NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from the Miami Herald: Talk host Neil Rogers is dead, but his radio archive lives on. “Legendary radio host Neil Rogers died of congestive heart failure in Broward County on Christmas Eve 2010. But he’s alive and well on Michael Allen Smith’s… website that allows free access to 1,900 Rogers shows — more than 4,500 hours of broadcasts spanning 25 years. For good measure, Smith added 300 ‘drops,’ seconds-long bits that Rogers sprinkled on his audience, including ‘Neil God,’ ‘It’s Friday, you bastards’ and ‘Floridians, dumb as dirt.'”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Neowin: Russia blocks Telegram – company responds by saying that updates will bypass ban. “Russia’s Tagansky court has announced that Telegram access in the country will be blocked due to a failure of Telegram to provide encryption keys to the Federal Security Service (FSB) that it could have used to decrypt user messages if the need had arisen. The court’s judge announced that the ban will be made instantly and that it will remain the case until Telegram provides encryption keys to the FSB.”

CNET: New Google Go app tackles slow internet speeds in Africa. “Google is releasing an app intended to help internet users in Africa overcome poor connectivity and the high cost of data. The app, Google Go, reduces the amount of data needed to display search results by 40 percent and allows previous searches to be accessed offline, the search giant said in a company blog post. Voice search has been adapted to work better on slow connections, including 2G.”

Cointelegraph: ‘China’s Google’ Baidu Launches Blockchain-Based Image Rights Protection Platform. “Chinese internet search giant Baidu has launched a digital image property rights management platform based on Blockchain, the company announced Wednesday, April 11. The service, called Totem, timestamps each submitted original image with a real-time identity and other user data, storing it on a traceable and immutable Blockchain.”

USEFUL STUFF

Fast Company: It’s surprisingly easy to make government records public on Google Books. “While working on a recent story about hate speech spread by telephone in the ’60s and ’70s, I came across an interesting book that had been digitized by Google Books. Unfortunately, while it was a transcript of a Congressional hearing, and therefore should be in the public domain and not subject to copyright, it wasn’t fully accessible through Google’s archive….But, as it turns out, Google provides a form where anyone can ask that a book scanned as part of Google Books be reviewed to determine if it’s in the public domain. And, despite internet companies sometimes earning a mediocre-at-best reputation for responding to user inquiries about free services, I’m happy to report that Google let me know within a week after filling out the form that the book would now be available for reading and download.”

Lifehacker: Visit New Places Every Day in Your Browser with This Google Earth Extension. “Not every Chrome or Firefox extension you use has to be one-hundred-percent dedicated to productivity or utility. Sometimes, it’s just nice to look at something pretty. And in the case of Earth View from Google Earth (Chrome, Firefox), I don’t really care if it eats up my browser’s memory or otherwise impacts its performance in any way. It makes me happy, and it’ll make you happy too—exactly why this is our Extension of the Week.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Star: Federal department tells researcher his document request will be ready in … 80 years. “Library and Archives Canada is promising to fulfill an Ottawa researcher’s access to information request. It just needs until 2098. In correspondence reviewed by the Star, the federal department said it needed at minimum eight decades to review 780,000 records related to a mysterious RCMP investigation called Project Anecdote.”

Mashable: Google Clips review: AI is not ready to be your photographer. “Google Clips doesn’t deliver on its promise to automatically capture moments you care about with a camera you can set up and forget. You should forget it, alright: Avoid this pricey AI experiment at all costs.”

The Hill: Emails reveal Facebook tried to reach out to Diamond and Silk over changes: report. “Facebook reached out to pro-Trump vloggers Diamond and Silk days before the duo claimed that they had not heard from the social media company about why their page was deemed ‘unsafe for the community.’ Emails obtained by conservative writer Erick Erickson’s blog ‘The Resurgent’ show that the company tried contacting Diamond and Silk on Monday. Erickson also reported that the company tried calling them twice on Tuesday.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: The Personal Data of 346,000 People, Hung on a Museum Wall. “Deng Yufeng wanted to create art that prods people to question their lack of data privacy. What better way, he reasoned, than to buy the personal information of more than 300,000 Chinese people off the internet and display it in a public exhibition? The police did not appreciate the irony.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: How social media helps scientists get the message across . “Analyzing the famous academic aphorism ‘publish or perish’ through a modern digital lens, a group of emerging ecologists and conservation scientists wanted to see whether communicating their new research discoveries through social media–primarily Twitter–eventually leads to higher citations years down the road. Turns out, the tweets are worth the time investment.”

Nieman Lab: People read news differently (i.e., worse) on phones than they do on desktop, new research suggests. “People seem to pay better attention to news presented on desktop than on mobile. What changes as people read more news on mobile than desktop? A new paper by Texas A&M’s Johanna Dunaway, Kathleen Searles, Mingxiao Sui, and Newly Paul, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (h/t Jane Elizabeth) looks at this.” There’s some other interesting bits in this roundup as well. Good morning, Internet…

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