Hi. My mother went into ICU a week ago this morning. She got out yesterday. She’s doing better (knock wood knock wood KNOCK WOOD) and I might exhale sometime in the next week or two. Hug your people. Wear a mask. I love you.

NEW RESOURCES

The Soufan Center: Mapping Insecurity: Tracking Domestic Violent Extremism . “The Mapping Insecurity project is an interactive tracker that will allow users to follow the law enforcement response to the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, and will be updated to reflect the broader threat from domestic violent extremism. This initiative builds on longstanding work by The Soufan Center (TSC) to highlight the threat posed by domestic violent extremists, including white supremacists and violent anti-government groups. It includes a resource library of TSC publications and briefings, as well as an updated interactive map to track arrests across the United States, drawing on primary data provided by U.S. government sources.”

Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute: VoterFraud2020. “We are making publicly available VoterFraud2020, a multi-modal Twitter dataset with 7.6M tweets and 25.6M retweets from 2.6M users that includes key phrases and hashtags related to voter fraud claims between October 23rd and December 16th. The dataset also includes the full set of links and YouTube videos shared in these tweets, with data about their spread in different Twitter sub-communities.”

EVENTS

State of Delaware: Cultural Affairs division celebrates Black history. “During the month of February 2021, the Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs will be offering three virtual programs streamed live on the Web. Two of these programs will be presented in commemoration of National African American History Month, an annual observance celebrating the invaluable contributions that the Black community has made to the culture and history of the United States. All programs are free and open to the public.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ABC News: Facebook passes final decision to ban Trump to oversight board. “Facebook said Thursday it was referring the decision to indefinitely suspend Donald Trump’s account to its newly-formed oversight board to make the final call on what will happen to the former president’s accounts.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

TechCrunch: Google inks agreement in France on paying publishers for news reuse. “Google has reached an agreement with an association of French publishers over how it will be pay for reuse of snippets of their content. This is a result of application of a ‘neighbouring right’ for news which was transposed into national law following a pan-EU copyright reform agreed back in 2019. The tech giant had sought to evade paying French publishers for reuse of snippets of content in its news aggregation and search products by no longer displaying them in the country.”

CBC: Archive brings history of Nova Scotia’s aging LGBT community to life. “Researchers at Dalhousie University in Halifax are creating an archive of materials relating to the LGBT community in Nova Scotia dating back to the mid-1900s. Jacqueline Gahagan, lead researcher on the project, said living in Halifax where there’s a naval base and a strong military presence made the creation of the archive even more important because many LGBT people in that era were kicked out of the military after being outed.”

BuzzFeed News: “If They Won’t Hear Us, They Will Fear Us”: How The Capitol Assault Was Planned On Facebook. “Right-wing extremists used Facebook to make calls to overthrow the government and storm the US Capitol in the period leading up to a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, a tech watchdog group has found, contradicting attempts by the social media company to downplay the role of its platform in the affair.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BetaNews: Serious Windows 10 flaw could corrupt your hard drive if you open a folder. “A security researcher has revealed details of a strange bug that could result in an NTFS hard drive becoming corrupt in Windows 10, as well as the unsupported Windows XP. What makes the bug so serious and unusual is that it can be triggered without the user having to open a file.”

I apologize in advance for the language. Motherboard: ‘Your Cock Is Mine Now:’ Hacker Locks Internet-Connected Chastity Cage, Demands Ransom. “A hacker took control of people’s internet-connected chastity cages and demanded a ransom to be paid in Bitcoin to unlock it. ‘Your cock is mine now,’ the hacker told one of the victims, according to a screenshot of the conversation obtained by a security researcher that goes by the name Smelly and is the founder of vx-underground, a website that collects malware samples.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Nature: How to include Indigenous researchers and their knowledge. “Although racial-justice initiatives around the world have sparked a renewed focus on the need to recruit and retain more people from minority ethnic groups in STEM, Indigenous researchers — and Indigenous knowledge — remain at risk of being overlooked. Nature spoke to four Indigenous academic scientists about the challenges these early-career researchers face, and how scientists can respectfully and effectively bring together traditional knowledge and Western science.”

NiemanLab: A lot of Americans get news from social media, but they don’t expect it to be true. “During a year full of misinformation, from vaccines to voter fraud, Pew surveyed 9,220 U.S. adults between August 31 and September 7 about 11 different social media platforms. Of those who get news on social media at least ‘sometimes,’ 59 percent said they expect the information they find there to be inaccurate, a sentiment that remains unchanged from 2019.”

ZDNet: Why all of Trump’s tweets and other social media posts must be archived for future historians. “It is important to think of this as a historical issue and not a political one. Electronic records are still rather new to our history as a nation, couldn’t even have been conceived of by our founders, and aren’t represented fully in many of our older but still-active laws. But now that digital messages are so relevant to our lives, and have become the chief way we communicate, we need to make sure we don’t delete them, allow them to conveniently slip through loopholes, or let them be consumed by bit rot.” Good morning, Internet…

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