waterway View.”

BetaNews: Opera 52 launches faster ad-blocking tool, adds support for multiple tab selection. “Opera Software has released Opera 52.0, the latest version of its Chromium-based browser for Windows, Mac and Linux. The main highlight in this new release is the unveiling of a faster ad-blocker tool. In addition, users gain the ability to select multiple tabs with a variety of related actions, including a brand new option for copying Web URLs. There are also new animations to accompany error and warning messages.”

TechCrunch: Instagram will show more recent posts due to algorithm backlash. “Instagram isn’t quite bringing back the chronological feed, but it will show more new posts and stop suddenly bumping you to the top of the feed while you’re scrolling. ‘With these changes, your feed will feel more fresh, and you won’t miss the moments you care about’ Instagram writes. It should be more coherent to browse the app now that you won’t lose your place because your feed randomly refreshes, and there shouldn’t be as many disparate time stamps to juggle. Instead, you’ll be able to manually push a ‘New Posts’ button when you want to refresh the feed.”

USEFUL STUFF

Berkeley: UC libraries launch tool to help achieve open access. “For far too long, a gold mine of knowledge has been locked away behind journal paywalls, or has been otherwise inaccessible to countless people who could benefit from it. To help address this problem, the scholarly community has been working toward achieving open access, helping to unlock this wealth of information by making it free to everyone, everywhere. But after nearly 20 years of work, much of the world’s scholarly information is still not as available as it could be — only 15 percent of journal articles, for example, are openly accessible at the time of publication. Today, to accelerate toward free readership for all, the University of California Libraries published Pathways to Open Access, a toolkit for campuses and research institutions to help make more knowledge openly available.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Parallax: Why (and how) China is tying social-media behavior to credit scores. “As America struggles to keep tabs on consumer credit scores in the tumultuous wake of last year’s Equifax breach, China is preparing to flip the switch on a new type of credit score. In 2020, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, China’s most popular social networks, will be required to include all users in social-credit systems unique to their platforms. And each Chinese citizen using these networks will be given a credit score based on his or her online behavior. Scoring high will open financial doors; scoring low will slam them shut.”

Business Standard: Facebook, Google warn Singapore against new laws to combat fake news. “Internet giants Facebook and Google on Thursday warned Singapore against introducing new laws to combat ‘fake news’, saying that existing legislation is adequate to address the problem.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Legal Intelligencer: Superior Court Adopts Standard for Authenticating Social Media Posts. “Noting how easily social networking accounts can be faked or hacked, the Pennsylvania Superior Court has ruled in a case of first impression that social media posts are inadmissible in criminal cases unless prosecutors can present evidence of who actually authored them.”

Ars Technica: Thousands of servers found leaking 750MB worth of passwords and keys. “In a blog post published late last week, researcher Giovanni Collazo said a quick query on the Shodan search engine returned almost 2,300 Internet-exposed servers running etcd, a type of database that computing clusters and other types of networks use to store and distribute passwords and configuration settings needed by various servers and applications. etcd comes with a programming interface that responds to simple queries that by default return administrative login credentials without first requiring authentication. The passwords, encryption keys, and other forms of credentials are used to access MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, content management systems, and other types of production servers.” womp womp.

RESEARCH & OPINION

IEEE Spectrum: Russian Astronauts Prepare to Bring the ‘Internet of Animals’ Online. “An ambitious project to keep an eye on thousands of animals and birds from space in a sort of ‘Internet of Animals’ is getting ready to kick off. In February, German researchers sent three large 200-kilogram antennas to the International Space Station (ISS) on a Soyuz rocket. The antennas joined a computer that had been sent up in October. These pieces will be the ears and brain of ICARUS, short for International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, an initiative funded by the Russian and German space agencies to track the movement of the smallest animals—birds, turtles, fish, and even insects—and tap into swarm intelligence.”

Mashable: The tech snoops have already won: Privacy is eroding at work as well as on Facebook. “They’re out again in force, the #deleteFacebook brigade. In the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s belated Thursday acknowledgement (one couldn’t really call it an apology) that his company erred in letting Cambridge Analytica acquire deep psychological data on at least 50 million Americans — data that could have helped Trump win a tight election — many users have reached boiling point. This time, they say, Zuck has gone too far. This time, they’re out. I have great sympathies for this crew. I too would like to believe we can somehow pour the genie back into the bottle. That we could roll back a global network that has literally two billion people in its thrall, or that we could all simultaneously hop over to the network next door. But we just can’t. It’s too late. Zuck won, whether or not he ends up with more FTC oversight. And already there are other successful companies copying his tactics.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

PetaPixel: This Mesmerizing Animation Consists of Google Earth Satellite Photos. “Photographer Páraic McGloughlin took Google Earth satellite photos and strung them together into this extremely fast-paced animation titled Arena. The lines and shapes seen from a bird’s-eye view are used to create movement in the frame.” Wow! Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!