NEW RESOURCES

Jerusalem Post: German Jewish poet brought back to life in a new online platform. “Else Lasker-Schüler – one of Germany’s greatest Jewish poets – who moved to Jerusalem in the 1930s and eventually faded into obscurity, will come back to life in a new digital platform that will display a significant collection of her works online. Lasker-Schüler, who lived between 1869-1945, is considered to be one of the greats of German poetry, a bohemian artist who corresponded with many of the most prominent cultural figures of her time including Albert Einstein, Martin Buber and Thomas Mann.”

Vancouver Sun: Museum of Vancouver goes virtual with Google Arts & Culture. “The Museum of Vancouver is now online for browsing using Google Arts & Culture. The museum’s exhibit Textile Arts of the Pacific Northwest has been digitized and can be viewed through Google’s arts portal, which allows anyone, anywhere in the world, to explore museum artifacts and art gallery works online from participating institutions.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

VentureBeat: Mozilla Common Voice updates will help train the ‘Hey Firefox’ wakeword for voice-based web browsing. “Mozilla today released the latest version of Common Voice, its open source collection of transcribed voice data for startups, researchers, and hobbyists to build voice-enabled apps, services, and devices. Common Voice now contains over 7,226 total hours of contributed voice data in 54 different languages, up from 1,400 hours across 18 languages in February 2019.”

The Next Web: Twitter’s new secret project is a subscription platform. “Twitter is cooking up some kind of subscription service for its platform, and it’s recruiting engineers to work on it. We don’t know anything about it thus far, but the potential of it is pretty staggering.” Well, yeah. For one thing it would stop all the “this site is free” tweets…

Outlook India: Google to provide quick facts about images you search. “Google on Wednesday announced a new feature that will make it easy to find quick facts about what people see on Google images in the form of a Knowledge Graph. Starting first in the US, the feature would include people, places or things related to the image from the Knowledge Graph’s database of billions of facts, helping users explore the topic more.”

USEFUL STUFF

CNET: How to find free workout classes on Instagram. “As the coronaviruspandemic spread throughout the US, it forced gyms and fitness studios to close. But that didn’t stop them from helping people work out. Pro fitness trainers flocked to Instagram to stream and upload free fitness videos anyone can use, without a hefty gym membership fee. If you’ve ever wanted to try a new workout, instructor or commit to a new exercise routine, now is the time. The best part about working out with Instagram Live is that you can try new workouts without committing — there’s no trial, subscription or money involved.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

NBC News: Thousands of contracts highlight quiet ties between Big Tech and U.S. military. “On Wednesday, newly published research from the technology accountability nonprofit Tech Inquiry revealed that the Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, have secured thousands of deals with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Dell, IBM, Hewlett Packard and even Facebook that have not been previously reported.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BetaNews: Fake content drives online fraud. “Based on a study of 34,000 sites and apps, as well as a survey of over 1,000 consumers conducted in June 2020, new research details how content abuse is a critical part of the fraud supply chain, the interconnected ecosystem of fraud. The research, carried out by digital trust and safety firm Sift, also uncovered a fraud ring based in Russia where fraudsters executed a card-testing scheme through fake listings on an e-commerce marketplace.”

ZDNet: One out of every 142 passwords is ‘123456’. “In one of the biggest password re-use studies of its kind, an analysis of more than one billion leaked credentials has discovered that one out of every 142 passwords is the classic ‘123456’ string. The study, carried out last month by computer engineering student Ata Hakçıl, analyzed username and password combinations that leaked online after data breaches at various companies.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Arizona State University: ASU researchers launch blog series exploring equitable research practices. “As public attention has turned to systemic inequities in institutional cultures like those in police forces, medical care, school systems and food production, some researchers at Arizona State University are turning their attention to academic culture to explore how researchers might embody more equitable research practices. This week, ASU postdoctoral scholar Schuyler Marquez launched a new series, ‘Embodying Reciprocity: Relationality and Redistribution in Anthropology,’ on the collaborative blog Footnotes, along with ASU doctoral candidate Taylor Genovese and University of Chicago doctoral candidate Sonia Grant.”

New York Times: Goodbye to the Wild Wild Web. “Within a 48-hour period this week, many of the world’s internet giants took steps that would have been unthinkable for them even months earlier. Reddit, which spent most of its life as a lawless free-for-all, banned thousands of forums for hate speech, including the largest pro-Trump forum on the internet. Twitch — an Amazon-owned video-gaming platform not known for its political courage — suspended President Trump’s official account for ‘hateful conduct,’ while YouTube purged a handful of notorious racists and punished a popular creator with a history of problematic videos. Facebook, under pressure from a growing advertiser boycott, took down a network of violent anti-government insurrectionists who had set up shop on its platform.” Good morning, Internet…

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