NEW RESOURCES

Chemical & Engineering News: New database on university spinouts highlights dissatisfaction. “A new open source database on university technology spinouts, also referred to as spin-offs, detailing terms negotiated between academic institutions and research entrepreneurs indicates a high level of dissatisfaction among company founders, especially those spinning out of universities in the UK.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Sciblogs: Bidding farewell to Sciblogs. “For 13 years, Sciblogs has been a staple in New Zealand’s science-writing landscape. Our bloggers have written about a vast variety of topics from climate change to covid, and from nanotechnology to household gadgets. But sadly, it’s time to close shop. Sciblogs will be shutting down on 30 June.”

Search Engine Land: The LinkedIn Funny emoji is here. “LinkedIn has finally added one of the most requested features. The Funny emoji started rolling out to LinkedIn users at some point in the last couple of hours.”

TechCrunch: Reddit is buying machine learning platform Spell. “Spell was founded by former Facebook engineer Serkan Piantino in 2016 to provide a cloud computing solution to allow anyone to run resource-intensive ML experiments without the high end hardware that would normally be necessary. The company defines its mission as the pursuit of ‘the best possible platform for anyone looking to develop powerful, reliable, and safe software using Machine Learning and AI,’ according to their website.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: SEO For Non-Profits: 7 Tips To Help Your Organization Get Found. “I have had the opportunity to work with many spanning focuses and missions aimed at healthcare, education, performing arts, adoption, orphanages, and more. Within each non-profit, I have found tips that help regardless of most focuses and circumstances. From solid funding to grassroots organizations, there’s a lot to be gained by focusing on seven SEO tips to help your organization get found.” As I have said before, I hate SEO. But I realize it’s important, and I will share articles that have a high useful-to-garbage ratio. SEJ is always quality.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

ProPublica: Google Says It Bans Gun Ads. It Actually Makes Money From Them.. “For roughly two decades, Google has boasted that it doesn’t accept gun ads, a reflection of its values and culture. But a ProPublica analysis shows that before and after mass shootings in May at a New York grocery store and a Texas elementary school, millions of ads from the some of the nation’s largest firearms makers flowed through Google’s ad systems and onto websites and apps — in some cases without the site or app owners’ knowledge and in violation of their policies.”

Deutsche Welle: Google’s data plans in Saudi Arabia ‘will risk lives’: activists. “Internet giant Google is creating a ‘cloud region’ in Saudi Arabia. It says it will protect users there. But digital rights activists argue the firm will be putting the lives of government critics at risk.”

CNBC: TikTok exec: We’re not a social network like Facebook, we’re an entertainment platform. “TikTok is fully aware that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is retooling the Facebook and Instagram apps to be more like its own popular short video service. But TikTok has no interest in mimicking Facebook.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Publishers Weekly: Internet Archive, Publishers to Seek Summary Judgment in Book Scanning Lawsuit. “A federal court in New York has ordered motions for summary judgment by early summer in a lawsuit filed by four major publishers against the Internet Archive over its scanning and lending of print library books, putting the fate of the closely watched copyright case on track to be in the court’s hands by early fall.”

Ars Technica: Tsunami of junk traffic that broke DDoS records delivered by tiniest of botnets. “A massive flood of malicious traffic that recently set a new distributed denial-of-service record came from an unlikely source. A botnet of just 5,000 devices was responsible, as extortionists and vandals continue to develop ever more powerful attacks to knock sites offline, security researchers said.”

Techdirt: New Report Offers Solutions For Our Never Ending Robocall Hell. ” Every single month U.S. residents receive an estimated 4 billion robocalls. About a billion of those are illegal, outright scammers. That’s more than 33 million illegal scam robocalls every day. As a result, 70% of Americans no longer answer the phone if it’s an unrecognized number. We’ve just ceded a major tech platform to scumbags. The National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) has spent years providing insights and solutions on this problem. They’ve issued a new report that’s worth a read if you’re at all curious why we’ve allowed a major communications platform to be hijacked by garbage merchants and snake oil salesmen.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Analytics India: Amazon Prime video: The little search engine that couldn’t. “Interestingly, Amazon accounts for 54 percent of all product searches on the internet and has one of the best recommendation systems and search engines in the business. However, Amazon Prime Video–available in nearly 200 countries– has a bad search engine. To make matters worse, Prime Video’s clunky UI is a real pain in the neck.”

Iowa State University: Engineers develop cybersecurity tools to protect solar, wind power on the grid. “Solar panels and wind turbines, now projected to produce 44% of America’s electricity by 2050, present cybersecurity challenges. They have sensors, controllers, actuators or inverters that are directly or indirectly connected to the internet. They’re distributed far and wide across the country and the countryside. Many have insecure connectivity to legacy electric grid systems. They have complex physics. They’re subject to advanced persistent threats. And there will be more and more of them going online.” Good morning, Internet…

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