NEW RESOURCES

Rogers State University: Cherokee Nation, RSU offering Cherokee Language Classes through New Online Platform. “The Cherokee Nation and Rogers State University are teaming up to connect more Cherokee Nation citizens to the Cherokee language through a new, online learning platform.” I looked at the Rogers State University class listing and I didn’t see any requirement that you had to be a member of the Nation to take the classes.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Tubefilter: YouTube To Stream Coachella For Eighth Year, Including Headliner Beyoncé. “For the eighth year running, YouTube will serve as the exclusive livestreaming partner for the music festival’s first weekend of performances — which includes headliner Beyoncé as well as Cardi B, The Weeknd, Post Malone, The War On Drugs, and more. ”

Instagram analytics site WEBSTA is shutting down. From its About page: “Serving you on your Instagram journey was indeed a great opportunity and an amazing experience. However, due to Instagram’s data usage policy (on April 4th), our service is no longer useful as it used to be to our subscribers, thus we decided to stop our WEBSTA service soon. We have been passionately providing multiple services through WEBSTA since our first launch last January 2011 to help you experience more fun and excitement in your Instagram world and it saddens us to stop our service. However, we would be continually be seeking ways to serve you again in the future.”

Variety: New Version of Snap’s Spectacles Pops Up in FCC Filing . “Snapchat’s corporate parent Snap Inc. may be getting ready to release a new version of its Spectacles wearable device soon: On late Tuesday, the FCC published a new filing made by the company for a ‘wearable video camera.’ Snap didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Declutter Your Data With No Regrets (But Keep What You Need). “One effective way to worry less about your data is to have less of it to worry about. To get there, you’ll need to redefine the word ‘important’ to mean ‘impossible to get your hands on in future for free’. With that definition as our guide, let’s explore the kind of data you can consider reducing from your digital life. Also, let’s see how you can access the relevant information once again if you need it in future.” Gotta admit, the one about deleting digital photos made me twitchy.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Foreign Policy: Asia’s Authoritarians Are Big Fans of Regulating Facebook. “A few days after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, a Facebook representative was already being grilled on the company’s trustworthiness before a Singaporean select committee. The company’s vice president of public policy for the Asia-Pacific, Simon Milner, confirmed that, if the courts ordered it, the company would remove ‘falsehoods’ that had been ‘defined as illegal.’ But just who gets to decide what constitutes an ‘illegal falsehood’ is a worrying question. The social media, with its power and reach, has reshaped Southeast Asian politics — but it’s also handed a new tool to potential authoritarians as they look to define truth and falsehood online.”

Omaha World-Herald: Warren Buffett plans to release video archive of past shareholder meetings. “Warren Buffett plans to make public a video archive of about 20 years of past Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholder meetings. It’s a potential treasure trove for students, teachers and financial types interested in his ideas and history, said Louis Pol, business dean at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.”

CNET: Twitter, like Facebook, says political ads need regulation. “Twitter is the latest online company to support a proposed law to regulate political ads amid growing public pressure after revelations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections. The social media company announced on its public policy Twitter feed Tuesday that it will follow Facebook in supporting the Honest Ads Act, a Senate bill that would require tech companies to disclose how political ads are targeted and how much they cost.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Digital Trends: Major web browsers will support web-based fingerprint, facial authentication. “The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the entity that maintains the standards used across the internet, said on Monday, April 9, that Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla signed on to support web-based technology for biometric authentication. In other words, Chrome, Edge, and Firefox will soon support signing into online accounts using fingerprint scanners, voice authentication, facial recognition, and so on without additional software.”

BetaNews: Mobile phishing click rate increases 85 percent. “A new report from mobile security specialist Lookout exposes the growing risk from phishing attacks on mobile devices, with an increase in the number of users clicking on URLs that bypass security controls. The mobile phishing URL click rate has increased 85 percent year-on-year. 56 percent of Lookout users received and clicked on their mobile device a phishing URL that bypassed existing layers of phishing defense.” Please note that the report is from a company that’s got something to sell.

RESEARCH & OPINION

Quartz: AI experts want government algorithms to be studied like environmental hazards. “Artificial intelligence experts are urging governments to require assessments of AI implementation that mimic the environmental impact reports now required by many jurisdictions. AI Now, a nonprofit founded to study the societal impacts of AI, said an algorithmic impact assessment (AIA) would assure that the public and governments understand the scope, capability, and secondary impacts an algorithm could have, and people could voice concerns if an algorithm was behaving in a biased or unfair way.”

Techdirt: Again, Algorithms Suck At Determining ‘Bad’ Content, Often To Hilarious Degrees. Warning: there is a swear word in this quote. “A few weeks back, Mike wrote a post detailing how absolutely shitty algorithms can be at determining what is ‘bad’ or ‘offensive’ or otherwise ‘undesirable’ content. While his post detailed failings in algorithms judging such weighty content as war-crime investigations versus terrorist propaganda, and Nazi hate-speech versus legitimate news reporting, the central thesis in all of this is that relying on platforms to host our speech and content when those platforms employ very, very imperfect algorithms as gatekeepers is a terrible idea. And it leads to undesirable outcomes at levels far below those of Nazis and terrorism.” Good morning, Internet…

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