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Daily Archives: July 11, 2021

How to Make Your Web Searches More Secure and Private

Wired: “When it comes to looking something up on the web, most of us default to Googling it—the search engine has become so dominant that it’s now a verb, in the same way that Photoshop is. But using Google for your searches comes with a privacy trade-off. Google’s business is, of course, based on advertising, and every search you make feeds into the profile of you that it uses to target the ads you see around the web. While Google isn’t telling marketing firms what searches you’re running, it is using those queries to build up a picture of you that ads can be sold against. While Google has made moves to limit this data collection—introducing tools for auto-deleting your web history after a certain time period, for example—you might want to switch to a different search provider that doesn’t log your queries. And if you want to stick with Google, there are ways to limit the amount of data that gets recorded…”

The anatomy of a ransomware attack

Washington Post – Inside the hacks that lock down computer systems and damage businesses. “…To reconstruct the anatomy of a ransomware attack, The Post conducted its own data analysis and spoke with nearly a dozen cybersecurity experts, law enforcement officials, negotiators and victims. The Post used different examples to illustrate the components of how an… Continue Reading

SCOTUS Interpretation of CFAA A Win for Collecting Data With Web Scraping

Center for Data Innovation: “Web scraping—the use of automated tools to extract data from websites—helps businesses, researchers, and others quickly and efficiently gather publicly available information from the Internet, such as consumer product reviews or social media posts, that would otherwise require significant labor to collect. Unfortunately, uncertainty about the legality of scraping under the… Continue Reading

Histomap: Visualizing the 4,000 Year History of Global Power

Virtual Capitalist: “Today’s infographic, created all the way back in 1931 by a man named John B. Sparks, maps the ebb and flow of global power going all the way back to 2,000 B.C. on one coherent timeline.  Histomap, published by Rand McNally in 1931, is an ambitious attempt at fitting a mountain of historical… Continue Reading

Identity Theft 101: Tips to Protect Yourself Against Identity Theft

Law Technology Today: “What identity theft comes down to is that your personal and confidential information ends up in the wrong hands and gets used without your permission for purchases and all kinds of fraudulent activities. The scary part is that most of us willingly make our personal information available online, and it is easy… Continue Reading

Don’t be that employee: How to avoid ransomware attacks at work

Washington Post -“…Ransomware, which locks down a target’s computers and data, can infect a network a few different ways, including through employee accounts. Click the wrong link, open the wrong attachment or log into the wrong website, and you could put your company in a perilous position. Depending on their roles, some employees find their… Continue Reading

Beyond Goodreads: Four tools that help readers track their books

Washington Post – “Serious readers, much like sports fans, often relish keeping track of stats. Many turn to Goodreads, a large social cataloguing website that allows users to log, discuss, review and rate the books they read. (Goodreads is owned by Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.) But increasingly, there are websites… Continue Reading

The state of American friendship: Change, challenges, and loss

Survey Center on American Life: “Coming out of a once-in-a-generation global pandemic, Americans appear more attuned than ever to the importance of friendship. However, despite renewed interest in the topic of friendship in popular culture and the news media, signs suggest that the role of friends in American social life is experiencing a pronounced decline.… Continue Reading