NEW RESOURCES

Fold3 Blog: New Collection of Military Notices from the London Gazette!. “We are pleased to announce a new collection of UK records on Fold3®. The UK, London Gazette WWII Military Notices 1939-1945 contains 1.3 million indexed records for service members found in the Military Notice sections or supplements of the London Gazette newspaper.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Google Scares Up New Great Ghoul Duel Doodle for Halloween. “Like the original, released in 2018, Great Ghoul Duel 2 challenges players to form two teams of four ghosts to collect as many wandering spirit flames as possible. The team that collects the most spirit flames and returns them to your home base within two minutes wins.”

Business Insider: Use of N-word on Twitter jumped by almost 500% after Elon Musk’s takeover as trolls test limits on free speech, report says. “The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a research group that analyzes social media content to predict emerging threats, said that use of the N-word on Twitter increased by nearly 500% in the 12 hours immediately after Musk’s deal was finalized.”

New York Times: Elon Musk Is Said to Have Ordered Job Cuts Across Twitter. “The layoffs at Twitter would take place before a Nov. 1 date when employees were scheduled to receive stock grants as part of their compensation. Such grants typically represent a significant portion of employees’ pay. By laying off workers before that date, Mr. Musk may avoid paying the grants, though he is supposed to pay the employees cash in place of their stock under the terms of the merger agreement.”

USEFUL STUFF

Mashable: Elon Musk’s Twitter is already less safe. These tools will help you protect yourself. . “Given that Musk has already done away with top executives who guided moderation strategy and won’t make any decisions on the matter until convening his own council, it’s unlikely that he’ll be coming down on that kind of language any time soon. In the meantime, we’ve gathered a few quick tips for controlling your Twitter experience and steering clear of hateful language and ideas.”

How-To Geek: 9 Alexa Tricks to Try This Halloween Season. “If you’re one of the millions of people with an Echo speaker, Ring doorbell, or both, there are plenty of smarthome tricks for you to take for a spin this Halloween.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

ReviewGeek: How to Play Reddit’s ‘Spooky Bananas’ Halloween Game. “If you’re in the mood for a lighthearted Halloween scare, maybe it’s time to visit Reddit. A new game hiding in Reddit’s menu bar, called Spooky Bananas, lets you control the ghost of Snoo as he floats around eating bananas.”

Moneycontrol: A Google Maps blunder in Chennai – CEO Sundar Pichai’s hometown – has internet in splits. “A Chennai resident tweeted about how Google Maps has been mispronouncing the name of a major road in the Chennai suburb of Adyar in Tamil Nadu. The Lattice Bridge Road is popularly shortened to LB Road, which has become the root cause of confusion for Google Maps. According to the Twitter user, Google Maps pronounces LB Road as ‘Pound Road’ – a blunder that certainly occurs because ‘pound’, a unit of mass, is abbreviated as ‘lb’.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Cointelegraph: Google still promoting crypto phishing sites, warns Binance boss. “Despite Google’s strict policies on crypto marketing for its ads service, scammers have still been slipping through the cracks over the past few years. At times, scam websites have even been displayed higher than legitimate crypto and blockchain projects.”

SiliconANGLE: Thomson Reuters exposes 3TB+ of sensitive data on unsecured ElasticSearch database. “Discovered by researchers at Cybernews and announced today, the data was found on public-facing ElasticSearch databases. The content of the databases, which surprisingly also included plaintext passwords to third-party servers, primarily consisted of logging data collected through user-client interactions. The data collected includes documents with corporate and legal information about specific businesses and individuals.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Harvard Business School: How Paid Promos Take the Shine Off YouTube Stars (and Tips for Better Influencer Marketing). “Influencers aspire to turn ‘likes’ into dollars through brand sponsorships, but these deals can erode their reputations, says research by Shunyuan Zhang. Marketers should seek out authentic voices on YouTube, not necessarily those with the most followers.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Hackaday: A Collection Of Websites That Look Like Desktops. “Web design has come a long way since those halcyon days of Web 1.0. There are plenty of rules about how to make a clean and efficient website, but sometimes it’s more fun to throw them out and just be creative instead. In that vein, [Simone] has curated a wonderful collection of websites that emulate the computer desktop experience online.” Good morning, Internet…

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