NEW RESOURCES

Vietnam+: Rich biodiversity database debuts. “A web portal collecting data of natural resources and wildlife conservation in Da Nang City has been introduced. It will provide information, documents, photographs and statistics from nature reserves in Son Tra and Ba Na-Nui Chua, as well as a special-use forest of South Hai Van in the central city.” I took a quick look and it seems that the site officially launches tomorrow. I didn’t see an English option but Google Translate did okay.

Azernews: National Archive Department highlights Niyazi’s musical legacy. “National Archive Department has launched a virtual exhibition devoted to maestro Niyazi, Azernews reports. The exhibition includes documents from the private funds of the State Archive of Literature and Art. Maestro Niyazi’s musical talent was truly impressive. The maestro conducted the Azerbaijan State Symphony orchestra for 46 years.” At this writing the link in the story will give you a 404 error; remove the period at the end of the URL and you’re good. The site is in Azerbaijani and, unusually, Google Translate has a difficult time with it. You can use Google Lens to translate the photography captions without any problem.

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: How To Use Slack Effectively: 10 Tips To Increase Productivity. “For many, Slack has overtaken email as the dominant means of communication. And just like some wrestle with unmanageable email inboxes, many others are trying to tame their Slack. So here are 12 handy tips for making the best of Slack and leveraging it to enhance what you do across the rest of your suite of programs.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Rolling Stone: Jan. 6 Committee Experiment Found TikTok Went From Zero To Nazi in 75 Minutes. “WHEN THE JAN. 6 committee wanted to test how easy it was for TikTok users to wander down a far-right rabbit hole, they tried an experiment. They created Alice, a fictional 41-year-old from Acton, Massachusetts, gave her a TikTok account, and tracked what the social media app showed her. To their surprise, it only took 75 minutes of scrolling — with no interaction or cues about her interests — for the platform to serve Alice videos featuring Nazi content, following a detour through clips on the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp defamation suit, Donald Trump, and other right-wing culture war flashpoints.”

Washington Post: Twitter said it fixed ‘verification.’ So I impersonated a senator (again).. “After Blue 2.0 (my term for it) launched on Dec. 12, I made another faux Markey and applied for verification. Some of Twitter’s new requirements slowed down the process — and might dissuade some impatient impersonators — but the company never asked to see a form of identification. Last week, up popped a blue check mark on my @SenatorEdMarkey account. Oops! I did it again. Twitter didn’t reply to a request for comment. After I published this story, Twitter suspended the @SenatorEdMarkey account.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: 200 million Twitter users’ email addresses allegedly leaked online. “A data leak described as containing email addresses for over 200 million Twitter users has been published on a popular hacker forum for about $2. BleepingComputer has confirmed the validity of many of the email addresses listed in the leak.”

Ars Technica: Hundreds of WordPress sites infected by recently discovered backdoor. “Malware that exploits unpatched vulnerabilities in 30 different WordPress plugins has infected hundreds if not thousands of sites and may have been in active use for years, according to a writeup published last week.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: Stop Using Social Media Apps. The Web Version Is Often Better. “I CAN SCROLL through my timeline of choice whenever I want, which is a miracle of technology. The downside: I do so, a lot, even when I wish I were doing something else. With this in mind, I’ve been thinking lately about how I’d like social media to be just a little bit worse—to add the slightest amount of friction so I don’t spend quite so much time doomscrolling. I found the perfect solution: using the web version of social networks on my phone instead of installing the app.”

Front Matter: Building an archive for scholarly blog posts. “Building an archive of scholarly blog posts faces the same fundamental challenges as repositories for other types of scholarly content, whether data, software, preprints, or journal articles. You have to collect metadata and content, and that approach only scales with standardization and open licenses. Luckily we already know a lot about required and optional but desired scholarly metadata, and they are fundamentally not different for scholarly blog post.”

Daily Sabah: Turkish researchers use AI to read cuneatic Hittite tablets. “For the first time, 1,954 ancient Hittite tablets are being read with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) thanks to a project implemented in Türkiye. When the translation part is completed, the cuneatic clay tablets will be put on display for the public in the Hittite Digital Library scheduled to open soon.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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