NEW RESOURCES

Awful Announcing: The Masters uploads every final round broadcast from 1968 to present on YouTube. “The Masters has amazingly uploaded every single final round broadcast from the tournament dating all the way back to 1968 on the tournament’s YouTube page. For all the golf fans out there, good luck with your social lives over the next three weeks.”

ParaSport News: Introducing ParaSports Data. “ParaSport Data is a Project created by Laura Hale, a two time Wikipedian in Residence for two different National Paralympic Committees, a sport journalist who has covered three different Paralympic Games and a sport researcher who graduated with her PhD from the University of Canberra with a thesis focused on developing understanding of sports culture using social media data. The purpose of ParaSport Data is to create the largest database of Paralympic, Deaflympic and disability sport data in existence. This data will include basic biographical data, sportspeople rankings, individual and completion results, classification information, disability prevalence data by country, and information about many disability sport organizations around the globe.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 6 Uses for Google Lens, Now Integrated Into Google Photos. “If you’ve never had the chance to use Google Lens, it’s a super useful app that integrates a little bit of augmented reality with intelligent, automated web search. Google Lens brings a lot of power to your fingertips whether you run it on photos you’ve just taken, or photos that are already in your Google Photos library. Let’s take a closer look at some of the impressive tricks you can do with Google Lens.”

Make Tech Easier: How to Find the Best Alternative DNS Server. “Changing your DNS server is a good idea. You will get better security, privacy, accuracy, and speed by switching away from your ISP’s default. You can change your DNS by just entering a few numbers into your computer or router, but figuring out what those numbers can be is a little more confusing. Google and OpenDNS, the popular choices, may not actually be the best, but luckily, they are far from the only options.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Gizmodo: The Other Cambridge Personality Test Has Its Own Database With Millions of Facebook Profiles. “Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock on Mars, you’ve likely heard about a little scandal involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica got its hands on millions of people’s Facebook likes in 2014 by getting an academic, Aleksander Kogan, to design an app with a personality test that hoovered up data from the 250,000 or so Facebook users that took it, as well as from their millions of friends. Cambridge Analytica supposedly used all those likes combined with the magic of big data to put Donald Trump in the White House.”

Times of Israel: Despite privacy concerns, Israel to put nation’s medical database online. “The Israeli government on Sunday approved a National Digital Health plan, which, despite mounting privacy concerns, plans to create a digital database of the medical files of some 9 million residents and make them available to researchers and enterprises.” After reading about so much misuse of personal information and data leaks, I’m honestly shocked Israel is going to do this.

SECURITY & LEGAL

Naked Security: Crooks infiltrate Google Play with malware in QR reading utilities. “SophosLabs just alerted us to a malware family that had infiltrated Google Play by presenting itself as a bunch of handy utilities. Sophos detects this malware as Andr/HiddnAd-AJ, and the name gives you an inkling of what the rogue apps do: blast you with ads, but only after lying low for a while to lull you into a false sense of security.”

Washington Post: Lawmakers hope to use Facebook’s ‘oil spill’ privacy mishap to usher in sweeping new laws. “It was October 2010, and two members of Congress were furious with Facebook. In the eyes of then-Rep. Edward J. Markey and Rep. Joe Barton, the company had failed its users in allowing app developers to take personal data from them and their friends — and transmit it to marketers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

State Tech Magazine: Digital Data Helps Public Health Departments Keep Tabs on, Tackle the Flu. “No one needs a reminder that this flu season was one of the worst in recent years. Preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control suggests it may have been worse than the 2009 season, when the swine flu pandemic strain swept the country. The good news, however, is that digital data is helping researchers and public health organizations provide more timely predictions about the spread of the flu and assessments of seasons in progress.” Good evening, Internet…

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