NEW RESOURCES

Royal Gazette: Online gallery gives artists global exposure. “An independent art curator and consultant has launched an online art gallery to develop international awareness of the contemporary visual-art movement in Bermuda.”

State of the Planet / Columbia University: Rescuing 50 Years of Apollo Sample Data . “Over the next five years, the Astromaterials Data System will collect, organize, and digitize study results not only from the samples collected by the Apollo missions, but also studies based on meteorites, cosmic dust samples, and samples from asteroids and comets gathered from outer space.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Journal: DuckDuckGo Now Handles 40 Million Searches a Day . “DuckDuckGo was recently profiled in the New York Times, where it was revealed the search engine is now handling around 40 million searches a day. At last count, in January 2019, DuckDuckGo was serving around 34 million searches a day. This continues the steady growth of the niche, privacy-focused search engine.”

University of Nevada, Las Vegas: Latinx Voices of Southern Nevada Hits 100-Interview Milestone. “The Latinx Voices of Southern Nevada project is celebrating an important milestone: the collection of 100 oral histories from Latinx residents in Southern Nevada in just under a year.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

StateTech Magazine: Tips for Launching a Public Library Virtual Reality Program. “As library tech evolves, many public libraries are embracing VR to enhance their missions of educating the public and enhancing access to technology. Some are in more advanced stages of deploying VR technology and hardware than others, but librarians see great potential in VR. The tech can be used to enhance storytelling and educational programs via immersive graphics, and it also serves as a way to draw in residents who may have thought of public libraries as passé in the information age.”

Techdirt: Gab, Mastodon And The Challenges Of Content Moderation On A More Distributed Social Network. “While so many of the discussions and debates about content moderation focus on a few giant platforms — namely Facebook, YouTube and Twitter — it’s fascinating to see how they play out in other arenas. Indeed, one of the reasons why we’re so concerned about efforts to ‘regulate’ content moderation practices on social media is that focusing on the manner in which those big, centralized platforms work could serve to stifle newer, more innovative platforms, whose very set up may inherently deal with the ‘problems’ in the first place (see my protocols, not platforms discussion for one example).”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Firefox to Warn When Saved Logins are Found in Data Breaches. “Starting in Firefox 70, Mozilla aims to have the browser report when any of your saved logins were found in data breaches. This will be done through their partnership with the Have I Been Pwned data breach site. Mozilla is slowly integrating their independent Firefox Monitor service and the new Firefox Lockwise password manager directly into Firefox. Mozilla is also considering premium services based around these features in the future.”

HSJ: ‘Couch to 5k’ among 10 apps pulled from NHS app library. “Couch to 5k is among 10 apps which have been removed from the NHS’ digital library after failing to go through data protection checks. According to NHS Digital’s 2018-19 annual reports and accounts, the apps were pulled from the NHS Apps Library after they failed to provide information for a new general data protection regulation assessment.”

The Verge: A new anti-robocalling bill is headed to the House floor. “The bipartisan Stopping Bad Robocalls Act would outlaw a slate of methods fraudsters use to scam consumers over the phone and through text. If approved, the bill would make it easier for the government to go after the fraudsters and issue tougher penalties. The Federal Communications Commission would also need to update what it considers a ‘robocall,’ which would require more businesses to obtain consent from customers before making robotic calls.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Nature: The plan to mine the world’s research papers. “Carl Malamud is on a crusade to liberate information locked up behind paywalls — and his campaigns have scored many victories. He has spent decades publishing copyrighted legal documents, from building codes to court records, and then arguing that such texts represent public-domain law that ought to be available to any citizen online. Sometimes, he has won those arguments in court. Now, the 60-year-old American technologist is turning his sights on a new objective: freeing paywalled scientific literature. And he thinks he has a legal way to do it.”

Military.com: The Army Is Building a 3D Database of Real Cities for Virtual Reality Training. “Army modernization officials are building a new database filled with satellite imagery and 3D models of cities and key terrain from around the world that may one day feed a new age of virtual training for soldiers.”

Canada’s National Observer: Twitter bots boosted the trending #TrudeauMustGo hashtag. “The hashtag #TrudeauMustGo soared to the top of Twitter’s trending list in Canada on Tuesday, perhaps giving some observers the impression that Canadians were taking to social media en masse to express their discontent with the prime minister. But a closer look revealed that much of the activity surrounding the hashtag was actually driven by accounts tweeting at non-human rates, including about two dozen accounts created in the past 48 hours.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!