NEW RESOURCES

Who Do You Think You Are: Millions of soldiers listed on first national war memorials database. “Over a million names of those killed in the First World War can now be located in a new database of war memorials. The new War Memorials Register, published on the Imperial War Museums (IWM) website, contains around 1,025,000 names from the UK’s War Memorials and Rolls of Honour and over 23,000 images of the memorials. Around two-thirds of the records relate to casualties of the First World War.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mashable: Snap Maps update makes it even better for stalking your friends . “An update called Map Explore lets Snapchat users more easily see what their friends are up to, without any action required by the user. Your status might update itself based on where a your friends are and what Snapchat predicts you’re doing. And maps can populate your status when you appear to be taking a road trip, flying to a new destination, or using a particular geofilter, a Snap spokesperson told Mashable. ”

USEFUL STUFF

Forbes: What To Know About The #FollowThatScientist Movement. “I often write about weather and climate topics. However, I will occasionally discuss broader science issues. This week in social media something caught my eye that is consistent with things on my mind lately. As a scientist and professor, I am always interested in public perceptions of scientists. In part, this is because I am often told that I do not ‘fit’ the image of a scientist because of my race, the way I dress, or my personality. While these are obviously stereotypes shaping perceptions, one of my missions is to break down barriers between scientists and the public. We are not the “monsters under the bed.” We are fathers, mothers, parishioners, daughters, and sons doing what we love for the benefit of everyone. The #FollowThatScientist movement is a great opportunity to do that.”

PC World: How to watch Major League Baseball online
. “Major League Baseball has always presented the biggest hurdle for sports-loving cable-cutters. Unlike the NFL, which still airs the bulk of its games on broadcast TV channels, MLB is a predominantly cable league. Of the six networks hosting nationally aired games over the 2018 season, only Fox can be accessed over the air.”

Lifehacker: Lock Down Your Social Media Data With the PlusPrivacy Chrome Extension . “Most connected people use services from at least one, if not most of the major tech companies. And while they generally make it easy for you to figure out what data you’re sharing with them and other third-party services, sometimes you need a big, red warning flag—like PlusPrivacy. This open-source service, financially backed by the European Commission, is a little Jekyll and Hyde when it comes to data privacy, but it’s a valuable tool that can help you lock down your online accounts with a few mouse clicks.” Lifehacker also notes a concern with the extension, which you can read about at the end of the article.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Wired: Children’s YouTube is still churning out blood, suicide and cannibalism. “WIRED found videos containing violence against child characters, age-inappropriate sexualisation, Paw Patrol characters attempting suicide and Peppa Pig being tricked into eating bacon. These were discovered by following recommendations in YouTube’s sidebar or simply allowing children’s videos to autoplay, starting with legitimate content.”

GQ: What the Cambridge Analytica Scandal Means for the Future of Facebook. “Today’s Facebook is a global, for-profit institution that functions as a hybrid digital directory, online marketplace, instant communications service, video-on-demand platform, civic-engagement tool, virtual public square, and curated one-stop news source. For many people, it is the Internet. It quickly outgrew the relevant regulatory schemes, most of which were built decades ago with only the relatively meager capabilities of its media predecessors in mind. It is now so big that when—just as a hypothetical example—it is used to facilitate the deliberate dissemination of fabricated ‘news’ stories in a way that might have helped swing a presidential election, it poses the worst kind of problem: one for which there is no objective, readily identifiable method of fixing.”

The Times of Israel: Israel to probe Facebook over Cambridge Analytica data breach. “Israel’s Justice Ministry informed Facebook that it is opening an ‘administrative investigation’ into the social media giant following reports of the transfer of personal information from Facebook to data-mining firm Cambridge Analytics, ‘and the possibility of additional violations of Israelis’ personal information,’ the ministry said Thursday.”

Xinhua: India issues notice to Cambridge Analytica over social media data manipulation. “The Indian government has slapped a notice on Cambridge Analytica, a global data firm which allegedly manipulated social media data in many countries to influence voters for its clients. India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has also threatened to initiate legal action against Cambridge Analytica in case it fails to respond to the notice by March 31, a senior official said Saturday.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Fast Company: Feds: Iranian hackers compromised more than 8,000 academic email accounts. “The Justice Department released an indictment Friday accusing nine Iranians of taking part in a massive hacking campaign targeting hundreds of universities around the world, as well as 30 U.S. companies, the United Nations, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.”

ZDNet: A new data leak hits Aadhaar, India’s national ID database. “India’s national ID database has been hit by yet another major security lapse. Known as Aadhaar, the government ID database is packed with identity and biometric information — like fingerprints and iris scans — on more than 1.1 billion registered Indian citizens, official figures show. Anyone in the database can use their data — or their thumbprint — to open a bank account, buy a cellular SIM card, enroll in utilities, and even receive state aid or financial assistance. Even companies, like Amazon and Uber, can tap into the Aadhaar database to identify their customers.”

The Malaysian Insight: Feminists to sue China social media giants for deleting group’s accounts. “FEMINIST activists are preparing to sue China’s biggest social media platforms for deleting their organisation’s accounts, the group’s founder said today. On March 8, International Women’s Day, staffers operating the prolific Feminist Voices account on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform found that it had been deleted.” Good morning, Internet…

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