NEW RESOURCES

University of Wisconsin-Madison: New Online Archive For Africanist Norman Miller. “The Norman Miller Archive is a new open multimedia resource featuring selected research, photos, films, journals, books, and field notes from the library of Norman Miller, an academic researcher, journalist, and film producer who worked extensively in East Africa from 1960-2015.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

DigitalNC: The Daily Record Project: “Remnants” of a Pivotal Paper in North Carolina’s History. “About two years ago, we had the honor of hosting a group of students from Wilmington who were studying one of the most politically and socially devastating moments in the state’s history–the Wilmington Coup and Race Riots of 1898. Their efforts centered around locating and studying the remaining issues of the newspaper at the center of that event, the Wilmington Daily Record. Owned and operated by African Americans, this successful paper incited racists who were already upset with the political power held by African Americans and supporters of equality. During the Coup, the Record’s offices were burned and many were killed. Thanks to these students, their mentors, and cultural heritage institutions, you can now see the seven known remaining issues of the Daily Record on DigitalNC.”

The Register: Googlers hate it! This one weird trick lets websites dodge Chrome 76’s defenses, detect you’re in Incognito mode . “A week ago, Google released Chrome 76, which included a change intended to prevent websites from detecting when browser users have activated Incognito mode. Unfortunately, the web giant’s fix opened another hole elsewhere. It enabled a timing attack that can be used to infer when people are using Incognito mode.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CNBC: How Facebook failed to break into hardware: The untold story of Building 8. “Building 8′s experience highlights Facebook’s central quandary as it seeks to diversify beyond mobile ads, which account for 93% of revenue, and expand into the costly business of developing, manufacturing and selling consumer devices. Coding is Facebook’s DNA, but the company’s hacker culture clashes with the realities of hardware development, which demands longer time horizons and relationships with a wide swath of manufacturers and resellers, all issues well beyond Facebook’s core.”

The Atlantic: Where Everyone’s an Influencer. “The occasion was Instabeach, an exclusive, invite-only annual party hosted by the photo-sharing platform for 500 top creators along with plus-ones, talent representatives, managers, and—for the first time—press. The goal, according to Justin Antony, Instagram’s head of creators and emerging talent partnerships, is to help influencers meet one another, mingle, and form friendships. But what started three years ago as a casual beach party for a class of people that was once maligned by the traditional entertainment industry has become a who’s who of young Hollywood, a sun-soaked declaration of just how completely enmeshed Instagram has become with the teen-entertainment world.”

TechCrunch: Facebook still full of groups trading fake reviews, says consumer group. “Which? says it found more than 55,000 new posts across just nine Facebook groups trading fake reviews in July, which it said were generating hundreds ‘or even thousands’ of posts per day. It points out the true figure is likely to be higher because Facebook caps the number of posts it quantifies at 10,000 (and three of the ten groups had hit that ceiling).”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ZDNet: Microsoft: Russian state hackers are using IoT devices to breach enterprise networks. “One of Russia’s elite state-sponsored hacking groups is going after IoT devices as a way to breach corporate networks, from where they pivot to other more high-value targets. Attacks have been observed in the wild said the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center, one of the OS maker’s cyber-security divisions.”

New York Times: Legal Shield for Websites Rattles Under Onslaught of Hate Speech. “When the most consequential law governing speech on the internet was created in 1996, Google.com didn’t exist and Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old. The federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, has helped Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and countless other internet companies flourish.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechXplore: Study explores interactions between world leaders on social media. “Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) have recently carried out a study investigating the interactions among different world leaders and influential political figures on social media. Their findings, pre-published on arXiv, provide interesting new insight about how government actors use social media, which could help to better understand the role of new technologies in diplomatic exchanges.”

Cornell Chronicle: Study finds racial bias in tweets flagged as hate speech. “Tweets believed to be written by African Americans are much more likely to be tagged as hate speech than tweets associated with whites, according to a Cornell study analyzing five collections of Twitter data marked for abusive language.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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