NEW RESOURCES

Sky News: Westminster Accounts: How to explore the database for yourself. “Sky News and Tortoise Media have programmatically collected and analysed thousands of public records to create this extensive record of financial interests in Westminster from December 2019 onwards. It means that for the first time, you can easily see the total sums of donations and earnings for individual MPs – something which was previously very difficult to collate and compare due to the way the registers are published.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bleeping Computer: Microsoft ends Windows 7 extended security updates on Tuesday. “Windows 7 Professional and Enterprise editions will no longer receive extended security updates for critical and important vulnerabilities starting Tuesday, January 10, 2023. Microsoft launched the legacy operating system in October 2009. It then reached its end of support in January 2015 and its extended end of support in January 2020.”

Techdirt: DidYouKnowGaming Gets Video Nintendo DMCA’d Restored. “Back in December we discussed how Nintendo got a video on the DidYouKnowGaming YouTube channel taken down via a DMCA notice. While Nintendo is notorious for being an intellectual property bully and enforcing what it thinks are its rights in as draconian a manner as possible, what stood out about this particular story is that the video in question was a journalistic effort to document a game pitched to Nintendo that never came out, included no gameplay footage, and therefore didn’t reproduce any actual game assets.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Asahi Shimbun: Students lay groundwork for research project on Donald Keene. “Students have taken the lead in a project to sort out more than 7,000 books in the collections of American-born Japanese literature expert Donald Keene (1922-2019). Toyo University, Tokyo’s Kita Ward and the Donald Keene Memorial Foundation in July signed an agreement to scrutinize the collections of the scholar who introduced Japanese literature and culture to people around the world.”

TMZ: POPEYES MEME KID: I’M A COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYER!!! … Wants NIL Deal. “Remember the TerRio look-alike who went viral for giving the side-eye at Popeyes??? That kid from the famous meme is now a college football player — and we’re all officially old. TMZ Sports has confirmed … Lake Erie College freshman offensive lineman Dieunerst Collin is, in fact, the little kid in the yellow shirt who became internet famous on now-defunct social media platform Vine back in the day.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: Come to the ‘war cry party’: How social media helped drive mayhem in Brazil. “Online influencers who deny the results of the country’s recent presidential election used a particular phrase to summon “patriots” to what they called a ‘Festa da Selma’ — tweaking the word ‘selva,’ a military term for war cry, by substituting an ‘m’ for the ‘v’ in hopes of avoiding detection from Brazilian authorities, who have wide latitude to arrest people for ‘anti-democratic’ postings online. ‘Festa’ is the Portuguese word for ‘party.'”

The Guardian: Second cabinet minister says Twitter account hacked. “A second cabinet minister has said they fell victim to hackers and was forced to apologise after their Twitter account posted a series of offensive tweets about race, sexuality and gender identity. Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, said others temporarily gained access to his account and posted some ‘deeply unpleasant stuff’.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Nikkei: Japan taps AI to defend against fake news. “The foreign ministry will launch an AI-powered system in fiscal 2023 to collect and analyse fake information on social media and other platforms, allowing it to track how foreign actors are trying to influence public opinion over the medium to long term. The framework will not only cover information geared toward the Japanese audience, but also information aimed at harming foreign perceptions of Japan.”

New York University: Exposure to Russian Twitter Campaigns in 2016 Presidential Race Highly Concentrated, Largely Limited to Strongly Partisan Republicans. “The study, which included researchers from the University of Copenhagen, Trinity College Dublin, and Technical University of Munich and examined social media users’ behaviors and attitudes in both April and October of 2016, also concluded that there was no relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior. Despite these results, the researchers caution that Russia attempts to alter the outcome of the election may have had other effects.”

ZDNet: I’m running my own Mastodon server on a Raspberry Pi. Here’s what I’ve learned. “I decided that if I’m going to truly move away from Twitter, I want to own my entire Mastodon experience. I don’t want to worry about the server I’ve joined having an admin go rogue, or not being able to secure enough funding to keep running. I want to be my own admin, and it’ll be up to me to keep the server running.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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