TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ubergizmo: PewDiePie Is The First Individual YouTuber To Hit 100 Million Subscribers. “These days technology has opened up all kinds of doors when it comes to a career. No longer are people limited to more traditional jobs, and where one could do jobs on the internet that could potentially make them millions. PewDiePie is a name that many are familiar with, and rightfully so.”

Tubefilter: YouTube Updates Child Safety Policies To Remove Adult-Themed Videos Aimed At Kids. “YouTube is updating its child safety policies to ban videos that contain ‘mature or violent themes’ and yet explicitly target minor or family viewers. Prior to this update, YouTube simply age-restricted videos that were found to contain things like sex, death, and graphic violence, but indicated (via the title, description, and/or tags) that they were made for kids or intended for families to watch together.” Wow, this took long enough.

USEFUL STUFF

Genealogy’s Star: The Ultimate Digital Preservation Guide, Part Eleven: Focus, Focus, Focus. “While working in the Maryland State Archives digitizing probate records for FamilySearch, we became acutely aware of the need to have the images properly focused. The software we used to digitize the records automatically gave a warning signal on the computer processing the images when the images were out of focus. Essentially, even with taking thousands of images, we had to be aware of the focus for every image.”

Hongkiat: 10 WordPress Plugins to Harden Website’s Security. “Even though WordPress has some security features built-in, but the type of threats a website is vulnurable to, you need some special plugins. This post will list some of the best plugins to harden the security on your website and keep it safe from malacious attacks. Let’s take a look.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Evening Express: Digital archive of traditional Scottish music to be created. “The British Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage is a major £18.8 million sound preservation and access project which has seen the formation of the first ever network of 10 sound preservation centres, including one at the National Library of Scotland. The project, which received a £9.5 million National Lottery Heritage Fund grant, is looking to digitally preserve music made in Aberdeenshire from as early as the 1940s up to the 1980s.”

The Drum: Estée Lauder now spends a huge portion of its marketing budget on influencers . “Speaking during the beauty giant’s fourth quarter earnings call on Monday (19 August), [president and chief executive Fabrizio] Freda revealed that it has ‘invested much more’ in marketing in the recent quarter, specifically digital, and called out how effective it had been globally. ‘These investments are mainly now in digital,’ he explained. ‘75% of our investment now is in digital social media influencers and they’re revealing to be highly productive.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wired: Shh! No Hacking the Census in the Library. “The 2020 United States Census will be the first to request a majority of Americans to respond online. The benefits are obvious. A digitized census is more efficient than the 230-year-old paper method, streamlining the processing of individual data for a population that has increased nearly a hundredfold since 1790, to 330 million. But connecting the country’s biggest and most important questionnaire to the internet also creates vulnerabilities to hacks. And what could be the most popular census survey station is also an underfunded and maliciously targeted American institution: the public library (and its computers).”

Brian Krebs: Breach at Hy-Vee Supermarket Chain Tied to Sale of 5M+ Stolen Credit, Debit Cards. “On Tuesday of this week, one of the more popular underground stores peddling credit and debit card data stolen from hacked merchants announced a blockbuster new sale: More than 5.3 million new accounts belonging to cardholders from 35 U.S. states. Multiple sources now tell KrebsOnSecurity that the card data came from compromised gas pumps, coffee shops and restaurants operated by Hy-Vee, an Iowa-based company that operates a chain of more than 245 supermarkets throughout the Midwestern United States.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Search Engine Land: Google’s inconsistency with third-party reviews is a confusing user experience. “When I first started in this industry in 2006, there was a multitude of sites that small businesses could ask customers to review them on. Over a decade later, we find that there are very few websites in this space that are actively generating user-generated content from consumers…. It also becomes very confusing to consumers and marketers when you factor in Google not enforcing their own schema guidelines for third-party review sites. Here are a few examples.” Excellent editorial with tons of examples.

Microsoft Research Blog: First TextWorld Problems, the competition: Using text-based games to advance capabilities of AI agents. “Public competitions often help to advance the state of the art in challenging research problems. They frame a question, provide relevant data, and define evaluation metrics so that researchers across the world can work toward a shared goal—and ultimately learn from each other’s advances. The TextWorld team at Microsoft Research Montreal proposed ‘First TextWorld Problems’ (FTWP), a machine learning competition that ran from January 2019 to July 2019, to encourage research on machines that interact with and learn from the world through language.” Good evening, Internet…

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