NEW RESOURCES

MarketWatch: New CFPB database of expensive prepaid cards is missing key information, advocates say. “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has launched a new database revealing the terms and conditions on prepaid cards and payroll cards that can sometimes hit users with high fees. But people wouldn’t know that from the federal watchdog agency, consumer advocates say.”

WHYY: ‘Up close and personal’: Mütter Museum maps the spread of Philly’s 1918 flu epidemic. “When the Mütter Museum began looking into the historic epidemic five years ago, it discovered a trove of information in archives around the city, including tens of thousands of death certificates. Part of the project was to create a public online database of all those death certificates and place them on an interactive map. Users can search by name or neighborhood to track how the flu swept the city.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Yahoo will give you an extra week to post on Yahoo Groups, says it will ‘listen to feedback’. “Yahoo’s plan to largely shut down Groups was widely publicized on October 16th, just days before the company was going to freeze uploads on October 21st. But today, the company told us that date is actually going to be a bit later, on October 28th. (It has also added the new date to its support document about the decision.) However, no matter when you post something to a group, it’s still going to get deleted, as Yahoo is still removing all content hosted on Groups on December 14th.”

TechCrunch: Farewell, Google Clips. “Amid a slew of updated hardware, Clips has gone missing from Google’s online store. Odds are you probably don’t remember what Clips is. If you do, odds are you’re not surprised by this turn of events.”

BetaNews: KB4517389 is causing even more problems with Windows 10 than first thought. “That Microsoft’s updates for Windows 10 have been problematic is hardly a revelation, but the scale of the problems just keeps on growing. We have already written about numerous bug-ridden updates, including KB4517389 breaking the Start menu and Edge. Now this same update is being blamed for display issues and random BSODs.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Download Books From Google Books. “Google offers a vast repository of ebooks via Google Books. There’s the Google Books search engine and Google Play Books store. Both services let you save copies of books so you can read them offline. So here’s how to download books from Google Books.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BBC: Lebanon scraps WhatsApp tax as protests rage. “The Lebanese government has backtracked on plans to tax WhatsApp calls as protests rage over the government’s handling of an economic crisis. It had announced a new $0.20 (£0.16) daily charge on voice calls made through Facebook-owned WhatsApp and other similar apps.”

New York Times: Defiant Zuckerberg Says Facebook Won’t Police Political Speech. “In a winding, 35-minute speech at Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall — where presidents and foreign heads of state have delivered addresses — Mr. Zuckerberg fought back against the idea that the social network needed to be an arbiter of speech. He said that Facebook had been founded to give people a voice and bring them together, and that critics who had assailed the company for doing so were setting a dangerous example.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: New privacy bill threatens years of jail time for companies that misuse consumer data. “The bill, known as the Mind Your Own Business Act, threatens to put top executives behind bars for up to 20 years if their companies are caught lying to authorities about having misused Americans’ personal information. It also proposes that those companies face special tax penalties tied to executive salary.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Tech Xplore: Telescope: a tool to manage bioinformatics analyses on mobile devices. “A team of researchers at UCLA, the University of São Paulo, the Federal University of São Carlos and the University of Southern California has recently developed an interactive tool for managing large-scale bioinformatic analyses in real-time and from portable devices. This new tool, called Telescope, was first presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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