NEW RESOURCES

Salt Lake Tribune: What can and can’t be learned from our new crowdfunded Utah teen treatment database. “The teen treatment industry is bigger in Utah than anywhere else in the country. The Salt Lake Tribune and KUER released a database Thursday containing the past five years’ worth of inspection reports and confirmed investigations for every residential teen treatment program currently operating in the state. The Salt Lake Tribune’s Jessica Miller was the lead reporter on the database project. She sat down with KUER’s Caroline Ballard to talk about how it could be a resource for anyone considering a Utah program for a teenager.”

Mashable: How Facebook, Twitter, YouTube reacted to big events in 2020, including Trump’s many lies. “The Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit which advocates for a secure, open internet that supports democracy, has released an interactive timeline that shows the misinformation policy changes online platforms made before, during, and after the 2020 election, and how those actions intersect with major political and cultural events that spurred misinformation. Mozilla is most widely known for its Firefox browser, but the nonprofit also tracks online misinformation in an effort to improve tech policies.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Neowin: Google TV is adding support for kids’ profiles, rolling out this month in the U.S.. “Google today announced that it is adding support for kids’ profiles on Google TV. The feature comes as a welcome addition to the offering, as Google TV currently does not offer support for multiple profiles to allow catering content on the TV based on individual preferences. With kids’ profiles, parents can now control the content served to children, their screen time, and more.”

USEFUL STUFF

PC World: How to make your laptop go faster for free. “If your old laptop needs a little more pep in its step, there’s an easy fix most people overlook: the performance settings. These settings reside in most laptops, usually via a preinstalled utility. The vast majority of laptop users never poke around in there—and you shouldn’t need to, if all you do on your laptop is email, web browsing, and mainstream productivity applications. But if you want to try your hand at a bit of light gaming, or you’re tinkering with Twitch streaming or video production, you could unlock a free performance boost with a simple mouse click or button-push.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BetaNews: Microsoft’s search engine Bing declares Prince Philip dead… but he isn’t . “The UK’s Prince Philip has been in hospital recently — which isn’t a huge surprise as he is 99 years old. He underwent a heart procedure on a pre-existing condition and is currently recuperating at King Edward VII’s Hospital in London. Doctors there say he’s doing well. Bing, on the other hand, has declared him dead.”

Engadget: iCloud allegedly locked out a user over her last name. “iCloud has had the occasional service issue, but its latest problem appears to be highly… specific. Actor and author Rachel True claims iCloud has effectively locked her out of her account due to the way her last name was written. Reportedly, her Mac thought lower-case ‘true’ was a Boolean (true or false) flag, leading the iCloud software on the computer to seize up. The problem has persisted for over six months, she said.”

Agence France-Presse: Instagram-ready: Vietnamese influencer teaches art of posing. “How to smile, where to place a hand, which direction to face: young Vietnamese social media users are snapping up a popular influencer’s course on posing for the perfect photo. In communist Vietnam, where 70 percent of the population is under 35, the classes are particularly popular with young women. Instructor Pham Kieu Ly – who has hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok –set up the $130 course in Hanoi after women began asking her how to look their best in photos, largely for social media.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: A new type of supply-chain attack with serious consequences is flourishing. “A new type of supply chain attack unveiled last month is targeting more and more companies, with new rounds this week taking aim at Microsoft, Amazon, Slack, Lyft, Zillow, and an unknown number of others. In weeks past, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, and 32 other companies were targeted by a similar attack that allowed a security researcher to execute unauthorized code inside their networks.”

New York Times: What Went Right in the 2020 Election. “A lot went wrong after the 2020 election in the United States. But here’s one thing that went right during it: A risk everyone worried about — foreign election interference — mostly failed. That showed what is possible when government officials and technology companies are laser focused on a problem, effectively coordinate and learn from their past mistakes. But the false narrative that the election was stolen, culminating in a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, also pointed to the limits of those efforts. The Russians or the Chinese didn’t delegitimize our election. We did it to ourselves.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

EurekAlert: Retreat to win — How to sustain an online campaign and survive trolling and abuse. “Trolling and extreme levels of abuse can kill an online campaign but momentum can be maintained, and the energy and morale of exhausted activists effectively restored, by tactical retreat and taking time out, new research into the landmark ‘No More Page 3’ campaign in the United Kingdom shows.” Good evening, Internet…

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