NEW RESOURCES

University of Melbourne: Partnership helps lay the foundations for treaty making in Australia. “Launched in a partnership between the University of Melbourne and the National Native Title Council, the new Agreements, Treaties and Negotiated Settlements (ATNS) website is a resource that aims to empower Traditional Owners through information, capturing the range and variety of agreement making with First Nations peoples in Australia and other parts of the world. Its purpose is to encourage transparency and knowledge around agreement making with a focus on nation building, First Nations governance and treaty making.”

NET Nebraska: Digital Archive Catalogues Abuses Of Genoa Indian School. “From its opening in 1884 until its decommissioning in 1934, the Genoa Indian School in Genoa, Nebraska harbored Native American children with the goal of destroying native culture through assimilation. Now, there’s a digital project that seeks to document the experiences of those who attended for future generations.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BetaNews: Firefox 83 unveils improved page loading and responsiveness, HTTPS-only mode. “Mozilla has released Firefox 83.0, the latest version of its open-source, cross-platform web browser. A mere 28 days after the last major release, and version 83 makes its bow. Despite the short time between releases, version 83 manages to pack in more performance improvements, a new optional HTTPS-only mode, support for pinch zoom on touchscreens, and compatibility with new Apple Macs running the M1 chip.”

Route Fifty: Top Tech Companies Begin Pushing Priorities for Biden Administration. “In the days after national news outlets declared President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris the winners of the 2020 election, technology companies unleashed letters and social media posts loaded with congratulations—and policy proposals for America’s next administration to pursue.”

CNET: Twitter rolls out vanishing Fleets as it copies Snapchat and Instagram Stories. “Twitter, a social network known for 280-character messages, is giving users more ways to share their thoughts online including through ephemeral content and audio clips. The move is part of Twitter’s efforts to encourage more people to converse publicly online, a task that can be daunting to users who are worried others won’t like or share their tweets.”

Digital Music News: SoundCloud Introduces Verified Profiles — Here’s How to Get Your Account Verified. “SoundCloud has introduced verified profiles to help ‘well-known artists stand out’ and make it easier for fans to find authentic accounts. Here’s a quick, step-by-step guide on how to get verified on SoundCloud.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Techdirt: ICE Briefly Becomes A Stranded Minor: Loses Its Twitter Account For Being Too Young . “Thanks to the ridiculousness of the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which has basically served only to have parents teach their kids it’s okay to lie online in order to use any internet service, most websites say you can’t use the service if you’re under 13 years old. ICE changed its ‘birthdate’ to be less than 13, thereby making it… shall we say, something of a ‘stranded minor’ and Twitter automatically, well, ‘separated it’ from its account.”

BBC: Shazam reveals most searched-for songs of all time. “Australian pop star Tones And I has the most-Shazamed song of all time, with her 2019 breakout hit Dance Monkey. More than 200 million people a month use the Shazam app to identify songs they have heard but don’t know the names of. Dance Monkey, which was written about the singer’s experiences of busking in Byron Bay, has been Shazamed 36.6 million times, the company said.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ThreatPost: Exposed Database Reveals 100K+ Compromised Facebook Accounts. “Cybercriminals left an ElasticSearch database exposed, revealing a global attack that compromised Facebook accounts and used them to scam others. Researchers have uncovered a wide-ranging global scam targeting Facebook users, after finding an unsecured database used by fraudsters to store the usernames and passwords of at least 100,000 victims.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Caltech: Hundreds of Copies of Newton’s Principia Found in New Census. “In a story of lost and stolen books and scrupulous detective work across continents, a Caltech historian and his former student have unearthed previously uncounted copies of Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking science book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known more colloquially as the Principia. The new census more than doubles the number of known copies of the famous first edition, published in 1687. The last census of this kind, published in 1953, had identified 189 copies, while the new Caltech survey finds 386 copies. Up to 200 additional copies, according to the study authors, likely still exist undocumented in public and private collections.”

EurekAlert: Researcher gets NSF grant to study hidden messages in digital images. “For more than 25 years, Binghamton University Distinguished Professor Jessica Fridrich has studied digital-image steganography — the science of hiding messages inside ordinary-looking photos. Just as technology has evolved and become more sophisticated, so have the methods to share secrets — and a recent $768,964 grant from the National Science Foundation will help Fridrich stay ahead of the curve.”

Cancer Data Science Pulse: “Count Me In” Gives Patients a Voice in Scientific Discovery. “What makes the program unique is that it creates a new pipeline for clinical and genomic cancer data by partnering with patients to collect information. This type of ‘citizen science’ is a largely untapped but vital part of data science. It gives patients an opportunity to share their data directly with scientists. Those data include clinical and patient-reported information, as well as samples from tumors, saliva, and blood for genetic analysis.” Good morning, Internet…

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