NEW RESOURCES

Rehabilitation and Community Providers Association: New “Smart Homes Made Simple” Website is Live!. “We hope this website will serve as a hub of information where members of the disability and aging communities, as well as service providers, housing professionals, and technology consultants, can learn how to integrate smart home technology into the homes of people with disabilities and older adults for greater independence, autonomy, safety, and accessibility.”

University of Maryland Baltimore: Institute Launches National Online Resource to Help LGBTQ Youth, Families. “The Institute for Innovation & Implementation, together with the Family Acceptance Project has launched a new national online resource that provides access to accurate information and affirmative services to increase family and community support for LGBTQ children and youth, to help decrease mental health risks and to promote well-being.”

Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation: IPLC Launches the Uyghur Human Rights Web Archive. “The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of its collaborative Uyghur Human Rights web archive, preserving web resources documenting the displacement and repression of Uyghurs, Uzbeks, Tatars, and Kyrgyz peoples in East Turkestan/Xinjiang.”

Chemical & Engineering News: A new database for machine-learning research. “A group of researchers are launching an open-source database of chemical synthesis procedures that they think will benefit artificial intelligence algorithms for reaction prediction, synthesis planning, and other tasks (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2021, DOI: 10.1021/jacs.1c09820).”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bing Blog: 11 New 3D Cities are now available. “Microsoft takes petabytes of high-definition aerial imagery from specialized cameras and feeds them into a specialized Azure pipeline to automatically create detailed, fully textured, 3D models. This rich 3D data is used to power multiple applications which let you experience our planet from your device. Touch the map, and instead of looking straight down from above, tilt it, tap it or spin it to immerse yourself and experience the world in new ways.”

CNET: Mozilla will end support for Firefox Lockwise app. “Mozilla will end support for its Firefox Lockwise password management app this year, the company said in a post on its site. The app, currently available on iOS and Android, will no longer be available to install or reinstall starting Dec. 13. That means iOS version 1.8.1 and Android version 4.0.3 will be the app’s last releases.” It looks like Firefox still supports password management – they’re just getting rid of the app.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BBC: India farm laws: Fake social media profiles targeting Sikhs exposed. “A network of fake social media profiles of people claiming to be Sikhs, and promoting divisive narratives, has been exposed. A new report shared exclusively with the BBC ahead of its publication on Wednesday identified 80 accounts in the network, which have now been suspended because they were fake.”

Q News (Australia): LGBTIQ publishers unite to seek deals with Google and Facebook. “Over a dozen of Australia’s small news publishers, including QNews, Star Observer and OUTinPerth, have united to collectively negotiate with Google and Facebook on secure commercial agreements for supply of public interest journalism content to their platforms.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BleepingComputer: New Windows zero-day with public exploit lets you become an admin. “A security researcher has publicly disclosed an exploit for a new Windows zero-day local privilege elevation vulnerability that gives admin privileges in Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server. BleepingComputer has tested the exploit and used it to open to command prompt with SYSTEM privileges from an account with only low-level ‘Standard’ privileges.”

Route Fifty: Localities and States Are Turning to Data Analytics to Catch Fraudsters—and It’s Working. “When a health care provider submitted a request for $8,002,021 to New York’s Medicaid program in October, it raised eyebrows among state auditors, who, just a few years ago had started scouring government databases for suspicious public assistance transactions. Flagged as an abnormally large invoice, the state denied the payment and investigated the claim. It turned out that the vendor had inadvertently made a typo that combined the amount of the payment—$800—with the year—2021.”

Trade Secrets Trends: City Claims Google’s Water Use Is A Trade Secret and Exempt from Oregon’s Public Records Laws . “After a reporter from The Oregonian inquired into Google’s water use, the City of Dalles (‘Dalles’) filed a Complaint against both the reporter and the newspaper (the ‘Defendants’) seeking declaratory relief, requesting that the court declare Google’s water use a trade secret under Oregon’s Public Records Law, ORS 192.311 et seq, and the Oregon Uniform Trade Secrets Act, ORS 646.461 et seq. As described below, the issue is whether Google’s water use is a trade secret, and if so, if the public interest exception, which may permit public disclosure of trade secrets, applies.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Nature: Europe’s Roma people are vulnerable to poor practice in genetics. “For many samples, either there is no record of consent being obtained from individuals whose DNA was collected, or the procedures used to obtain consent were inadequate. This applies to numerous studies involving Indigenous communities, including Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Native American communities in the United States and the San people in southern Africa. Moreover, people often have little or no say in how their DNA will be used, and rarely benefit from the studies. Now, our analysis of several hundred publications and five databases points to multiple issues with the handling and interpretation of DNA data from Roma people. The Roma are the largest minority group in Europe.”

New York Times: Help! I’m Stuck in a Knowledge Bubble and I Need to Get Out.. “I write this newsletter for The New York Times, which means that I write this for you, the subscribers. Those of you who are reading this probably know a lot about American politics, and are steeped in a particular East Coast-centric culture. I’m going to assume that some of you might know less about, say, the inner workings of a call-in radio show that focuses on college football teams in the Southeast. Knowledge bubbles become problematic and even dangerous when we pretend as if they don’t exist or don’t matter. Because what we don’t know — about the lives of our neighbors and fellow citizens and why they think the way they do — is almost as important as what we do know.” One thing ResearchBuzz is good for, over and over, all day every day, is teaching me that I don’t know anything. Good morning, Internet…

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