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Daily Archives: June 24, 2019

5 Ways to Safely Test Your Antivirus Software

MakeUseOf (MUD): “lIf you’re concerned about how good about your antivirus software is, why wait until it’s too late? There are some safe ways you can test your antivirus to make sure it’s working properly. Here’s why you’d want to test an antivirus and how to put one through some tests yourself. Why You Should Test Your Antivirus Software – The most obvious reason why people test their antivirus is to check it’s working properly in the first place. Antiviruses work by scanning files as they arrive and blocking the ones that match its database of virus definitions. As such, the only way to know for sure if your antivirus is working is to test it. Of course, we would never recommend anyone visit dangerous websites to see if their computer can handle it. This is like testing out body armor by walking out onto a live battlefield. There are safe and benign ways a user can test their antivirus software, which they can use to see if their security is up to speed. Not everyone wants to just test the quality of the software, however. Sometimes, people have deployed the software under a specific environment, under certain rules, or with certain conditions. As such, performing these five tests are a great way to confirm that nothing can slip through the cracks…”

Looking for a better way to teach public records? Read what we’ve learned in Make FOIA Work

MuckRock: “A new field guide on bringing transparency into communities from the Engagement Lab at Emerson College, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and MuckRock Last August, with support from the Online News Association, we partnered with the Engagement Lab at Emerson College and the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism to explore new ways of… Continue Reading

Justices to Decide if States Can Copyright Laws

Courthouse News: “The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to weigh in on the ability of a state to copyright its own official annotated codes, after an appeals court panel ruled Georgia could not. The court battle goes back to 2015, when the Peach State sought an order forcing U.S. technologist and public domain advocate Carl… Continue Reading

New deepfake detection tool should keep world leaders safe—for now

MIT Technology Review: “..a new digital forensics technique promises to protect President Trump, other world leaders, and celebrities against such deepfakes—for the time being, at least. The new method uses machine learning to analyze a specific individual’s style of speech and movement, what the researchers call a “softbiometric signature.”  The researchers, from UC Berkeley and… Continue Reading

Reintroducing Natalia Ginzburg, One of the Great Italian Writers of the 20th Century

New York Times – “The voice is instantly, almost violently recognizable — aloof, amused and melancholy. The metaphors are sparse and ordinary; the language plain, but every word load-bearing. Short sentences detonate into scenes of shocking cruelty. Even in middling translations, it is a style that cannot be subsumed; Natalia Ginzburg can only sound like… Continue Reading

How Amazon benefits from counterfeit books

Vox – “Amazon has a counterfeit book problem. But it isn’t really a problem for Amazon itself, reporter David Streitfeld argued in an investigation published in the New York Times on Sunday. In fact, publishers and authors whose books are photocopied or otherwise plagiarized just come to rely on Amazon even more. Streitfeld starts by… Continue Reading

2019 IPR Disinformation in Society Report

Institute for Public Relations -“Sixty-three percent of Americans view disinformation—or deliberately misleading or biased information—as a “major” problem in society, on par with gun violence (63%) and terrorism (66%), according to the 2019 Institute for Public Relations Disinformation in Society Report. The 2019 IPR Disinformation in Society Report surveyed 2,200 adults with Morning Consult to… Continue Reading