NEW RESOURCES

There is a new database aggregating information on people killed by police. It’s called People Killed by Police. The about page states: “To provide a much needed source of input on policing related issues and events in the United States, by an ex-SWAT officer and well known media personality DonutOperator, as well as to provide a single cohesive database of all individuals killed by police, as a replacement for killedbypolice.net which sadly shut down after many years of dedicated work.” DonutOperator is not a well-known personality to me, and I can’t find his real name on the site. This gives me pause. However, every listing from 2019 and 2018 that I checked had a news story link you can access by clicking “details.” None of the 2017 listings I looked at did. I might use this as a starting point or to gather names to investigate further, but I’m a little leery of denoting this as completely credible. (And if DonutOperator doesn’t want to use his real name, fine; he doesn’t owe me anything. But skepticism is pretty much required online nowadays.)

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Politiscope, an app to track Congressional voting records and bills, launches on android devices. “While the scope of Politiscope may be expanding, the brothers make clear that the company’s mission is still the same. To provide unbiased information sourced from places like the Congressional Budget Office, the Library of Congress, and the Pew Research Center.”

CNN: Social media access restored in Zimbabwe by court order. “Access to social media platforms in Zimbabwe was reinstated on Monday, hours after a court deemed the government’s internet shutdown illegal. Zimbabwean authorities clamped down on internet use last week, after violent protests broke out over President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s announcement of a 150% hike on fuel prices.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: The Best Cloud Storage for Your Buck in 2019. “We’re taking a look at some of the best options available and how much they’ll cost you. If you want more control or value your privacy above all, you might be interested in a self-hosted solution. We’ve already taken a look at self-hosted cloud storage services like NextCloud in a separate article.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Motherboard: Why Did YouTube Mass Recommend That People Watch News Footage of the 9/11 Attacks?. “Earlier this month, a two-hour newscast from CNN on the morning of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks started showing up in the recommended section of many users’ feeds, prompting people to question, ‘What did I watch for this to be recommended to me?’ The video itself was uploaded more than five years ago by an account exclusively full of other videos from Sept. 11, 2001 and news coverage of the attacks from that day.”

Advertising Age: 10 Influencers Under 10. “Generation Alpha isn’t kidding around. A child influencer can earn, per post, $100 for every 1,000 followers, and a kid with 500,000 followers can earn $5,000 for a single image, Fast Company estimates. Seems like these 10 influencers are on their way to paying for college.”

Wired: How AI Will Turn Us All Into Filmmakers. “As platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat have proved, video has become a dominant mode of communication and public rhetoric. And carrying a high-quality video camera in our pockets means we’re recording more moving pictures than ever before. Ah, but to turn those infinite hours of video into something more complex and polished than, say, an Instagram Story? That’s still hard. Editing tools are more useful now, but video is still more time-consuming and trickier to wrestle with than text or photos.”

The New Orleans Advocate: King cake baby too lewd for Facebook? Post violation for nudity leaves company ‘shocked’. “King Cake Snob is a competition run annually by Innovative Advertising, a Mandeville-based company, which ranks king cakes from across the region. As part of its usual marketing push, the group tried to post sponsored Facebook ads featuring tiny baby dolls, the totems traditionally found in the classic Carnival treat. But the sight of plastic babies wearing nothing but their birthday suits led Facebook to block the ads.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ZDNet: Websites can steal browser data via extensions APIs. “Malicious websites can exploit browser extension APIs to execute code inside the browser and steal sensitive information such as bookmarks, browsing history, and even user cookies.The latter, an attacker can use to hijack a user’s active login sessions and access sensitive accounts, such as email inboxes, social media profiles, or work-related accounts.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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