TWEAKS AND UPDATES

IP Australia: IP Australia is the first in the world to extend its WIPO’s Digital Access Service (DAS) digital library to trade marks . “IP Australia is pleased to announce the extension of its digital library in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)’s Digital Access Service (DAS) to trade marks and designs as of 1 November 2019.”

Creative Commons: Introducing CC Accidenz Commons: An Open-Licensed Font. “Since 2002, CC licenses—and the CC logo—have been used to share and make freely available billions of works in the Global Commons. CC has also grown to include an active Global Network, consisting of 41 local CC Chapters and over 450 members who use the logo to support their work. Due to this growth, we realized in 2018 that the original Akzidenz Grotesk font was not ideal for members of our Global Network to adapt and remix. We wondered: Can we develop an open-licensed Creative Commons font? Thanks to the kind support of a CC member, we did.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BusinessWest: Mellon Foundation Awards Five Colleges $800,000 For Online Museum Collections. “The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the Five College Consortium $800,000 to reimagine the way museum collaborations can share their online collections with each other and the world. The current shared collections database at Five Colleges was developed more than 20 years ago, and this commitment to a consortial database has enriched collaboration across the Five Colleges and opened up discovery and access to museum collections for students, faculty, staff, and the public.” If you’re wondering what the Five College Consortium is, here’s an overview.

Ars Technica: Ars puts Google’s new Nest Wi-Fi to the test. “Google says its new Nest Wi-Fi isn’t just Google Wi-Fi plus a smart speaker—it’s new, improved, and with better coverage. This is good news—despite the impressive sales numbers Google says it has for the original Google Wi-Fi, the product never ranked very well in performance tests at Wirecutter, Smallnetbuilder, or here at Ars.”

New Indian Express: Tamil University to digitize manuscripts with funds from British Library. “Rare collections of Tamil manuscripts available in the Tamil University (TU) will now be digitized under the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) of British Library in London. ‘The British Library has approved 51,040 British Pound Sterling, which is approximately Rs 48 lakhs for the project’, said Vice-Chancellor of TU G Balasubramanian, adding that as a first instalment, the British Library has already released Rs18.50 lakhs.” Rs 48 lakhs is a little less than $68,000 USD.

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Your hacked Facebook account may be bankrolling scam ad campaigns. “As Henry Lau slept on Oct. 15, hackers quietly took control of the ads manager page for his Facebook account. By 6:15 a.m. PT, Facebook had approved a widespread advertising campaign with a budget of $10,000 per day to promote a 13-second video in the US, Mexico and Australia. Lau, who hadn’t taken out any Facebook ads in two years, had no idea his credit card racked up thousands of dollars in charges until he got an alert that the ad campaign was shut down — six hours later.”

Motherboard: I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb. “… I had unknowingly stumbled into a nationwide web of deception that appeared to span eight cities and nearly 100 property listings—an undetected scam created by some person or organization that had figured out just how easy it is to exploit Airbnb’s poorly written rules in order to collect thousands of dollars through phony listings, fake reviews, and, when necessary, intimidation.” This is WILD.

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Daily Beast: Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Smash Facebook Could Work—and Boy, Do We Need It To. “Silicon Valley wants Congress to believe its web of interconnected self-regulatory organizations is no different from how the American Bar Association polices lawyers. But the global scope of tech’s activities, and its ability to cause harm to tens or even hundreds of million of users with a single oversight, is a risk potential unlike any private industry has ever known. This year the United Kingdom declared Big Tech’s self-regulatory schemes a costly and dangerous mistake. The United States must follow suit.”

Tubefilter: YouTube Ads Contain More Male Characters, But Those Starring Females Nab More Views (Study). “Google has conducted a new study alongside the Geena Davis Institute On Gender In Media (GDIGM) into various gender dynamics at play in the realm of YouTube advertising. Google and the GDIGM — which advocates for the equal representation of women in media — studied a total of 2.7 million video ads (with 550 billion views) that were uploaded to YouTube over a four-year period ended last March across 11 different convent verticals and 51 different markets.”

Engadget: How computational photography is making your photos better. “Phone cameras have undergone huge improvements in recent years, but they’ve done so without the hardware changing all that much. Sure, lenses and sensors continue to improve, but the big developments have all been in software. So-called computational photography is using algorithms and even machine learning to stitch together multiple photos to yield better results than were previously possible from a tiny lens and sensor.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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