There’s so much Russia/Ukraine stuff it’s getting its own newsletter. It’ll work just like the Facebook one: when there’s 12 items it goes out. There will be one going out this evening. Like ResearchBuzz, the Ukraine/Russia newsletter will cover social media, search engines, cultural heritage, Internet culture issues, etc. Much love.

NEW RESOURCES

Maryland Today: Digitized Media Diversity . “The University of Maryland’s digital record of student newspapers has taken another step in representing the diverse history of the Terp community with the addition of eight new Jewish, Asian and Latino titles.”

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: ICIJ releases the Russia Archive, an inside look at how elites close to Putin hide wealth offshore . “Using tens of millions of leaked files, ICIJ reveals the hidden wealth and financial secrets of Russia’s most powerful people, including oligarchs, political leaders, and proxies close to Vladimir Putin.”

Vice: Twitter Launches Tor Onion Service Making Site Easier to Access in Russia. “The Russian government may have blocked Twitter earlier this month, but now users in the country might have another way to bypass that censorship and access the social network. On Tuesday, a cybersecurity expert announced that they had helped implement an official Tor onion service version of Twitter, meaning that Russian users should be able to use the Tor anonymity network to reach the site.”

Homeland Security Today: Program on Extremism Launches Nexus Project to Track Global Jihadist Movement. “On March 7 at 09:30AM EST, the Program on Extremism launched a new project— The Global-Local Jihadist Nexus: Islamic State and Al-Qaida Affiliates Monitor (Nexus). This project draws on a global network of subject matter experts and locally-based researchers to monitor Islamic State and al-Qaida affiliates across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, as well as their support and enabling networks in the West.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

IGN Southeast Asia: Atari Completes Acquisition of Video Game Online Database ‘MobyGames’. “Similar to the television and film-centric IMDb database, MobyGames provides in-depth and accurate video game credits and information for titles ranging from Triple-A to obscure independent projects. Atari’s role in establishing the modern video game industry directly correlates to MobyGames’ mission to catalogue the history of video games. So it is interesting to see what enhancements can be made to the site from here on out.”

Discogs Blog: 15 Million Releases Added to the Discogs Database. “The Discogs Community has reached another milestone. Contributors have added more than 15 million releases to the Database! This is an extraordinary achievement — but what does that much music actually look like? After taking a closer look, Discogs determined that getting through all of the genres, styles, and formats represented in the database would require several lifetimes of non-stop listening. Below, you’ll find a breakdown of mind-boggling information that could only come from the world’s largest online music database.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: The 5 Best Free Websites to Turn Your Photos to GIFs. “There are several useful things you can do with your photos. You can post them on popular social networks like Facebook and Instagram, or make a slideshow out of them, among others. Another cool thing you can do with your photos is to turn them into GIFs, and who doesn’t like GIFs. There are plenty of tools that you can use to turn your photos into GIFs.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Harvard News: Mira Nair comes full circle with donation of archive. “When Mira Nair ’79 was offered the chance to give her professional archive to Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, something clicked. ‘Harvard has changed my life,’ said the award-winning director on a recent Zoom call from New York. ‘There’s no question about it.’ For almost two years the director of ‘Monsoon Wedding,’ ‘The Namesake,’ and ‘Vanity Fair’ filled boxes with papers and other material related to her long career. She had fielded a request from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences regarding her papers, but Radcliffe’s interest tugged at her heart.”

The Oregonian: The quest to save Oregon’s Kalapuya: ‘You lose a language, you lose a culture’. “On a drizzly January morning, Esther Stutzman’s dining room table is covered with sticky notes, worksheets, notepads and several bulky Kalapuya dictionaries. Seated next to Stutzman are her two daughters and granddaughter, all Kalapuyan descendants and enrolled members of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. Their jovial banter belies the gravity of their mission: to revive the lost language of their ancestors. The scattered documents form a paper trail to their heritage.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: More Internet Options — in Theory . “The U.S. has an illusion of free-market competition in internet service. There’s a lot of government regulation, but it isn’t particularly effective. This double whammy of dysfunction holds back the U.S. economy, wastes taxpayer and consumer money and shuts many Americans out of modern life. The result: Americans pay more for worse internet service than our peers in most rich countries.”

Bleeping Computer: Nearly 30% of critical WordPress plugin bugs don’t get a patch. “Patchstack, a leader in WordPress security and threat intelligence, has released a whitepaper to present the state of WordPress security in 2021, and the report paints a dire picture. More specifically, 2021 has seen a growth of 150% in the reported vulnerabilities compared to the previous year, while 29% of the critical flaws in WordPress plugins never received a security update.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

UVA Health: A New Tool to Make Genomic Research Reflect the World’s Diversity. “The new tool will allow researchers to compare natural variations in our genes against genome sequences collected from a diverse group of people. Until now, scientists have compared these variations with a ‘reference genome’ primarily sequenced from a few volunteers (~70% from one person) living near laboratories involved in the Human Genome Project almost 20 years ago. This represented genomes from a small number of people in a small number of countries.” Good evening, Internet…

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