NEW RESOURCES

The Guardian: Campaign launched to catch ‘Europe’s most wanted women’. “Europe’s policing agency has launched a campaign to catch the continent’s most wanted female criminals. Europol’s new website, called the Crime Has No Gender campaign, reveals the faces of fugitives wanted by 21 EU countries in an interactive way. Eighteen of them are women.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Blog: 15 years of Google Books. “Today we’re unveiling a new design for Google Books on desktop and helpful features for anyone looking to read, research or simply hunt for literary treasures. We’ve redesigned Google Books so people can now quickly access details like the book’s description, author’s history and other works, reader reviews and options for where you can purchase or borrow the book. And for those using Google Books for research, each book’s bibliographies are located prominently on the page and the citation tool allows you to cite the source in your preferred format, all in one spot.”

University of Georgia: UGA partners with Google Books for digital access. “University of Georgia Libraries’ books will soon transcend shelves and be available online to students, faculty and members of the community in Athens and around the world. Through a new partnership with Google, about 120,000 of the Libraries’ 4.5 million volumes will be digitized, allowing further access to literary, historic, scientific and reference books and journals through UGA’s library catalog as well as one of the largest digital book collections in the world.” Genealogists with Georgia roots, keep an eye on this — one of the categories of items being digitized is city directories.

Gambling .com: Online Casinos Can Advertise on Google in 2020 as Ban Ends. “Google is getting ready to change its advertising policies around the evolving U.S. gambling landscape. The company plans to ease up on online casino advertising and get rid of a sweeping ban on the industry, according to an report from EGR.”

USEFUL STUFF

TechCrunch: A set of new tools can decrypt files locked by Stop, a highly active ransomware. “New Zealand-based security company Emsisoft has built a set of decryption tools for Stop, a family of ransomware that includes Djvu and Puma, which they say could help victims recover some of their files. Stop is believed to be the most active ransomware in the world, accounting for more than half of all ransomware infections, according to figures from ID-Ransomware, a free site that helps identify infections.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Columbia Journalism Review: India had its first ‘WhatsApp election.’ We have a million messages from it. “At the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, we used the Indian election cycle, which ran between April 11 and May 19, 2019, as a case study for assessing both general political discourse and information manipulation on WhatsApp. With no APIs, tools, or best practices in place to help outsiders tap into ongoing activity inside closed groups, we devised a strategy to monitor a subset of the political conversation, over a period of three and a half months. The study’s resulting data set—which grew to over a terabyte in size—contains 1.09 million messages, retrieved by joining 1,400 chat groups related to politics in the country.”

The Register: Yahoo! Groups’ closure and a tale of Oftel: Die-hard users ‘informally’ included telcos. “The tossing away of user-generated content on Yahoo!’s long-running Groups site on Wednesday was not just bad news for all the hardcore users who are about to lose all their precious things stored there. Many were quick to point at telcos, who were using Yahoo! Groups to manage phone number assignments.” WOW.

SECURITY & LEGAL

ZDNet: Google is in serious trouble, warns top anti-trust lawyer. “Seth Bloom, former general counsel to the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee and former attorney at the Justice Department Antitrust Division, said Google is ‘in serious trouble’ regarding anti-trust scrutiny from many different places.”

Digital Trends: Lawsuit alleges Equifax’s stupid password made it super easy to steal your data. “The first of those issues comes in the form of the password the company users to protect a portal used to manage credit disputes. While you might think a major company holding personal information like people’s names, addresses, and social security numbers might use an exceptionally secure password in that instance, it actually went for something a different: It used ‘admin’ as both the username and password for the portal.” This is me, my blood pressure zooming up, my eyes bugging out…

Ars Technica: Unpatched Linux bug may open devices to serious attacks over Wi-Fi. “A potentially serious vulnerability in Linux may make it possible for nearby devices to use Wi-Fi signals to crash or fully compromise vulnerable machines, a security researcher said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York University: Combination of Artificial Intelligence & Radiologists More Accurately Identified Breast Cancer. “An artificial intelligence (AI) tool—trained on roughly a million screening mammography images—has identified breast cancer with approximately 90 percent accuracy when combined with analysis by radiologists.”

Mashable: The ‘Internet of Things’ can’t stop killing my gadgets. “The internet of things is more than just Alexa, and its weak point is more than just privacy. We’re talking about hundreds of devices performing every conceivable labor-saving function. Now, at the end of what was supposed to be the IoT decade, these gadgets are already starting to do what was always more likely, the mundane thing that technology has pretty much always done: either break down and leave us stranded, or effectively extort more money from us, after we’ve been foolish enough to start relying on them.” Good morning, Internet…

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