TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Hackaday: How to Block, Scrapers, Hackers and Spammers with Wordfence. “Wordfence is a popular WordPress security plugin. Among the features are scanner that monitors for hacked files and a firewall with regularly updated rules that proactively blocks malicious bots. There’s also a useful feature tucked away in the tool that makes user-configurable firewall rules available that can supercharge your ability to block hackers, scrapers and spammers.” These are powerful techniques that look like they could go powerfully wrong, so proceed with caution.

MakeUseOf: How to Bypass Blocked Sites and Internet Restrictions. “It doesn’t matter where in the world you live; there are times when you’re going to come across blocked sites and a restricted internet. If you come across an internet block, don’t panic. Keep reading to find out more how to bypass barred sites and internet restrictions.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Nepali Times: Saving Nepal’s archives from oblivion. “In June 2019, a team from the National Archives reached Taplejung in eastern Nepal to find decaying handwritten parchments, centuries-old manuscripts, and stone inscriptions all lying abandoned…. The initial plan for the Archives team was just to copy the text from two historic bronze bells in front of the Nageshvar Temple, but they decided to stay for three more days, digitising 77 historic documents and 95 letters. The images of those documents are now in the digital archives, even though the originals have been lost. And these were most likely just a tiny proportion of all the material still out there waiting to be discovered.”

The Guardian: The rise of TikTok: why Facebook is worried about the booming social app. “TikTok is on track to overtake the global advertising scale of Twitter and Snapchat combined this year, and to match mighty YouTube within two years, as trendsetting teens and young adults make it the hottest social app of the moment – and Facebook is worried.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: FTC Chair Pushes Privacy Rules; Calls for Limits on Data Collection. “The Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan said it is time the agency, which is tasked with enforcing consumer privacy protections, ‘reassess’ rules around what data companies can collect about consumers and how they secure that data.”

Route Fifty: North Carolina First State to Prohibit Agencies From Paying Ransoms. “State and local government agencies in North Carolina may not submit payments to—or even communicate with—someone who has encrypted their IT systems. Other states are considering similar legislation.”

Krebs on Security: RaidForums Gets Raided, Alleged Admin Arrested. “The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said today it seized the website and user database for RaidForums, an extremely popular English-language cybercrime forum that sold access to more than 10 billion consumer records stolen in some of the world’s largest data breaches since 2015. The DOJ also charged the alleged administrator of RaidForums — 21-year-old Diogo Santos Coelho, of Portugal — with six criminal counts, including conspiracy, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

New York Times: From Dalí to Picasso, a Museum With a Masterpiece Collection Partially Reopens. “The vaults above inundated basements contain the region’s largest public collection of Pablo Picasso’s works, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars worth of paintings and drawings by masters such as Joan Miró, Marc Chagall and Lucian Freud. Nearby, 700 sculptures by iconic artists, including Salvador Dalí and Fernando Botero, are crammed in a large room to protect them against encroaching humidity. This is Venezuela’s Caracas Museum of Modern Art, or MACC, once a regional reference for cultural education, that has fallen victim to economic collapse and authoritarianism.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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