NEW RESOURCES

The Art Newspaper: A year after fire, Museum of Chinese in America launches digital platform with Google to celebrate its historical treasures. “A year after a fire broke out in its New York archive, prompting a herculean effort to salvage its historical artefacts, the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) today launched a digital platform with Google Arts & Culture to make hundreds of digitised images of its treasures available online. The chief attraction is a new virtual exhibition titled Trial by Fire: The Race to Save 200 Years of Chinese American History, which traces the recovery effort after the fire nearly destroyed the museum’s collection of more than 85,000 items on 23 January 2020.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Blog: A Google designer takes us inside Search’s mobile redesign. “The beginning of a new year inspires people everywhere to make changes. It’s when many of us take stock of our lives, our careers or even just our surroundings and think about what improvements we can make. That’s also been the case for Google designer Aileen Cheng. Aileen recently led a major visual redesign of the mobile Search experience, which rolls out in the coming days.”

Neowin: Google Chrome adds experimental share button in Custom Tabs. “In 2015, Google introduced Custom Tabs to Chrome on Android to provide a smooth transition from app to web content without resorting to a WebView. Compared to WebViews, the feature loads faster and allows apps to customize their web experience. However, Custom Tabs do not have a default sharing experience on the app bar that users can tap to post content to their social media accounts, for example.”

NiemanLab: After the Capitol riots, platforms, archivists, conspiracists, and investigators collide. “Some of the entries in our 2021 predictions package proved gloomily prescient this week as a mob stormed the Capitol, incited by Trump’s baseless claims that he won the election. ‘A lot of America slipped into conspiracy thinking during this pandemic, and they got there from yoga Instagrams and NFL forums and private church choir Facebook groups that were systematically invaded by QAnon and anti-vax recruiters,’ NBC’s Ben Collins had written in his prediction. ‘It’s going to be a rude awakening in the next few months as we find out which of our friends got sucked into truly astonishing tales of New World Orders and Great Resets that helped them cope — and just so happen to be spectacularly wrong.'”

USEFUL STUFF

Mashable: Never trust a single source: The new rules for learning anything online. “If you’d like to learn more on any topic without getting drunk, or just brush up your research skills before annoying your family again, here’s my advice, drawn from years in the internet trenches in the ongoing war between fact and falsehood. You shouldn’t just take my word for it, of course, so I’ve included links to further reading after each guideline.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Guardian: Rolling Stone seeks ‘thought leaders’ willing to pay $2,000 to write for them. “Rolling Stone magazine is offering ‘thought leaders’ the chance to write for its website if they are willing to pay $2,000 to ‘shape the future of culture’. The storied magazine, which has published journalism by writers including Hunter S Thompson, Patti Smith and Tom Wolfe, approached would-be members of its new ‘Culture Council’ by email, telling them that they had the chance to join ‘an invitation-only community for innovators, influencers and tastemakers’.”

CR Fashion Book: The Lure Of Luxury: Why Tiktokers Are Buying $20 Chanel Cotton Pads. “With TikTok’s popularity and the fact that it’s a video platform, it seems natural that the new unboxing trend would emerge there. So what exactly is this new trend? TikTok users have been going viral for unboxing the cheapest items from luxury brands like Chanel, Hermes, Dior, and more. The TikTok shopping hack went viral after several users started buying Chanel Le Coton, the $20 extra soft cotton from the brand.”

CNET: Bernie Sanders’ inauguration mittens meme: The funniest versions. “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn in as president and vice president on Wednesday in a fanfare-filled inauguration ceremony. But neither set the national meme machine churning in quite the same way as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. An image of him sitting with his arms crossed, wearing a mask and big, cozy mittens, has been shared and tweaked endlessly — and even inspired a bobblehead figurine.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: CISA: Hackers bypassed MFA to access cloud service accounts. “While threat actors tried gaining access to some of their targets’ cloud assets via brute force attacks, they failed due to their inability to guess the correct credentials or because the attacked organization had MFA authentication enabled. However, in at least one incident, attackers were able to successfully sign into a user’s account even though the target had multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled.”

ZDNet: Hackers publish thousands of files after government agency refuses to pay ransom. “The hackers behind the ransomware attack on the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) have published thousands of stolen files after the organisation refused to pay the ransom.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

BBC: How to investigate a firm with 60 million documents. “Ms [Yousr] Khalil and a 70-strong team faced an ocean of files, transaction data and emails spanning worldwide activities, most of them entirely innocuous. So how did they plot a course through? Artificial intelligence (AI) and a bespoke computer unlike any PC you have ever worked on played a big part in this epic data trawl. A daunting collection of 500 million documents and transactions had to be whittled down.”

Phys .org: Experts call for more pragmatic approach to higher education teaching. “In a new paper, Professor Newton, Dr. Ana Da Silva and Sam Berry argue that the findings of higher education research are not being used to develop and benefit educational practice. They say belief in ineffective methods such as Learning Styles persist, teaching quality and teacher performance are measured using subjective and potentially biased feedback while university educators have limited access to professional development.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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