NEW RESOURCES

Independent: New website checker launched to combat online fraud. “A new website-checking tool has been launched to help users confirm whether a site is legitimate before they visit. Internet safety group Get Safe Online has worked with fraud prevention service Cifas to create the tool, which enables users to enter the address of any website to check if it a real site or a scam.”

The Next Web / Shift: Goddamn, this map-making tool has turned me into a digital cartographer. “Making maps is usually something you either associate with old dudes in dusty paper-laden shops or serious people who wear colorful glasses and work at huge digital desks. But now, mapping startup Felt makes it easy to create personalized maps using drawing tools such as markers, pins, notes, and images.”

Jerusalem Post: New digital archives show Vienna Jews efforts to escape before WWII. “Israeli genealogy platform MyHeritage on Sunday unveiled its database of digitized records of Vienna’s Jews between the years 1938-1939 – when the robust Jewish community of Vienna, Austria attempted to flee Nazi rule and persecution.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Europe’s Sweeping New Internet Rules Adopted by EU Parliament. “The package consists of two pieces of legislation: the Digital Services Act, which protects the rights of internet users, and the Digital Markets Act, which is designed to create fair and open competition in the digital realm. Together the pair of laws propose a set of new rules for all digital services, including social media and online market places.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 4 Free Sites and Extensions for Online Text-to-Speech Tools. “There are a whole host of different benefits that you can achieve with text-to-speech, no matter who you are or what you’re doing. But downloading various programs onto your computer just to give text-to-speech a try can be a bit of a daunting task. Fortunately, there are plenty of online services that allow you to achieve the same functionality as many text-to-speech services without having to worry about any downloads.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: How Wall Street Escaped the Crypto Meltdown. “It’s not that financial giants didn’t want to be part of the fun. But Wall Street banks have been forced to sit it out — or, like [BNP Paribas], approach crypto with ingenuity — partly because of regulatory guardrails put in place after the 2008 financial crisis. At the same time, big money managers applied sophisticated strategies to limit their direct exposure to cryptocurrencies because they recognized the risks. So when the market crashed, they contained their losses.”

University of Rochester: Slaughter family papers help complete the story of a life in politics. “The letters exchanged between late United States Representative Louise Slaughter and her husband, Bob, are a small portion of the Robert and Louise Slaughter family papers that now reside at the University of Rochester. A gift from the Slaughters’ family, the papers will be held by the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation (RBSCP), complementing the Louise M. Slaughter congressional papers given to Rochester in 2019.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Idaho News: Idaho debt collectors can now contact through email, text, social media. “Debt collectors are now allowed to contact people through email, text and social media, the Department of Finance says. This new rule falls under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act which went into effect Nov. 30, 2021. Officials say it might be hard to tell the difference between a legitimate debt collector and a scam artist.”

TechCrunch: Twitter, challenging block orders, sues India’s government. “Twitter has sued the Indian government to challenge some of the block orders on tweets and accounts, further escalating the tension in the key overseas market. In its lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the Karnataka High Court in Bengaluru, Twitter alleges that New Delhi had abused its power by ordering it to arbitrarily and disproportionately remove several tweets from its platform.”

Reuters: Hacker Claims to Have Stolen 1 Billion Records of Chinese Citizens From Police. “A hacker has claimed to have procured a trove of personal information from the Shanghai police on one billion Chinese citizens, which tech experts say, if true, would be one of the biggest data breaches in history.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Ars Technica: The cryptopocalypse is nigh! NIST rolls out new encryption standards to prepare. “In the not-too-distant future—as little as a decade, perhaps, nobody knows exactly how long—the cryptography protecting your bank transactions, chat messages, and medical records from prying eyes is going to break spectacularly with the advent of quantum computing. On Tuesday, a US government agency named four replacement encryption schemes to head off this cryptopocalypse.”

Tech Xplore: New AI-powered app could boost smartphone batteries by 30 per cent. “A cutting-edge AI development that could boost smartphone battery life by 30 percent and shave countless kilowatts from energy bills will be unveiled to technology giants. The ground-breaking University of Essex-developed work has been rolled into an app called EOptomizer—which will be demonstrated to expert researchers and designers as well as major manufacturing companies like Nokia and Huawei.” Good morning, Internet…

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