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PCMag – “Biometric locks like face recognition are easy to set up—but thanks to a legal loophole, they’re easier for law enforcement to bypass than a passcode: “Using a face scan to unlock your phone and log in to accounts is easy to set up, but it’s not the best option for everyone. That’s because, …
PHYS.org: “Researchers, including Professor of Management and Organization Reuben Hurst at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, have produced VRscores, an unprecedented public database for understanding the partisan lean of different employers in the United States. Hurst, with co-authors Justin Frake (University of Michigan) and Max Kagan (Columbia University), developed VRscores …
“Tech Brew [reg reqd]: Getting locked out of your Apple Account is the digital equivalent of locking your keys in your car—except your car (iPhone) contains your entire life—including every photo you’ve ever taken. Getting back in isn’t always as quick and easy as calling roadside assistance: Apple’s verification process can often make DMV wait …
Vox – AI agents could change your life — if they don’t ruin it first. ChatGPT is boring compared to what comes next. The Atlantic [no paywall] – “The first signs of the apocalypse might look a little like Moltbook: a new social-media platform, launched last week, that is supposed to be populated exclusively by …
“WoAtlas.com is a free, interactive atlas providing key statistics and data for countries around the world. The goal is to create a modern, modular resource that anyone can use to explore and understand our world. Why This Project? Traditional atlases and geography resources can feel static and disconnected from how we learn today. WoAtlas aims …
Beautiful machines from a beautiful country – “Olivetti’s history can be divided into three distinct parts. First, there were typewriters. As the crisis of this first era mounted, the company moved into microcomputers for its second era. With the IBM PC dominating the world, the company moved into its PC era. When this era came …
Wired: “ICE has used Mobile Fortify to identify immigrants and citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn’t built to work like that—and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy rules.The face-recognition app Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not …
AP: Close the cover on the CIA World Factbook: “The spy agency announced Wednesday that after more than 60 years, it is shuttering the popular reference manual. The announcement posted to the CIA’s website offered no reason for the decision to end the Factbook, but it follows a vow from Director John Ratcliffe to end …
Internet Archive Blogs: “Digital journalists increasingly turn to web archives like the Wayback Machine to follow how things on the Internet break, change or disappear – from deleted posts to quietly edited pages. The web has become not only a source of information but also the subject of media investigations, prompting journalists, researchers and activists …
The dataindex.us team is excited to launch the Data Checkup – a comprehensive framework for assessing the health of federal data collections, highlighting key dimensions of risk and presenting a clear status of data well-being. When we started dataindex.us, one of our earliest tools was a URL tracker: a simple way to monitor whether a …
The New York Times Gift Article– “The Trump administration finalized a new policy on Thursday that would strip job protections from up to 50,000 federal workers, a move that would make it easier for President Trump to remove or discipline them, in his latest effort to dismantle the federal work force. Until now, the roughly …
TechCrunch: “The Internet Archive is a nonprofit that — as you might expect — is devoted to archiving the internet and preserving digital context for future generations. This week, the platform announced a new tool designed to expand on that mission by helping the world’s WordPress users keep their articles in peak digital health. The …