NEW RESOURCES

Ahval: Turkish historian launches digital archive documenting Armenian genocide. “Turkish historian Taner Akçam, a professor of Armenian genocide studies at Clark University in Massachusetts, has launched a digital archive of evidence collected by an Armenian genocide survivor which documents the atrocities of 1915…. [The archive] contains thousands of original Ottoman documents and Guerguerian’s unpublished writings, including the handwritten memoirs of Naim Bey, an Ottoman bureaucrat stationed in Aleppo who actively participated in the deportation and massacres of Armenians and documents from the Jerusalem Armenian Patriarchate containing first-hand information about the Armenian genocide.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BuzzFeed News: This Document Is Some Of The Research Facebook Commissioned On George Soros. “BuzzFeed News obtained a document Facebook commissioned as research on billionaire George Soros following critical comments the billionaire investor made at the World Economic Forum earlier this year. This report, which you can read below, is at the center of a controversy surrounding Facebook’s previous relationship with a public relations firm that brought Beltway political tactics to the social networking giant.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 5 Free Apps for Reminders to Take a Break From Screens . “You know that staring at the screen for too long isn’t good for your health or your eyesight, but it’s easy to get sucked in. Use these apps to get a reminder to take a break from screen time, and take care of your health.”

How-To Geek: Unfollow People on Facebook for a Happier Life. “Facebook is a great place to keep in touch with friends and family—especially those for whom you’d like to do so at a distance. Unfortunately, your friends list is probably filled with people you can’t unfriend but would prefer not to hear from. Go ahead and unfollow them.”

Lifehacker: Quickly Tell if a Shared News Story is Old With This Chrome Extension. “Over the past year, all (well, at least most) of us have gotten a little more skeptical about what we read in the news, especially on social media. Within my own group of Facebook friends, one huge source of misinformation seems to be old news rather than inaccurate news.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Israel National News: Jewish cemeteries in Poland to be mapped and put in database . “According to the agreement, all the cemeteries will be mapped and placed in a database that will be available to the public, and the border markers will be placed in the corners of all the cemeteries.”

Wired: The Infinite Lifespan Of Memes. “A comic primed for the social media age, Busco (born Brandon Moore) lived a quotidian life that took on prodigious proportions online, regularly broadcasting moments of mundanity and side-splitting farce to his 50,000 Instagram followers. In 2015 Moore struck viral gold.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

HackenProof: New Data Breach exposes 57 million records. “A massive 73 GB data breach was discovered during a regular security audit of publicly available servers with the Shodan search engine. Prior to this publication, there were at least 3 IPs with the identical Elasticsearch clusters misconfigured for public access. First IP was indexed by Shodan on November 14th, 2018. An open Elasticsearch instance exposed personal info of 56,934,021 US citizens, with information such as first name, last name, employers, job title, email, address, state, zip, phone number, and IP address.”

TorrentFreak: Google, Facebook, VPNs, and Others Risk Huge Fines Under Proposed Law. “After failing to connect its systems to Russia’s national blacklist of permanently blocked sites, Google is now being considered for a fine. Current fines are very small and no deterrent to huge tech companies, but that could change. Legislation under consideration would see the search giant – and other tech companies, including VPNs – face potentially huge penalties, in Google’s case up to US$6.7 million.”

Ars Technica: Judge slams bikini-app maker’s lawyers in legal clash with Facebook. “At the conclusion of a tense hearing that lasted over 3.5 hours, a San Mateo County judge ruled Friday that a top executive of an embattled and now-defunct bikini-related app company now must surrender his electronic devices for forensic inspection. San Mateo County Judge V. Raymond Swope ordered Six4Three’s managing director, Ted Kramer, to hand over his computer and mobile devices by 9pm PT on Friday evening.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT Technology Review: Inside the world of AI that forges beautiful art and terrifying deepfakes. “Using one neural network is really great for learning patterns; using two is really great for creating them. Welcome to the magical, terrifying world of generative adversarial networks, or GANs.”

Big Think: ‘The Journal of Controversial Ideas’ will launch in 2019. Is it dangerous?. “Three very famous philosophers are teaming up to create an academic journal dedicated to ideas too controversial to put a name on. As you might expect, the concept itself has already gathered controversy.” Good morning,Internet…

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