NEW RESOURCES

Next City: New York City Debuts Regional Mapping Tool. “New York City’s planning department has launched a new mapping tool that harnesses population, housing and economic data and makes it available for exploring by the general public. The Metro Region Explorer offers trending data on the city’s greater metropolitan region: the five boroughs, upstate New York and Long Island, as well as parts of New Jersey and Connecticut.”

Patch: Farm Bureau Creates Online Database For Local Agriculture Sales. “Oregon’s Bounty is a searchable directory of nearly 300 family farms and ranches that sell food and foliage directly to the public. Oregon’s Bounty allows visitors to do keyword searches for specific agriculture products — such as berries, cauliflower, honey, or eggs — and/or search for farms within a specific region of the state. Visitors can also do a keyword search for ‘u-pick’ or ‘events’ to find farms that offer those activities.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Twitch to stream 500 classic Doctor Who episodes. “Twitch has announced that it will stream 500 Doctor Who episodes for seven weeks starting May 29. The stream will kick off with the very first episode, 1963’s An Unearthly Child, and run through each of the first seven Doctors, as well as the first appearances of the Daleks and the Cybermen, until the end of the show’s “classic” era in 1989.”

Eyerys: The ‘Yellow’ Initiative From Snapchat Wants To Cultivate Creative Projects. “Snapchat may not be the best player on the web, and far from the biggest, but it has its own way of thriving. When Snapchat rebranded as Snap, Inc. in late 2016, it started calling itself as a camera company. Besides its two versions of Spectacles, most of Snap’s releases over the years come from its app. From Snap Map to the controversial redesign. In an attempt to go beyond all that, Snap in unveiling another initiative. Called ‘Yellow’, it’s aimed to cultivating creative projects.”

USEFUL STUFF

TechCrunch: Collections is a better way to organize those photos you snap as mental notes . “Wi-Fi password sticker on your router? Snap. Cute sweater in a store’s window display? Snap. Party invitation? Snap. Cool gift idea for mom? Snap. If any of this sounds familiar to you, then you probably also use your iPhone’s camera to take photos of the things you want to remember – maybe even more often than you use Notes to write things down. If your mental notes are more visual in nature, then you may want give the new app Collections a go instead of relying only on your Camera Roll.” This sounds like a good option if, like me, you just can’t get into Pinterest.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Engadget: Egypt bans YouTube for one month over 2012 anti-Islamic video. “Egypt is about to act on its longstanding threat to temporarily ban YouTube. The country’s highest administrative court has ruled that officials must block the streaming video site for a month (along with ‘all’ links playing the video) after it allowed the 2012 anti-Islamic video Innocence of Muslims. The short film’s portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed triggered outrage in the Islamic world and led to a 2013 Egyptian case demanding the ban, but the appeal process has kept the ruling in limbo for the past five years.”

TheNewsLens: Data, Propaganda and Cambridge Analytica in Taiwan. “Look down any Taipei Metro car during rush hour, and it is immediately obvious that Facebook is a fact of daily life in Taiwan; 77 percent of the country claims to use the service, according to data-analysis firm Statista, among the highest penetration rates in the world. But with great penetration comes great responsibility, and research conducted by The News Lens suggests data on Taiwan’s citizens has been widely harvested by private and government entities.”

Search Engine Journal: Googlers Are Being Targeted With An Anti-Google Ad Campaign. “Google employees are being targeted with an ad campaign encouraging them to advocate for unbiased search results. The campaign, called ‘Focus on the User,’ has been put together by a consortium of companies led by Yelp. Their main argument is that Google is unfairly ranking its own properties ahead of competitors in local search results.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Neowin: FBI urges router owners to perform a reboot to stop VPNFilter malware. “Earlier this week, Cisco’s security team disclosed a Russian-developed malware called VPNFilter which compromised at least 500,000 routers built by Linksys, MikroTik, NETGEAR, and TP-Link as well as network-attached storage devices manufactured by QNAP. In addition to the threat protections rolled out by Cisco, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has also released a public advisory calling on users of the affected networking devices to reboot the routers in order to destroy the malware.”

FTC: Google is not calling you. “Have you gotten a robocall at work, telling you that you have to take action or your Google business listing will be removed? Or maybe even marked as permanently closed? That kind of thing could be tough for a business — if the threat was real. But those calls are not legit—and not from Google.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Economic Times: Microsoft building tool to spot bias in artificial intelligence algorithms. “After Facebook announced its own tool to detect bias in an algorithm earlier this month, a new report suggests that Microsoft is also building a tool to automate the identification of bias in a range of different Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms.”

Android Headlines: New Facebook AI Learns & Emulates Music Across Styles. “Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team published a paper detailing a new artificial intelligence system it developed for the purposes of remixing and emulating learned music in different styles. The short video that can be seen below demonstrates how the technology is capable of accepting an original piece of music from someone like Mozart or Bach, then emulating the underlying style of such compositions using different instruments.” Good morning, Internet…

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