NEW RESOURCES

The Guardian: Deadly Questions: ask Aboriginal champions anything about being Indigenous. “The Victorian government has launched a new website that will allow non-Indigenous people to ask questions of and about Aboriginal people in an attempt to build understanding as part of a push towards signing a treaty. Called Deadly Questions, the website allows users to write in questions and receive a personal response from one or more ‘champions’.” I visited the site and was immediately asked to submit a question, so I don’t think it’s Australians-only.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BetaNews: Facebook is killing off Trending as it tries to revamp newsfeeds. “Facebook has announced plans to kill off the Trending feature of its newsfeed. The social network says that this is to ‘make way for future news experiences’.”

PopSugar: Facebook Is Unrolling a BUNCH of Fun Stuff For Pride Month! Here’s the Deal. “Last year, Facebook unveiled a fun ‘rainbow’ reaction in honor of LGBTQ+ Pride Month. And though many wished it would stick around all year, the rainbow tragically disappeared as June drew to a close. This year, though, is an entirely different story. Facebook is introducing fun stickers, frames, masks, effects, and more to celebrate Pride. And this time, it’s not going away.” This article is a slideshow.

Search Engine Journal: Facebook Introduces Ads in Stories After Reaching 150M Daily Viewers. “Facebook has finally started including ads in Stories, which some might say was only a matter of time. After being relatively quiet on the success of Facebook Stories since launching the feature 14 months ago, the company has revealed Stories now receive a total of 150 million daily viewers.”

USEFUL STUFF

Gadget Hacks: Video Too Long for Instagram Stories? Here’s How to Split It Up. “One of the latest trends in Instgram is breaking up larger videos into more digestible clips to use in stories. Stories max out at 15 seconds, making it a pain to show anything meaningful in that short time frame. Fortunately, you can virtually extend the duration of your Stories on both your iPhone and Android phone.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Neowin: A Microsoft acquisition of GitHub, valued at $2 billion, said to be in the works. “Microsoft is said to be in serious talks about a possible acquisition of GitHub, the largest source-code repository in the world. A report by Business Insider suggests the Redmond giant has been in talks regarding a buyout for years now but that the discussions have heated up recently, possibly owing to the impending departure of GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath.” Uhhhhh…

The Canberra Times: These Chinese giants make Facebook and Google look tame. “The technology world’s most bruising battle for supremacy is taking place in China. And it could point to Big Tech’s future everywhere else, too. Tencent Holdings and the Alibaba Group are ratcheting up their no-holds-barred contest to dominate the ways 770 million internet users communicate, shop, get around, entertain themselves and even invest their savings and visit the doctor.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Amnesty International: UAE: Activist Ahmed Mansoor sentenced to 10 years in prison for social media posts. “The jailing of a prominent human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for posts he made on Facebook and Twitter is a devastating blow to freedom of expression in the country, Amnesty International said today. Ahmed Mansoor was this week sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined 1,000,000 Emirati Dirham (approximately USD $270,000) for posts he made on social media.”

The Register: OMG, that’s downright Wicked: Botnet authors twist corpse of Mirai into new threats. “Cybercrooks are using the infamous Mirai IoT botnet as a framework to quickly add in new exploits and functionalities, it has emerged. The tactic is dramatically decreasing the development time for new botnets, according to research from Netscout’s Arbor Security Engineering and Response Team (ASERT).”

ZDNet: Chrome, Firefox CSS3 flaw may have let attackers grab Facebook user data. “Chrome and Firefox recently received patches for a bug that allowed attackers to reveal Facebook usernames, profile pictures and Likes when users visited an attack site. The bug is caused by the way Chrome and Firefox implemented a feature of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) called ‘mix-blend-mode’, introduced to the CSS3 standard in 2016.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Things I’m Fonds Of: Searching for Answers in Archival Records (You can’t just Google them). “Anyone else out there addicted to Google Analytics? I regularly get lost down the rabbit hole of search queries that are being made on my archives’ online search portal. I want to know what researchers are looking for and if they are finding it. It’s fascinating to me, but also quite troubling. Recently a researcher typed in the following in the search bar: ‘City hall location in 1995’ Now, this is a perfectly valid piece of information that might be of interest to a resident of Coquitlam. But it points to a larger issue that I can’t figure out how to solve.”

CNET: Google says you probably don’t know how to spell ‘beautiful’. “Yacht. Chaos. Apparel. Connecticut. These are some of the words America most needs help spelling, according to a Google Trends visualization released this week. The chart breaks down to most-searched words by state. By the way, it’s Maine that’s asking how to spell ‘Connecticut.'” Good morning, Internet…

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