NEW RESOURCES

Spotted via my IFTTT/Reddit alerts: a new Web-based streaming app for live Grateful Dead concerts. There’s not a lot of documentation for site but it’s basic: looks like the concerts are arranged by year starting in 1965. (The site is powered by concerts in the Internet Archive.) Click on a one of the squares representing a concert and you’ll get a list of tracks with their duration. You can jump directly to specific tracks. Click play on a track and you’ll get a player at the bottom of the screen. No-frills but certainly functional.

PRNewswire: Accessible Archives® Releases New Collection Invention and Technology in America: American Inventor, 1878-1887 (PRESS RELEASE). “Accessible Archives, Inc., a digital publisher of full-text primary source historical collections, announces the release of a new primary source collection – Invention and Technology in America: American Inventor, Part I: 1878-1882 and Part II: 1883-1887. Invention And Technology In America: American Inventor provides an exclusive opportunity to investigate the history of American invention and the interaction of technology with social, economic, and cultural change throughout the course of the late 19th and early 20th century.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BBC: Booker Prize 2021 shortlist: ‘Absorbing global stories of life and death’. “Novels set in Sri Lanka and South Africa, Cardiff Bay and the outer cosmos are among those to have been nominated for this year’s Booker Prize. The chair of the judges said choosing the six ‘immersive’ books had felt ‘transporting in a year when so many of us have been confined to home’.”

BetaNews: Microsoft releases KB5005565 and KB5005566 Windows 10 updates to fix PowerShell bug and more . “With another Patch Tuesday rolling around, Microsoft has released a pair of new updates for Windows 10 — KB5005565 and KB5005566. Serving the same purpose, KB5005566 is available for Windows 10 version 1909, and KB5005565 is available for Windows 10 versions 2004, 20H2 and 21H1. These cumulative updates include security fixes, so they are important to install, but they also address non-security bugs including one affecting PowerShell.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Wired: In Kenya, Influencers Are Hired to Spread Disinformation. “ON MAY 18 of this year, the insidious hashtag #AnarchistJudges appeared on Kenyan Twitter timelines. Apparently driven by a number of faceless bots, and retweeted by a series of sock puppet accounts, the deluge of tweets cast suspicion on both the competence and integrity of senior High Court of Kenya judges that had just shot down the Constitutional Amendments Bill of 2021. Many falsely claimed the judges were involved in narcotics dealings, bribery, and political partisanship. It quickly became one of the country’s top trending topics. Such malicious, coordinated disinformation attacks are rapidly growing in Kenya, my Mozilla Foundation colleague Brian Obilo and I have found in a new investigation.”

HuffPost: Trump Insiders Are Quietly Paying Teen Memers For Posts. “In the fever swamps of Instagram, a network of right-wing meme accounts run by teenage boys and young men has erupted into an advertising powerhouse reaching millions. These memers — who regularly post far-right conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine propaganda and other incendiary clickbait — first caught the attention of obscure brands selling cheap MAGA merch, who started paying them to display ads to their rapidly growing conservative audiences. The money wasn’t great, as a few memers told HuffPost last summer, but it still felt like a big deal to watch their Instagram pages blossom into mini businesses. Little did they know, members of Donald Trump’s inner circle would soon come knocking.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

VentureBeat: IBM finds cloud credentials sell for mere dollars in ‘booming’ dark web market. “Cyberattacks have been increasing in both frequency and severity, but it’s not just because malicious actors are upping their game (though they very much are). Many cybersecurity veterans feel that the effective solutions the industry has put out over the years aren’t fully being taken advantage of, and now a new report from IBM sheds light on the ways enterprises are leaving the door wide open. It also details a ‘booming’ dark web marketplace for compromised cloud accounts, where some credentials are selling for just a few dollars.”

Hong Kong Free Press: Google handed user data to Hong Kong authorities despite pledge after security law was enacted. “Google has provided user data to the Hong Kong government in response to three requests made between July and December last year, making it the first US tech giant to disclose its compliance with requests from the local authorities for user data after the national security law was enacted last June.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Star (Malaysia): Singapore using ‘virtual twins’ of land and sea to monitor activities and plan projects. “GeoSpace-Sea stores and presents data from 11 government agencies, including national water agency PUB and the Housing Board. For example, if the National Parks Board (NParks) wants to study marine biodiversity, it can use the virtual twin to access marine life data, or the distribution of corals and sea grass. GeoSpace-Sea allows users to view and analyse the seabed with three-dimensional images as well.”

ScienceNordic: What our online lives can tell us about how much we value nature. “For the past eight years, several research groups, including ours, have spent a lot of time understanding whether we can eavesdrop on social media posts to figure out where and when people interact with nature. It turns out that we can. We tend to take photos and describe the part of our nature experiences that mattered. So suddenly our online lives is opening the possibility to figure out, at a global scale, where people go to experience nature and what it is they are actually enjoying when doing so.” Good evening, Internet…

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