afternoonbuzz

San Francisco Drought Tracking, Roku, YouTube, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 18, 2021

NEW RESOURCES

From the San Francisco Chronicle: Bay Area Drought Map & Tracker. “Track the water shortage status, reservoir levels and restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Roku now streams over 200 free live TV channels, and here are the newest 17. “Roku is adding more than a dozen new channels to the Live TV Channel Guide on the Roku Channel, its free streaming service. Roku’s live and linear live TV hub includes more than 200 free channels to surf. The newest slate of channels arriving on its live guide includes CBC, AccuWeather Now, FilmRise True Crime, Haunt TV, and IGN.”

CNET: YouTube amps up its search with more visual, foreign-language results. “YouTube is improving its search capabilities, the video streaming service said Tuesday, including making search results more visual and surfacing videos in more languages.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BBC: Who is TikTok’s masked vigilante?. “The game is online trolling, and the prize is that the Great Londini tracks you down. If you’re a troll you may think you can safely hide behind an anonymous account name. But Londini works on the premise that he can discover your real identity within seven to eight clicks.”

Search Engine Journal, from the “We know dis” department: Google: A ‘Site:’ Search Doesn’t Show All Pages. “Google’s John Mueller says the results of a site: query are not a comprehensive collection of all a website’s pages. This topic is addressed in the latest installment of the Ask Googlebot video series on YouTube.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

How-To Geek: Hey Google, Scheduled Actions Are Giving People Nightmares. “When smart home gadgets don’t work correctly, old-school switches start to look more appealing. This is true with a nasty bug in Google Assistant. It can be used to schedule things, but there’s no way to cancel those schedules.”

The Conversation: How hackers can use message mirroring apps to see all your SMS texts — and bypass 2FA security. “Major vendors such as Microsoft have urged users to abandon 2FA solutions that leverage SMS and voice calls. This is because SMS is renowned for having infamously poor security, leaving it open to a host of different attacks.”

BNN Bloomberg: Google Fails to Reach Deal With Putin Ally Over YouTube Lawsuit. “Alphabet Inc.’s Google failed to reach a settlement with a TV channel it has blocked that is owned by a sanctioned ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Tsargrad channel said in a statement Monday. Tsargrad accused Google of delaying substantive negotiations, according to the statement. Google didn’t immediately comment.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Monash University: New ARC-funded research project set to put death in its place. “The project, Putting Death In Its Place, in collaboration with Libraries Tasmania, will link individuals and their families to the locations where they were born, lived and died, using over 890,000 Tasmania population records from 1838 to 1930. Using innovative matching techniques and Tasmania’s wealth of digital archives, the project is the first of its kind in Australia to link a data set of this size to a reconstructed historic landscape. It aims to assess the influence that the quality and location of housing and public infrastructure had on life expectancy and other health and social outcomes.”

Digital Library of Georgia: How I Identified The Earliest Surviving Film Footage of African American Baseball Players. “In 2011, we received a donation of films from Pebble Hill Plantation in Thomasville, Georgia, spanning from 1916 into the 1970s. Pebble Hill was the winter hunting retreat for the Hanna family of Cleveland, Ohio, prominent industrialists and politicians. One of the most important segments of all the films in the collection was 26 seconds of 28mm film showing Pebble Hill’s black baseball team playing Chinquapin Plantation’s black baseball team sometime in the 1910s or 1920s.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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