Neowin: You can now report accounts for being fake on Twitter. “Twitter has been putting quite a bit of weight behind eradicating the rampant issue of fake accounts and spambots greatly influencing many people’s experience on its platform, to the point where the company, in its Q2 earnings report, saw itself lose over a million (fake) users.”
CNN: National Archives releases draft indictment of Richard Nixon amid Mueller probe. “The National Archives released a central set of documents from the Watergate scandal on Wednesday, including a would-be indictment against President Richard Nixon, following a lawsuit pointing to its relevance in the current era. The documents, known as the Watergate Road Map, as released Wednesday contained redactions and never-before-seen remnants of the investigation into Nixon but largely contained information previously made public, according to the Archives.”
DNAeXplained: MyHeritage LIVE Livestreamed Sessions to be Recorded. “If you are interested in the free livestreamed sessions from MyHeritage LIVE from Oslo, Norway, but the time difference is problematic for you – there’s great news. Many of the sessions will be recorded for later replay. I’m very glad to hear this from MyHeritage, because I want to watch the sessions in the tracks that I can’t attend. There are three tracks total, Genealogy and DNA, which will be recorded, and the workshops, which will not be recorded.”
CNET: Uber, Lyft, Lime and Skip offer free rides on Election Day. “Ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft and electric scooter companies Lime and Skip are offering free and discounted rides to help get people to the polls for the midterm elections next Tuesday.”
Reuters: U.S. Supreme Court divided over Google privacy settlement. “U.S. Supreme Court justices, in an internet privacy case involving Google(GOOGL.O), disagreed on Wednesday over whether to rein in a form of settlement in class action lawsuits that awards money to charities and other third parties instead of to people affected by the alleged wrongdoing.”
Digital NC: More issues of The Charlotte Post are now online!. “More than two dozen additional issues of The Charlotte Post have recently been added to Digital NC. Thanks to our partnership with Johnson C. Smith University, our digital holdings for The Charlotte Post now mostly range in date from 1971 to 1996, and feature newly uncovered early issues from the 1930s. This most recent batch includes those special issues as well as additions from 1991 to 1996. The three partial issues are from 1930, 1931, and 1934, and serve as important resources for African American history in Charlotte at that time.”
Energy Post: A blacklist of the world’s top 120 coal plant developers. “Nearly 1,400 new coal power plant developments are planned or under construction in 59 countries that would add 33% to coal power capacity. But the risks of investing in such projects are growing, and many banks and investors are looking to move away from coal. To help them, non-governmental organisation Urgewald has created a database of the world’s top 120 coal plant developers, says Kathy Hipple of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.”
The Verge: Facebook has started banning accounts affiliated with far-right group the Proud Boys. “Facebook has started banning both individual accounts and pages, as well as associated groups, that are affiliated with the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys. The news was first reported today by Business Insider, which noted that members of the Proud Boys and adjacent online communities had begun complaining about the takedowns on Twitter.”
Tubefilter: Twitch Announces A Swath Of New Creator Tools And Expansions To Its Esports Program. “This past weekend, at its annual TwitchCon gathering, Twitch unveiled a range of new and upcoming tools — including two large expansions of its esports program — that are meant to help creators find, connect with, and grow their audiences.”
TechCrunch: Civil servant who watched porn at work blamed for infecting a US government network with malware . “A U.S. government network was infected with malware thanks to one employee’s ‘extensive history’ of watching porn on his work computer, investigators have found. The audit, carried out by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s inspector general, found that a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) network at the EROS Center, a satellite imaging facility in South Dakota, was infected after an unnamed employee visited thousands of porn pages that contained malware, which downloaded to his laptop and ‘exploited the USGS’ network.’”
Lisa Charlotte Rost: One Chart, Nine Tools – Revisited. “2.5 years ago I wrote an article recreating the same bubble chart with 24 different charting tools: twelve charting apps and twelve libraries/frameworks. Afterward, I wrote an article for SOURCE explaining what I had learned during this experiment. During the last 2.5 years, the tool landscape changed. It’s time to look at it again!” Ms. Rost notes that she does work at one of the reviewed tools now, but has strived to be neutral in her judgement.
Nieman Lab: A massive Facebook group — made up almost entirely of women — is helping to solve a case gripping Australia. “Most Americans have never heard of Keli Lane or of her baby, Tegan, who disappeared in 1996 when she was only two days old. But the case of Lane — and her murder conviction in 2011, though no body or hard evidence was ever found — has gripped Australia for years. It’s now the subject of a three-part Australian Broadcasting Corporation documentary — and a Facebook group that, in around two weeks, has grown to 29,000 members focused on one goal: finding out what actually happened to Tegan. Lane, who is in prison with a chance of parole in 2023, insists that she handed over the baby to her biological father in the hospital’s lobby after her birth, and believes that she’s still alive.”
Make Tech Easier: Google Recaptcha Gets an Update with No Verification Tasks. “There isn’t anyone who visits websites regularly on the Internet who hasn’t encountered a Google Recaptcha one too many times. It can be annoying when you just want to get to a website and are stopped by the pop-up asking you to check a box, type in a word, or solve a puzzle to prove you’re human. The good news is that Google has updated the system to Recaptcha v3, a system that requires no participation on the part of the visitor to the website.”
New York Times: Your Kid’s Apps Are Crammed With Ads. “Many developers market apps for children as being educational. So Jenny Radesky, a pediatrician who wrote the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for children and media, wanted to check that out. ‘One of my big concerns about why apps might not be educational was because of the presence of distracting features such as banner ads that sit along the top of the screen and which contain stimuli that are irrelevant to the learning objective,’ Dr. Radesky said. ‘And we were expecting to see those.’ She was not expecting all the rest.”
CNET: Facebook sees stagnating sales and user growth. “Facebook’s string of scandals are taking a toll on the tech firm’s business. Facebook’s business first showed signs of cracking in July, when the company reported second-quarter sales that missed Wall Street estimates, gave a weak revenue forecast for future quarters and said the number of users in Europe had declined. The news sent Facebook’s stock free-falling nearly 25 percent in after-hours trading.”
