Author archives

Rogue Editors Started a Competing Wikipedia That’s Only About Roads

Gizmodo: “For 20 years, a loosely organized group of Wikipedia editors toiled away curating a collection of 15,000 articles on a single subject: the roads and highways of the United States. Despite minor disagreements, the US Roads Project mostly worked in harmony, but recently, a long-simmering debate over the website’s rules drove this community to …

Subjects: Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Transportation

U.S. prescription drug market in disarray as ransomware gang attacks

Washington Post via MSN: “A ransomware gang once thought to have been crippled by law enforcement has snarled prescription processing for millions of Americans over the past week, forcing some to choose between paying prices hundreds or thousands of dollars above their usual insurance-adjusted rates or going without lifesaving medicine. Insurance giant UnitedHealthcare Group said …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Health Care, Medicine

SpinScore

“We’re thrilled to announce a game-changing new feature: YouTube Video Analysis. Now, you can simply pass the link of a YouTube video to our system, and we’ll do the rest. This powerful new feature allows you to leverage our advanced bias detection and scoring system to analyze YouTube videos. Whether it’s a news segment, a …

Subjects: AI, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Marketing

Scam Baiting: An Innovative Approach to Combating Online Fraud

Via LLRX – Scam Baiting: An Innovative Approach to Combating Online Fraud – The thesis of Kyra Strick‘s instructive paper promotes a proactive approach to a rapidly increasing online security crisis. Strick states that in the dynamic landscape of cybersecurity, scam baiting has emerged as a captivating and unconventional approach to combating online fraud. Scam baiting is …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Commerce, Education, Legal Research, Privacy, Social Media

Toward a durable, dictator-proof Washington Post

Via LLRX – Toward a durable, dictator-proof Washington Post – David H. Rothman’s timely, outside the box commentary addresses the growing wave of news outlets abruptly closing down their websites, laying off staff, and in some cases, eliminating access to their respective archives. Rothman proposes an alternative to “how do I charge them enough” to …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Economy, Financial System, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

These Video Doorbells Have Terrible Security. Amazon Sells Them Anyway

Consumer Reports – “The devices are also sold by Walmart, Sears, and other retailers—and big platforms have faced few consequences for shipping flawed products. On a recent Thursday afternoon, a Consumer Reports journalist received an email containing a grainy image of herself waving at a doorbell camera she’d set up at her back door. If …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Records, Legal Research, Privacy

Axel Springer vs. Google

Fortune: “Axel Springer is at Google’s throat again. The German news-publishing giant (for which I worked in my days at Politico) has a long history of battling Google over the issue of so-called ancillary copyright fees—payments for carrying snippets of text and thumbnail images in search results. But now it’s waging war on another front: …

Subjects: Copyright, E-Commerce, EU Data Protection, Legal Research, Marketing, Search Engines

Corporate Tax Avoidance in the First Five Years of the Trump Tax Law

Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy: ” Download report data here – Executive Summary: “The tax overhaul signed into law by former President Donald Trump in 2017 cut the federal corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, but during the first five years it has been in effect, most profitable corporations paid considerably …

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

We Must Rescue Forgotten Geniuses If We are to Read Them

The Neglected Books Page: “Apoorva Tadepalli published an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times recently, titled “We Need to Read the Forgotten Geniuses, Not Rescue Them” [unpaywalled]. As anyone who’s familiar with this site can imagine, this was an article I read with interest. For over forty years, I’ve been fascinated with looking for forgotten …

Subjects: Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Libraries