TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ubergizmo: Self-Harm Images Will Be Hidden Behind ‘Sensitivity Screens’ On Instagram. “Instagram wants to clamp down on images that depict suicide or self-harm. The Facebook-owned company has now decided to hide self-harm images behind ‘sensitivity screens.’ This feature is going to blur the image until the user makes a decision to view it and taps on the image.”

Google Blog: State of the Union 2019: Live on YouTube. “As we have done since 2010, YouTube will live stream the President’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, February 5 at 9 p.m. ET, as well as the response. This year, you can tune in to live streams in both English and Spanish.”

USEFUL STUFF

CogDogBlog: Duct Taping A Hypothes.is RSS Feed Widget. “Do you remember the scene of Web Apocalypse Not Now where Lieutenant Colonel Bill Feedmore boasts, ‘I love the smell of an RSS feed in the morning!’ I hope not. But tinkering with RSS never tires, the technology that is always declared dead, but just keeps working.”

PetaPixel: 10 Good Reasons Why You Need an Archive if You’re a Photographer. “With digital photography, it’s now effortless to take, process and publish images. We share more than ever before on social media and we shoot twice as much than five years ago in 2013. All that data is easy to generate and it’s quite common for photographers to share their results every single day online. But there’s one thing that still requires some effort, something that many photographers overlook: archiving.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Verge: Google’s head of translation on fighting bias in language and why AI loves religious texts. “You might remember a spate of news stories last year about Google Translate spitting out ominous chunks of religious prophecy when presented with nonsense words and phrases to translate. Clickbait sites suggested it might be a conspiracy, but no, it was just Google’s machine learning systems getting confused and falling back on the data they were trained on: religious texts. But as the head of Google Translate, Macduff Hughes, told The Verge recently, machine learning is what makes Google’s ever-useful translation tools really sing.”

Culture Map Houston: New Instagram restaurant bingo cards are Houston’s latest viral sensation. “When it comes to Instagram, everyone wants to earn the most likes possible. Instagram stories don’t get likes in the same way as posts do, but they can start conversations through reposts and shares. For the past couple of weeks, Houston’s savviest, food-obsessed Instagrammers have been playing a game on their stories by using bingo cards to compare notes on places they’ve been.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Motherboard: Hacker Who Stole $5 Million By SIM Swapping Gets 10 Years in Prison. “A 20-year-old college student who was accused of stealing more than $5 million in cryptocurrency in a slew of SIM hijacking attacks is the first person to be sentenced for the crime.”

Ars Technica: Ajit Pai loses in court—judges overturn gutting of Tribal broadband program. “A three-judge panel said the FCC failed to consider that facilities-based providers have been leaving the Lifeline program, and provided no evidence that banning resellers would spur new broadband deployment. The FCC also failed to properly consider how eliminating the subsidy in urban areas would affect consumers, judges determined.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Harvard Gazette: Radcliffe scholar Nicole C. Nelson probes key moments in reproducibility crisis. “Nicole C. Nelson, Radcliffe’s Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow, examines scientists’ assumptions about the natural world and how they play into their research. This year at Radcliffe, the assistant professor of science and technology studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will delve into the scientific reproducibility crisis, a recent phenomenon in which subsequent scientific investigation has found many supposedly stable findings to be difficult to replicate.”

Engadget: Study suggests Facebook users are happier if they leave for a month. “You’ve no doubt heard anecdotal evidence of Facebook users feeling better after they’ve quit the social network, but how often does that help, really? A fair amount, according to researchers. A study (PDF) from New York University and Stanford showed that Facebook users were happier, more satisfied with life and slightly less likely to feel anxious, depressed or lonely. They also used other social networks less, and used Facebook less when they came back.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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