Day archives: February 11th, 2020

Twitter might have a better read on floods than NOAA

The Verge: “Frustrated tweets led scientists to believe that tidal floods along the East Coast and Gulf Coast of the US are more annoying than official tide gauges suggest. Half a million geotagged tweets showed researchers that people were talking about disruptively high waters even when government gauges hadn’t recorded tide levels high enough to …

Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law, Internet, Knowledge Management, Social Media

How Your Laptop Ruined Your Life

The Atlantic – Smartphones aren’t the only killers of work-life balance. “It’s a common existential crisis among American office workers that virtually nowhere is now safe from the pull of their jobs. This inescapability is usually attributed to the proliferation of smartphones, with their push notifications signaling the arrival of emails and other workplace messages. …

Subjects: Economy, Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

How Big Companies Spy on Your Emails

Motherboard: “Multiple confidential documents obtained by Motherboard show the sort of companies that want to buy data derived from scraping the contents of your email inbox…A dataset obtained by Motherboard shows what some of the information pulled from free email app users’ inboxes looks like. A spreadsheet containing data from Rakuten’s Slice, an app that …

Subjects: E-Commerce, E-Mail, Internet, Privacy

FTC to Examine Past Acquisitions by Large Technology Companies

FTC News Release: “The Federal Trade Commission issued Special Orders to five large technology firms, requiring them to provide information about prior acquisitions not reported to the antitrust agencies under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act. The orders require Alphabet Inc. (including Google), Amazon.com, Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook, Inc., and Microsoft Corp. to provide information and documents …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Economy, Financial System, Government Documents, Intellectual Property, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Glimpsing the future in eye-opening tech job listings

protocol: “Ninjas, evangelists, alchemists: Silicon Valley has a long history of unsubtly repackaging jobs that might otherwise be titled technical support, marketing or office management. But beyond the distinctive euphemisms, the thousands of jobs posted each week by tech behemoths, well-heeled startups and those trying to bridge the valley of death in between often hint …

Subjects: Economy, Internet, Knowledge Management

Firefox 73 arrives with default zoom level and readability backplate

VentureBeat: “Mozilla today launched Firefox 73 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Firefox 73 includes a default zoom level setting, a readability backplate option, and a handful of developer features. There isn’t too much else here — Mozilla has now transitioned Firefox releases to a four-week cadence (from six to eight weeks). You can download …

Subjects: Internet, Search Engines

The Golden Age Of White Collar Crime

HuffPost – The Highline: “…The criminal justice system has given up all pretense that the crimes of the wealthy are worth taking seriously. In January 2019, white-collar prosecutions fell to their lowest level since researchers started tracking them in 1998. Even within the dwindling number of prosecutions, most are cases against low-level con artists and …

Subjects: Economy, Financial System, Government Documents, Legal Research