Category «Internet»

Study – Google, Amazon funnel at least $25 million to coronavirus conspiracy sites

Why is ad tech paying US$25 million to COVID-19 disinfo sites? – Household brands are inadvertently funding disinformation sites to spread COVID-19 conspiracies, thanks to ad tech companies that do not effectively screen the sites to which they provide ads services.  New research from the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) shows that Google, Amazon and other …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Financial System, Health Care, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Medicine

NIST Kick-Starts ‘Threshold Cryptography’ Development Effort

Establishing the emerging technique’s building blocks is a near-term focus – “A new publication by cryptography experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) proposes the direction the technical agency will take to develop a more secure approach to encryption. This approach, called threshold cryptography, could overcome some of the limitations of conventional …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Government Documents, Internet

Teachers face threats, books are banned as China pushes party line in Hong Kong schools

Washington Post: “As China’s Communist Party dismantles Hong Kong’s freedoms, teachers are facing pressure to toe Beijing’s line. Schools are emerging as ideological battlegrounds as officials seek to transform freethinking students into patriots loyal to the motherland through punishment, coercion, surveillance and propaganda-style education. “I feel like we have suddenly been put on the front …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Libraries

How Google Docs became the social media of the resistance

MIT Technology Review – “Facebook and Twitter might have the bells and whistles, but the word processing software’s simplicity and accessibility have made it a winning tool… In just the last week, Google Docs has emerged as a way to share everything from lists of books on racism to templates for letters to family members …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Social Media

Covid-19 Shows That Scientific Journals Need to Open Up

Bloomberg Opinion via MSN: “One big change brought on by Covid-19 is that virtually all the scientific research being produced about it is free to read. Anyone can access the many preliminary findings that scholars are posting on “preprint servers.” Data are shared openly via a multitude of different channels. Scientific journals that normally keep their articles behind …

Subjects: Education, Health Care, Internet, Knowledge Management

As COVID-19 cases spike in US, mask misinformation also spreads

Agence France Presse Fact Check – “Social media posts shared thousands of times in the United States contain multiple false or misleading claims about face masks used to stop the spread of COVID-19, including that they violate federal standards for oxygen supply, cloth masks “do not filter anything” and trap carbon dioxide, surgical masks spread germs, …

Subjects: Health Care, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Social Media

Millions of Americans Depend on Libraries for Internet. Now They’re Closed

The MarkUp: “Libraries are still just about the only place in America anyone can go and sit and use a computer and the internet without buying anything. All over the country, library closures during the pandemic have highlighted just how many people have no dependable source of internet on their own. According to a Pew …

Subjects: Education, Health Care, Internet, Knowledge Management

Supreme Court says generic domains like booking.com can be trademarked

ars technica: “The US Patent and Trademark Office erred by finding the term booking.com was too generic for trademark protection, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday. Trademark law prohibits anyone from registering generic terms that describe a class of products or services. Anyone can start a store company called “The Wine Company,” but they can’t …

Subjects: Courts, E-Government, Government Documents, Internet, Legal Research, Patent and Trademark, Search Engines

You Purged Racists From Your Website? Great, Now Get to Work

Wired: “The Covid-19 infodemic taught social media giants like YouTube and Reddit an important lesson: They can—and must—take action to control the content on their sites. For those who follow the politics of platforms, Monday’s great expulsion of malicious content creators was better late than never. For far too long, a very small contingent of …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Economy, Financial System, Internet, Legal Research, Social Media

As libraries go digital, paper books still have a lot to offer us

Via LLRX – – As libraries go digital, paper books still have a lot to offer us – Ksenya Kiebuzinski, University of Toronto Libraries, offers perspective on how librarians face challenges in maintaining traditional means of accessing and delivering information to our users while embracing innovative media. We appreciate the value of both analogue (print …

Subjects: Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Libraries