NEW RESOURCES

FTC: Need help spotting, avoiding, and reporting scams? Start with Money Matters. “The FTC’s new website, ftc.gov/Money Matters (in Spanish: ftc.gov/AsuntosDeDinero) has your back as you spot, avoid, and report scams — and as you help others protect their bottom line. Let’s say you need to see if a job offer you got is legit: start at Money Matters. Maybe you want to help a friend know how to spot scams when trying to rent an apartment: start at Money Matters.”

NOAA Fisheries: The CALFISH database: A century of California’s non-confidential fisheries landings and participation data. “We reviewed the 58 landings reports published from 1929 to 2020 and extracted and carefully curated 13 datasets with long time series and wide public interest. These datasets include: (1) annual landings in pounds and value by port and species from 1941 to 2019; (2) annual number of commercial fishing vessels by length class from 1934 to 2020; (3) annual number of licensed commercial fishers by area of residence from 1916 to 2020; and (4) annual number of party boat (CPFV) vessels, anglers, and their total catch by species from 1936 to 2020.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Radio New Zealand: Swedish company apologises over security breaches at Archives New Zealand. “A Swedish company has apologised over months of security breaches at Archives New Zealand. Technology failings since February have exposed at least 9000 restricted records. They have shut down the public’s, historians’ and researchers’ ability to search the archive for days at a time.”

The Verge: More than two million users have flocked to Mastodon since Elon Musk took over Twitter. “Mastodon, a decentralized social media platform that many are turning to as a Twitter alternative, saw its userbase skyrocket from about 300,000 monthly active users to 2.5 million between October and November, Mastodon’s CEO, founder, and lead developer Eugen Rochko said in a new blog post. Elon Musk officially took over Twitter in late October, meaning Mastodon’s huge jump in users almost directly followed Musk’s new ownership.”

WordPress: Write and Publish Your Newsletter on WordPress.com. “We’re introducing WordPress.com Newsletter – with its own dedicated theme – to make it even easier to get up and running without going through the full website-building process. Newsletter gives you a place to write and build an audience, with the flexibility of WordPress under the hood to grow in many different directions.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Vox: Elon Musk’s future as Twitter CEO is suddenly in question. “Amid all the chaos, it’s unclear how long Musk will even stay on as CEO of the social media company. After he ran a poll on Twitter on December 18 asking people if he should step down, a clear majority voted in favor of him leaving. While Musk hasn’t yet made any follow-up statements, he has used poll results in the past to justify major company decisions.”

New York Post: How Dallas homemaker Mary Ferrell became main collector of JFK assassination records. “Ferrell became so influential in the community of JFK historians that two years before her death in 2004, a Boston-based financier started a non-profit to digitize her trove of documents. Now based in Ipswich, Mass., the Mary Ferrell Foundation Inc has sued the federal government to obtain classified documents related to Kennedy’s death.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: T-Mobile’s $350 Million Settlement: How to Claim Your Share Before It’s Too Late. “T-Mobile customers, both past and present, may be eligible for part of the carrier’s mammoth $350 million class action settlement to resolve claims that T-Mobile’s negligence was to blame for a 2021 cyberattack that exposed millions of people’s addresses, PINs and other personal information.”

Ars Technica: Critical Windows code-execution vulnerability went undetected until now . “Researchers recently discovered a Windows code-execution vulnerability that has the potential to rival EternalBlue, the name of a different Windows security flaw used to detonate WannaCry, the ransomware that shut down computer networks across the world in 2017.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: Mastodon Features That Twitter Should Steal (but Won’t). “I don’t want to give free advice to someone who was, until recently, the world’s richest man, but he should clean his laptop. After that he should check out Mastodon, because it offers all kinds of features that actually make it a great town square. He won’t copy them, of course, because he’s a coward. Here are a few of the features Elon Musk should steal from Mastodon but won’t.”

Western University: Should you believe your eyes? Not necessarily in virtual reality says new study. “A new study by Western neuroscientists suggests that, unlike true reality, perception in virtual reality is more strongly influenced by our expectations than the visual information before our eyes.”

Boing Boing: ChatGPT arrives in the academic world. “I recently came across two posts by academics that somewhat relieve the immediate worry about students successfully using ChatGPT to write their papers, and also raise challenges for educators about what we are actually doing in our classrooms.” Good morning, Internet…

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