NEW RESOURCES

South Dakota State News: State Historical Society puts more historic newspapers online . “More South Dakota towns are now represented in the digitized historical newspaper collections on Chronicling America, the South Dakota State Historical Society has announced. The Miller Press (1909-1924) and The Reporter and Farmer (1888-1913) of Webster were recently added to the collection.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Wall Street Journal: Facebook Slows New Products for ‘Reputational Reviews’. “Facebook Inc. has delayed the rollout of new products in recent days, people familiar with the matter said, amid media reports and congressional hearings related to a trove of internal documents showing harms from its platforms.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: 5 Sites to Stream Free Scary Movies for Halloween. “What’s your favorite scary movie? If you’re in the mood to spice up your Halloween with some delightfully spooky movies, you’re in luck. While movies on the big screen like ‘It’ and the upcoming ‘Jigsaw’ will be scaring cinema-goers, you’ll be happy to know you don’t have to stray from the couch to get in the Halloween spirit.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Tubefilter: Facebook’s New $10 Million Fund Will Pay Creators To Make VR Content. “Facebook plans to shell out some serious cash to get creators making content on its virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds. The social media giant this week announced it’s put together a $10 million Creator Fund that will disburse to content creators and developers over the next year.”

UCLA: UCLA Library funds 29 international cultural preservation projects. “The Modern Endangered Archives Program, a granting initiative launched in 2018 by the UCLA Library with support from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, has funded 29 new projects that will preserve at-risk materials as diverse as audio recordings of indigenous languages in Siberia, film periodicals from Pakistan and India, and photographs and maps from Peruvian Amazonia.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

PCMag AU: DuckDuckGo, Other Search Engines Ask EU to Loosen Google’s Stranglehold. “A group of search engine providers—DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Lilo, and Qwant—have asked the European Parliament to loosen Google’s stranglehold on the market via the Digital Markets Act.”

OCCRP: How a Russian Mobile App Developer Recruited Phones into a Secret Ad-Watching Robot Army. “In 2015, Russian-language tutorials began appearing on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and niche forums, blogs, and websites showing how Net2Share, a software tool developed by Adeco Systems, could be downloaded and used even by someone with zero programming skills to clone mobile apps. All a user had to do was download a regular mobile app, replicate it in Net2Share, and upload the duplicated copy to app stores. In exchange, they would get a cut of the revenue earned from ads displayed by the cloned apps. But Net2Share had a hidden feature that even its ethically dubious users didn’t know about.”

NBC News: Ransomware hackers find vulnerable target in U.S. grain supply. “All three known victims are Midwestern grain cooperatives that buy grain from farmers and then process, store and resell it for uses like livestock feed and fuel. The attacks, in which organized cybercriminals lock up organizations’ computers and demand ransom for a program to unlock them, has slowed the distributors’ operations, hampering their ability to quickly process grain as it comes in.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Mashable: Posting memes will get you banned from Instagram. “Since March, my accounts have been disabled five more times. One backup was actually deleted while I wrote this article for an innocent image of a man kissing a baby’s head. I’m not kidding. [I will bet you $10 Facebook’s AI thought the baby’s head was a breast. I’m not kidding.-TJC] Adiòs to another 14,000 followers, I guess. No matter how many appeals I send, nothing happens. I never fully understand why my account gets disabled, but I always try to play by Instagram’s distinctly vague community guidelines. Instagram did not reply to multiple requests for comment on this story, but when they do talk to the press, they usually say some version of, “Instagram has a responsibility to keep people safe.” While that may be true, how exactly does disabling an account for posting a Coachella meme have anything to do with keeping people safe?”

New York Times: We’re Smarter About Facebook Now . “So yes, we’ve all gotten stuff wrong about Facebook. The company, the public and people in power have at times oversimplified, sensationalized, misdiagnosed the problems or botched the solutions. We focused on how the heck Facebook allowed Macedonian teenagers to grab Americans’ attention with fabricated news, and did less to address why so many people believed it. Each public embarrassment for Facebook, though, is a building block that makes us a little savvier about the influence of these still relatively new internet technologies in our lives. The real power of the scandals is the opportunity to ask: Holy moly, what is Facebook doing to us? And what are we doing to one another?” Good afternoon, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!