Category «Internet»

How to stop Google from keeping your voice recordings

The Verge -Keep your ‘Hey Google’ questions off the record (or isn’t it time you used DuckDuckGo) “Home assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant are becoming ubiquitous, and as that happens, more and more users are discovering how much of their data is actually being collected by these handy items. The Washington Post’s Geoffrey …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Internet, Privacy, Search Engines

Terrorism, Violent Extremism, and the Internet: Free Speech Considerations

EveryCRSReport.com – Terrorism, Violent Extremism, and the Internet: Free Speech Considerations, May 6, 2019 R45713: “Recent acts of terrorism and hate crimes have prompted a renewed focus on the possible links between internet content and offline violence. While some have focused on the role that social media companies play in moderating user-generated content, others have called …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Congress, Courts, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Internet, Legal Research

Your most sensitive data is likely exposed online. These people try to find it.

c/net: “Justin Paine sits in a pub in Oakland, California, searching the internet for your most sensitive data. It doesn’t take him long to find a promising lead. On his laptop, he opens Shodan, a searchable index of cloud servers and other internet-connected devices. Then he types the keyword “Kibana,” which reveals more than 15,000 …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Mail, E-Records, ID Theft, Internet, Libraries, Privacy

Consumer groups accuse Amazon of illegally collecting data on children

Washington Post – Amazon Echo Dot Kids accused of illegally collecting data on children – “A coalition of 19 consumer and privacy groups plans to file a complaint Thursday alleging that Amazon’s Echo Dot Kids Edition is illegally collecting voice recordings and other identifying information on users under 13 and that the system’s parental controls are …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Government Documents, Internet, Legal Research, Privacy, Social Media

7 simple ways to protect your digital privacy

The New York Times – “What little privacy people don’t give away, companies tend to take. Given this unfortunate reality, to get complete privacy you’d need to install a labyrinthine series of software tools that make the internet slow and unusable — think specialty Web browsers, encrypted email and chat; virtual private networks; and security-focused …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Internet, Privacy, Search Engines, Social Media

Consider this – Alexa is always listening and collecting data about you

The Daily Dot – Here’s what you need to know about the security and privacy implications of smart speakers, both the myths and the realities – 1) Smart speakers are always listening – One of the first things you’ll hear about smart speakers like echo is that they’re “always listening” to your conversations—which is technically …

Subjects: AI, Cybersecurity, E-Commerce, Internet, Privacy

Study: Major media outlets’ Twitter accounts amplify false Trump claims on average 19 times a day

Media Matters: “Major media outlets failed to rebut President Donald Trump’s misinformation 65% of the time in their tweets about his false or misleading comments, according to a Media Matters review. That means the outlets amplified Trump’s misinformation more than 400 times over the three-week period of the study — a rate of 19 per …

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

‘Climate denial’ just made it into the dictionary. Wait, what?

Grist: “The world is on fire, and so is our vocabulary. Merriam-Webster added 640 new words to its online dictionary last week. The additions include swole (“extremely muscular”), new meanings for snowflake (someone who is “treated as unique or special” or “overly sensitive”) and, you guessed it, a whole batch of neologisms tied to the …

Subjects: Climate Change, Education, Environmental Law, Internet, Knowledge Management

From Clay Tablets to Smartphones: 5,000 Years of Writing

The New York Times – London – “The writing’s on the wall, we’re told. Whether it was Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century, the invention of the typewriter 300 years later, or the emoji of today’s smartphones, the act of writing seems to be forever on the precipice of extinction, without quite falling …

Subjects: Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Libraries

Unraveling the JPEG

“This article is about how to decode a JPEG image. In other words, it’s about what it takes to convert the compressed data stored on your computer to the image that appears on the screen. It’s worth learning about not just because it’s important to understand the technology we all use everyday, but also because, …

Subjects: Internet