NEW RESOURCES

The Hill: Liberal group launches database to track corporations’ response to tax law. “The website from Americans for Tax Fairness, called ‘Trump Tax Cut Truths,’ contains searchable data about the size of corporations’ tax cuts as well as information about bonuses, wage increases, job cuts, new investments and stock buybacks companies have planned following the law’s enactment. The database contains information about more than 800 companies.” I hesitated to include this as I try to be apolitical. But since the information is fact-based, like the size of a corporate tax cut and information on stock buybacks – I feel okay about putting it here.

USEFUL STUFF

Gizmodo: 10 Hidden URLs to Help You Rule the Web. “You’re probably used to bookmarking your favorite sites for easy access, but the web goes much deeper than the top domains you’re familiar with—from your social networks to your email box, having the right URL to hand can enable you to jump right into the page, feature, setting, or search you need. Here are 10 of the most useful ones.” Interesting roundup!

Quartz: How to watch Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional testimonies online. “Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg is set to appear before three Congressional committees this week to answer questions about how Facebook collects, analyzes, and shares the massive database of information it collects on its users as well as how information on the platform may have influenced voters in US elections.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Wisconsin State Journal: More than 1,000 recorded interviews with Wisconsin veterans to be digitized, available online. “For decades veterans, wartime laborers and refugees from around Wisconsin have told their stories of bravery, hardship and grief. Many of these stories are captured on cassette tapes, film reels and DVDs at community libraries, museums and historical societies, but these records of the state’s history could be lost to time as the years take their toll on the film and plastics containing them. The Wisconsin Library System and Recollection Wisconsin, with funding from a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, plan to collect about 1,100 of those stories to digitize them, making them available to anyone with internet access and preserving them for many years.”

University of Hawaii: UH Press awarded $100K to publish open-access books. “University of Hawaiʻi has received a $100,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the digitization and open-access distribution of 22 out-of-print University of Hawaiʻi Press books.”

Times of India: NCRB to prepare annual database on crime against journalists. “The National Crime Records Bureau will now collect data on crime against journalists on an annual basis, including that of murder, attempt to murder, assault and intimidation, starting this year, a statement by the Ministry of Home Affairs said. In a communication to the Press Club of India (PCI), the ministry said the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has so far been collecting data on attacks on media persons through monthly crime statistics, including the cases registered and persons arrested.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TechCrunch: Facebook shut down Russian APT28 trolls before the 2016 U.S. election. “The most interesting part of Mark Zuckerberg’s prepared testimony for Congress that was released today shows that Facebook has been fighting Russian election interference since before the 2016 U.S. presidential race. Facebook shut down accounts related to Russian GRU military intelligence-linked group APT28, also known as Fancy Bear, which had created an organization called DCLeaks run by fake personas to seed stolen information to journalists.”

CNN Money: The biggest Black Lives Matter page on Facebook is fake. “For at least a year, the biggest page on Facebook purporting to be part of the Black Lives Matter movement was a scam with ties to a middle-aged white man in Australia, a review of the page and associated accounts and websites conducted by CNN shows.”

James H. Fisher: The dots do matter: how to scam a Gmail user. “I recently received an email from Netflix which nearly caused me to add my card details to someone else’s Netflix account. Here I show that this is a new kind of phishing scam which is enabled by an obscure feature of Gmail called ‘the dots don’t matter’. I then argue that the dots do matter, and that this Gmail feature is in fact a misfeature. Finally I’ll suggest some ways the Gmail team can combat such scams in future.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Nieman Lab: Facebook and Twitter are opening up a bit to academic researchers, so platforms “can make better decisions”. “Facebook announced on Monday, ahead of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress on Wednesday, that it plans to give a limited group of soon-to-be determined academics some access to Facebook data as needed, with a research emphasis on how Facebook influences elections in different countries around the word.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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