NEW RESOURCES

The Coloradoan: How the Coloradoan tracked 600+ LGBTQ homicides since Matthew Shepard’s murder. “More than 600 LGBTQ-identifying people have been killed in acts of violence in the United States and Puerto Rico since Oct. 12, 1998, the day Matthew Shepard died at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, after he was brutally attacked near Laramie, Wyoming. The Coloradoan scoured media archives, online memorial pages, police records and advocacy reports to tell the stories of the nation’s LGBTQ residents lost to violence in the first online database of its kind.”

National Institute of Corrections: New Council of State Governments Web Tool Provides Look at Legal, Regulatory Restrictions Against People who have Criminal Convictions. “The new National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Conviction resource (link is external), launched today – October 31, 2018 by the National Reentry Resource Center and The Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center, compiles thousands of state and federal statutes into a searchable database, making it easier to identify these obscure regulations that can be triggered by a particular conviction.”

Globe and Mail: Documenting the disappeared: Relatives, friends build database of missing Uyghurs. “One woman spent two years working at an international school in the United Arab Emirates. Another woman purchased a SIM card for her sister. One man chatted with his wife in Kazakhstan on WeChat, the Chinese media app. A sister and brother married people with foreign passports. Western scholars estimate local authorities in China’s far western Xinjiang region have interned hundreds of thousands of people – perhaps as many as a million – in a network of political indoctrination centres in the past two years. Many of those detained are Uyghurs, a largely Muslim Turkic minority in the region.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Facebook keeps fumbling political ads. “Dana Hopkins felt like she was in an ‘endless loop’ with Facebook. The frustration began in September when she purchased an ad on the social network to promote an open mic night she was co-hosting in San Francisco. What happened next was a head-scratcher. Facebook blocked the ad at least six times because the social network said it was political.”

Engadget: Snapchat pushes voters toward the nearest polling place. “Snap said its surprisingly successful voter registration campaign helped 418,000 people register in the space of a two-week period. Now, the ephemeral messaging app is following that up with an initiative that encourages those users (and other voters) to actually go to the polls. Starting today until November 6th, you’ll be able to decorate your snaps with special Election-related face lenses and filters, including one that says ‘I Voted.'”

Boing Boing: Twitter “sorry” for “mistake” of posting “Kill All Jews” as a trend . “Everything Twitter has said or done about trolls, abuse, harassment, threats, Nazis or ‘the health of conversations’ treats it as someone else’s problem. To Twitter these are PR issues, and its solutions are oriented to media coverage. This is why nothing ever really changes, least of all its enthusiasm for product features that might accomplish more. ”

USEFUL STUFF

Fold3: Free Access to the Native American Collection . “November is National Native American Heritage month. To celebrate, we’re offering free access* to our Native American collection November 1-15.”

How-to Geek: The Best Free DJ Apps. “Being a DJ used to be expensive. Even if you had no skills, you’d have to invest in equipment worth thousands of dollars to start. Thankfully, technology has bought those costs down. Today, you can learn to DJ for just a few dollars, even for free! The following apps will help improve your DJ skills—whether you want to do it personally or professionally.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

ABC News (Australia): ‘It’s beautifully ugly’: Warren Kirk is preserving Australian suburbia, one photo at a time. “For decades, Warren Kirk has been on a mission to preserve something he says is dying: old-fashioned Australian suburbia. ‘It’s beautifully ugly,’ the Melbourne photographer says of the suburban aesthetic, with its relics like the outdoor tyre swan. He says within the ‘banality’ of suburbia is a certain beauty many of us take for granted — one that tells us a lot about our history.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Data leak affects thousands of wealthy Moscow residents. “Thousands of wealthy Moscow residents who subscribed to a regional internet provider have had personal data including names, home addresses and mobile numbers posted online. People affected by the high-profile data leak are all clients of Moscow-based internet provider Akado Telecom, a large telecommunications network owned by billionaire businessman Viktor Vekselberg, which said it had opened an inquiry into the incident.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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