NEW RESOURCES

The Shift (Malta): Documenting the ‘sudden awakening from a deep sleep’ – Book on 2019 protests launched. “Local human rights NGO aditus foundation on Friday launched a photobook and online archive that brings together photographs taken by citizens, participants and onlookers of the political protests that took place in Malta between November 2019 and January 2020, in the hope of preserving the memory of the protest.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Digitaltrends: Snapchat now has restaurant reviews. Here’s how to view them. “On Friday, Snapchat announced a new map layer it has added to its existing Snap Map. The new layer was created in partnership with The Infatuation, a restaurant review site. Basically, the layer shows you recommended restaurants that are closest to you. With the new feature, you can view restaurant reviews from The Infatuation about the restaurants around you, save them to your favorites, or share them with your friends.”

AFP: Campaign launched to stop Musk buying Twitter . “Advocacy groups on Friday launched a campaign to stop Elon Musk from buying Twitter as the proposed purchase cleared review by US antitrust authorities. Twitter said that the deal for Musk to acquire the company was a step closer to being sealed with the passing of a deadline for it to be challenged under a US antitrust law.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 10 Lightweight Linux Distributions to Give Your Old PC New Life. “Many Linux distros are designed to be lightweight, with versions of Linux under 500MB and even under 100MB available. If you’re looking for a resource-light operating system for your PC, try these compact, lightweight Linux distros.” I continue to recommend Zorin. I used Puppy Linux about fifteen years ago when I had plenty to do and junk hardware to do it with. It was great.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Prolific North: Footballers launch crowdfunding campaign for new app tackling social media abuse. “Four professional footballers, including Sheffield Wednesday’s Josh Windass, have launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise £250,000 for a new social platform tackling online abuse.”

NBC News: Photographer Naima Green is creating an archive of queer representation. “Green’s ongoing archival project, ‘Jewels From the Hinterland,’ features Black and brown people in urban green spaces. At work on the project since 2013, she wrote in a piece for The New York Times that she ‘wanted these photographs to assert and insert our presence in these tranquil landscapes, to interrupt the predominant narratives about people of color surrounded by urban decay. Beauty here is an entry point — it makes us stop and look, but it isn’t the whole story.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Verge: Congress is finally taking medical cybersecurity seriously. “Years of alarm bells from cybersecurity experts about the vulnerabilities of medical devices are finally being heard by Congress. Senators proposed a new bill this week that would require the Food and Drug Administration to issue cybersecurity guidelines more regularly, and share information about vulnerable devices on its website.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechCrunch: Social media giants are failing women, finds Ofcom. “Ofcom, the U.K.’s soon-to-be social media harms watchdog under incoming online safety legislation, has warned tech platforms that they are failing to take women’s safety seriously. Publishing new research (PDF) into the nation’s online habits today, Ofcom said it has found that female internet users in the U.K. are less confident about their online safety than men, as well as being more affected by discriminatory, hateful and trolling content.”

ZDNet: Google’s massive language translation work identifies where it goofs up. “What do you do after you have collected writing samples for a thousand languages for the purpose of translation, and humans still rate the resulting translations a fail? Examine the failures, obviously. And that is the interesting work that Google machine learning scientists related this month in a massive research paper on multi-lingual translation, ‘Building Machine Translation Systems for the Next Thousand Languages.'”

Associated Press: California child abuse database lacks half of county reports. “More than half of substantiated California child abuse reports in recent years were not in the state’s database, which could result in child abusers being allowed to care for children, state auditors said Tuesday.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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