NEW RESOURCES

The National: Louvre Abu Dhabi’s permanent collection will be available online by end of this year. “The museum is building a digital archive of its entire collection, which will be available on its website for visitors to peruse. From this week, 120 artworks can be viewed online. Along with images of artefacts, paintings or objects, the website will include historical information about the pieces, as well as details on their geography, date and medium.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Rolling Stone: TikTok Bans QAnon Hashtags. “A TikTok spokesperson told Rolling Stone such content contained disinformation, which is prohibited in the platform’s community guidelines, and confirmed that it was working to make QAnon-related content more difficult to find in its search function. TikTok will also be working to remove conspiracy theory-related videos and accounts, though some hashtags were still searchable on the platform as of this writing.”

Techdirt: Trumpian Loudmouths Apparently Losing Interest In Parler With No One To Play Victim To. “What a shock. Parler, the site that falsely claimed that it would be the ‘free speech’ alternative to Twitter, but who quickly realized that it was going to have to aggressively ban users as well, is apparently suffering from abandonment.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: How to Get Rid of Google Meet in Your Gmail. “There’s nothing wrong with Google Meet. But if you don’t use it, nor have an intention to use it anytime soon, its somewhat-front-and-centre placement is going to get annoying. However, you can fix this problem on the web, Android or iOS — you just have to do a little digging.”

Space: How to watch NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover launch live online. “NASA’s Mars-bound Perseverance rover is ready to blast off! You can watch the groundbreaking mission launch Thursday (July 30) live online as well as on TV, cable and satellite and get in on the action over social media. ”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Australia Department of Defence: Digitisation of historic Air Force documents. “The Australian public will soon be able to access a trove of significant Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) documents, many of which have been locked away for one hundred years. The public will gain online access to approximately 191 bound volumes of documents – including the signatures of first Chiefs of Air Staff, Air Marshal Sir Richard Williams and Air Marshal Stanley Goble. Air Board and Air Council Agendas and Submissions, along with Chief of Air Staff Advisory Committee (CASAC/CAFAC) Submissions, are set to be digitised through a $300,000 project delivered with the National Archives of Australia (NAA).”

PinkNews: Queer Black students are being failed by universities. This non-binary academic has a plan to change that . “Queer Black students are being failed by UK universities, says Melz Owusu, who has a plan to decolonise the system. Owusu, a 25-year-old decolonial theorist and activist about to embark on a PhD at Cambridge, is the architect of the Free Black University, a plan to ‘redistribute knowledge’ among Black students with the needs of those who are also queer and trans at its very heart.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Ongoing Meow attack has nuked >1,000 databases without telling anyone why. “More than 1,000 unsecured databases so far have been permanently deleted in an ongoing attack that leaves the word ‘meow’ as its only calling card, according to Internet searches over the past day.”

ZDNet: Fawkes protects your identity from facial recognition systems, pixel by pixel. “In a paper (.PDF) due to be presented at the USENIX Security 2020 symposium, researchers Shawn Shan, Emily Wenger, Jiayun Zhang, Huiying Li, Haitao Zheng, and Ben Zhao introduce ‘Fawkes,’ software designed to ‘help individuals inoculate their images against unauthorized facial recognition models.’ In what could be considered the introduction of garbage code and data to images we share online, Fawkes works at the pixel level to introduce imperceptible ‘cloaks’ to photos before they are uploaded to the Internet.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MobiHealthNews: Doctors tweet swimsuit photos in rebuke of critical journal article. “A new twitter movement dubbed #MedBikini has emerged after a research article published in the Journal of Vascular Surgery concluded that half of the recent and soon-to-be graduates in vascular surgery has social media accounts with ‘unprofessional content.'” Good afternoon, Internet…

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