NEW RESOURCES

Bismarck Tribune: New online local foods map launched in North Dakota. “‘The new map catalogs the state’s local producers, the type of food they sell and where the consumer can buy it,’ Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring said. ‘The map is a great tool to connect with and support local growers and producers.’ The map also shows on-farm sales, roadside stands, community-supported agriculture, retail food businesses, u-picks, wholesale options, online ordering opportunities and more.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

How-To Geek: New Facebook Messenger Feature Lets You Poll Your Friends. “Facebook just reached a significant milestone with Messenger, as the service has reached its 10th birthday. To celebrate the occasion, the company is adding many new features, including one that lets you poll your friends to find out who is ‘most likely to.'”

Slashgear: Google Docs gets Smart Replies years after launching in Gmail. “A few years after the feature launched in Gmail, Google has announced plans to expand its Smart Replies to Docs, enabling users to rapidly respond to comments by clicking a preset suggestion. The new capability will join other smart features relatively new to Google Docs, including spelling autocorrect and Smart Compose.”

The Register: ‘Apps for GNOME’ site aims to improve discovery of the project’s best applications. “The GNOME project has created Apps for GNOME, a website to ‘feature the best applications in the GNOME ecosystem,’ according to creator Sophie Herold. The scope of the GNOME project is extensive and includes low-level system components, a toolkit for developers of GUI applications (GTK), a desktop shell and window manager, and numerous applications built with these technologies.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Washington Post: One final look inside the archive that exposed Big Tobacco. “Here, in the Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository, lie the remains of 27 years of legal cases against Big Tobacco. There are trial transcripts, exhibits, images of the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel, a diseased lung in preserving liquid, stories of smokers’ deaths, and secrets that, once revealed, helped end the tobacco industry’s dominance in the cultural landscape of the United States. The warehouse, open to the public for 23 years, will close on Tuesday, ending an unprecedented court-ordered, industry-funded central collection of the legacy of a product that, according to the surgeon general, has killed more than 20 million Americans and continues to kill more than 400,000 a year.”

Drone DJ: Nigerian TikTok star, 22, lands Finland drone job through social media videos . “At first, Ignatius Asabor’s journey from Nigeria to Finland could sound like feel-good fiction. ‘You can’t imagine how happy I am,’ he tells you with his trademark toothy grin. But dig deeper, and you realize it’s a story of ambition, hard work, and tenacity. It also serves as a case in point that social media can be a very powerful tool in landing your dream job. Ignatius was born in 1999 in the Nigerian village of Utagba-Ogbe (Kwale). Last week, the 22-year-old engineer shifted base to Oulu, Finland. Filling the gap between the two coordinates are a curious mind, scrapyard robotics, and a ton of TikTok videos.”

It would be very easy to turn this newsletter into NFTBuzz, which is why I am mostly avoiding the flood of NFT-related articles that make it into my Google Alerts. But sometimes… BBC: Twelve-year-old boy makes £290,000 from whale NFTs. “A 12-year-old boy from London has made about £290,000 during the school holidays, after creating a series of pixelated artworks called Weird Whales and selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs).”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Boston .com: A cybersecurity attack is causing ‘significant’ system outages for the Boston Public Library. “The Boston Public Library is working to restore its digital services after being hit by what officials say was a cybersecurity attack. According to the library, the institution began experiencing a system-wide technical outage on Wednesday morning due to the attack, which has affected public computer and printing services and online resources.”

Techdirt: Copyright Scammers Getting More Sophisticated, Just As The US Is About To Make It Easier For Them. “These scams are different than standard copyright trolling, in which there may even be a kernel of truth in the initial copyright claim. Here, the scammers are just phishing for logins or other private data, and using the ridiculously overbroad power of copyright statutory damages to frighten people into coughing up the information. And, not surprisingly, the scam is evolving.”

Global Voices: Facebook user gets 18-month prison sentence for mocking Cambodia’s prime minister. “On December 7, 2020, [Ny] Nak posted that he intended to declare a ‘state of emergency’ in his chicken coop — appearing to mimic a speech Hun Sen made the same day. He was arrested by the police on December 12 and charged with ‘insult’ and ‘incitement.’ He was denied bail in January and convicted on August 19.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Shine: China home to over 1 billion Internet users. “China is home to over 1 billion netizens for the first time, forming the world’s largest and most vibrant digital society, a CNNIC report said on Friday. The country’s booming 5G development and increasing numbers of aged netizens have boosted the user base in China, already the world’s No. 1 country by Internet population for many years, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said.”

New York Times: Very Personal Computing: In Artist’s New Work, A.I. Meets Fatherhood. “Ian Cheng was feeling adrift. It was the start of 2013; he was nearly 30, with an art degree from Berkeley and another from Columbia, but he needed an idea, something to build a career on. Pondering the question one wintry afternoon in the balcony cafe at the Whole Foods Market on Houston Street, a place that promises people-watching and ‘you time,’ he found himself gazing absently at the shoppers below. He grew increasingly transfixed.” Good morning, Internet…

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