NEW RESOURCES

Missouri Veterans Commission: Missouri Veterans Commission and Missouri Department of Economic Development Launch New Benefits and Resource Portal for Veterans and Military Members. “In collaboration with the Missouri Department of Economic Development (DED) Office of the Missouri Military Advocate, MVC created the portal to serve as an informational tool and service guide to help Veterans find potential benefits and local resources.”

Complete Music Update: Folk Expo unveils Folk Talk Academy. “English Folk Expo has launched the Folk Talk Academy, a new online learning hub for the music community covering a wide range of music industry topics….The new hub will host nearly 50 lectures between May and August from a host of music industry experts, including Bev Burton of Black Deer Festival talking about programming festivals; Dee Bahl, manager of Biffy Clyro, on working with record labels; Francine Gorman from the PRS Foundation’s Keychange project on gender equality in music; Beth Morton from UTA on working with agents; and CMU’s Chris Cooke with his ‘Music Copyright Explained’ session.”

The Mainichi: Kamikaze pilot museum in Japan launches online services for remote visitors . “The online museum consists of 10-minute footage introducing the facility’s layout, plus three 5-minute video clips providing three curators’ commentaries on display items. The clips show photographs of suicide pilots and their farewell notes, laid in order of their departure on the attack missions. The footage also demonstrates the characteristics of the Imperial Japanese Army fighter Hayate, and a replica of the suicide attack boat Shinyo, which are both on display at the museum. Google Maps’ StreetView function also enables a 360-degree view of the facility’s interior.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Google Guacamole will let you use voice assistant without saying ‘Hey, Google,’ report says. “Google has reportedly kicked off internal testing for a new feature, called Guacamole, that would allow you to use the voice assistant without saying ‘Hey, Google.’ It would let Google Assistant users perform quick voice tasks like answering calls or turning off alarms and timers without needing to say the trigger words, according to reports Friday from 9to5Google and Android Police.”

TechRadar: Google will soon make two-factor authentication mandatory. “One of the best ways to protect your online accounts is to have a second form of verification in place as this allows them to confirm that it is really you trying to log in. Google has been doing this for years by asking users to enroll in two-step verification (2SV) to confirm it’s really them by tapping on a prompt on their smartphone whenever they sign in. However, soon the company will begin automatically enrolling users in 2SV if their accounts are properly configured.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Tech Wire Asia: The revolution in Myanmar, Thailand will be digitized. “Taking inspiration from the protest movements first in Hong Kong, then in Taiwan and neighboring Thailand, youth activists in Myanmar have been inspired to join the digital #MilkTeaAlliance online campaign that is uniting pro-democracy protestors across Asia.”

Wired: Don’t Buy Into Facebook’s Ad-Tracking Pressure on iOS 14.5. “For the first time, users can tell apps not to track their activity across different sites and services. In an attempt to dissuade them from doing so, the Facebook and Instagram iOS apps are admonishing users that tracking helps keep those platforms ‘free of charge.’ This is technically true; Facebook is an advertising company that profits from showing ads that its users are more likely to click. But the iOS 14.5 notice also frames the issue in a way that implies Facebook can’t make money if it foregoes this kind of tracking, or worse, that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency update may force the social network to start charging its users a fee. So it’s worth being absolutely clear: Neither of those is the case.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Signal Blog: The Instagram ads Facebook won’t show you. “Facebook is more than willing to sell visibility into people’s lives, unless it’s to tell people about how their data is being used. Being transparent about how ads use people’s data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing from your audience. So, here are some examples of the targeted ads that you’ll never see on Instagram. Yours would have been so you.”

Gizmodo: If You Use Twitter’s New Tip Jar Feature, Make Sure You Don’t Accidentally Send People Your Address . “Rachel Tobac, a security professional, was playing around with the app with a friend of hers when she noticed what initially seemed like a glaring security risk. Tobac discovered that if you specifically used PayPal to send someone a tip, you will also be sending them something else fairly intimate: your home address. This doesn’t appear to be an issue for any of the other pay applications set up through Tip Jar.” It’s apparently a PayPal thing.

Reuters: Texas federal judge hears arguments for date of Google trial. “A lawyer for 14 states led by Texas that have accused Alphabet’s Google of breaking antitrust law asked a federal judge to schedule a trial for the spring of 2022, while the search and advertising giant has asked for a trial in the fall of 2023.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Digiday: Facebook is ‘not a researchers-friendly space’ say academics encountering roadblocks to analyzing its 2020 election ad data. “Facebook is providing academic researchers with a massive data haul revealing how political ads during last year’s U.S. elections were targeted to people on the platform. However, researchers have been held up by an arduous process to access the data and worry the information is insufficient to provide meaningful analysis of how Facebook’s ad platform was used —and potentially misused — leading up to the election.”

NOAA: NOAA Launches First National Rip Current Forecast Model. “For the first time, NOAA is launching a national rip current forecast model, aimed at saving lives of beach-goers around the country. This new model can predict the hourly probability of rip currents along U.S. beaches up to six days out.” Good morning, Internet…

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