Mastercard and Microsoft Have Frightening Plan to Create Universal Digital Identities

Cale Guthrie Weissman, Fast Company, December 4, 2018

The objective behind this initiative (according to the original Mastercard press release)  is to allow individuals to establish a single digital identity -- one that is “globally interoperable” -- that can be used to simplify and enhance engagement with financial institutions, healthcare providers, and providers of government as well as social services. The touted benefits are lower costs, less friction, and fraud prevention.

The writer of the Fast Company article is skeptical: “...the solution they offer–a one-stop, universal identification for any and all applications–would mean that every citizen would be entering into a system built by private companies that centralizes all of their personal data. Every digital company wants to be a data hoover, and this program seems to underscore the extent of this pursuit...Beyond the surveillance and privacy red flags, a universal identification like this will likely raise security concerns. Even when companies think they are using the best practices to protect user data, it is only hubristic to believe something is un-hackable.”

The original Mastercard press release, dated Dec 3, 2018, may be found here.

Sorry, Your Data Can Still Be Identified Even if It’s Anonymized

Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, Fast Company, December 10, 2018

As the author of this brief piece notes, “we humans are now walking, talking data factories.” The concern raised in this coverage of MIT research output appearing in IEEE Transactions on Big Data is that the high volume of moving humans with sensor-equipped devices does not mean that the size of the data set is adequately preserving the privacy of our individual behaviors. (See paywalled research output at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8470173).  In fact, the researchers provide “the first large-scale analysis of user matchability in real mobility datasets on realistic scales, i.e. among two datasets that consist of several million people's mobility traces, coming from a mobile network operator and transportation smart card usage.” Over the course of a four-week period, individuals could be identified successfully more than half the time. Over an eleven-week period, individuals could be matched with their behaviors 95% of the time. The lead author of the research activity is quoted in both the Fast Company article as well as the original MIT press release as saying, “Although data means a better knowledge of the urban environment, currently much of this wealth of information is held by just a few companies and public institutions that know a lot about us, while we know so little about them. We need to take care to avoid data monopolies and misuse.”

See additional background in The Privacy Risks of Compiling Mobility Data, MIT Press Office Release, December 7, 2018

Special Report: The New Digital Divides

Axios, December 4, 2018

The Axios special report notes the emergence of two specific “digital divides”; the first being a geographic divide exacerbated by economic interest in serving profitable urban environments rather than rural areas and the second being an economic divide where infrastructure may be broadly available but beyond the means of lower-income citizens. As the Axios report puts it, “These divides are colliding and combining in troubling ways — creating a whole spectrum of education, information and privacy inequality.”

Membership Milestone for Shibboleth Consortium

Sara Aley, Internet2, December 7, 2018

The Shibboleth Consortium exists for the purpose of funding development, support, and maintenance of the Shibboleth software, a federated identity management approach offering a web-based single-sign-on (SSO) solution. The addition of the Ohio State University and Signet, an identity management consultancy firm, brings the number of members up to 51.

From the blog notice: “As of November 2018, 86% of the identity providers (IdPs) and 64% of the service providers (SPs) in eduGAIN were using the Shibboleth software. The percentages indicate that over 2,000 institutions world-wide are using the Shibboleth software.

“The Shibboleth software is open source and freely available, but ongoing development efforts to meet the needs of identity federations, educational systems and institutions have now grown to over $500,000 per year. Consortium membership dues serve as the funding base for the software and allows the consortium to manage the ongoing development of the software.”

New Geographic Trends in Attitudes to Open Access: Findings from the Editage Global Author Survey 2018

Editage Insights, December 7, 2018

The report offers insights into attitudes held by researchers in China, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, India, the U.S.A., and the U.K. regarding Open Access.

Of particular interest to this audience may be the mindset of Chinese researchers, as outlined in the report:

“The low level of both awareness and understanding of OA in China is perhaps a little surprising given that China is now the largest producer of research globally and major Chinese agencies have been promoting various forms of OA for the past several years. While a high percentage of those who chose to publish OA wanted to reach a larger audience,an important concern is that many Chinese researchers seem to be especially vulnerable to unethical approaches adopted by predatory journals—such as guaranteed publication. This is noteworthy since researchers in China are known to face intense pressure navigating an academic evaluation system that emphasizes the quantity of publications in high–impact factor journals.”

Who is Pirating Medical Literature? A Bibliometric Review of 28 Million Sci-Hub Downloads

Brian M. Til, Niklas Rudolfson, Saurabh Saluja, et.al. The Lancet: Global Health; Volume 7, Issue 1 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(18)30388-7

Specific findings of interest to this audience include:

• “Of 27·8 million download queries, 23·2 million were requests for journal articles. We categorised 94% of requests using Scopus terms. 4·7 million requests (22%) were for medical journal articles.

• “Most queries for medical literature originated in [low-income and middle-income countries] LMICs (3·3 million, 69%). Almost half (2·2 million, 47%) originated in upper-middle income countries. In absolute numbers, the most frequent countries of origin were India, China, the USA, Brazil, and Iran. When controlling for scientific output, the highest densities came from Peru, Algeria, Ecuador, Morocco and Indonesia.

• “The highest download densities in this sample are from middle-income countries. There are several probable factors underlying this trend. First, institutions in most upper-middle-income countries do not qualify for HINARI. Those in lower-middle-income countries may qualify for a fee-based version of the system depending on a range of factors. This exclusion, when coupled with increasing levels of educational attainment and rapidly growing medical industries, has probably led to increased demand for medical literature while legal avenues for access remain limited. With efforts undertaken by WHO focused on expanding access in the poorest countries, and with academic publishers focused on the sale of bundled journal packages to library consortia concentrated in high-income states, there appears to be a trough in access for middle-income countries.”

Community Announcement - DPN Sunset

Digital Preservation Network, December 4, 2018

“After careful analysis of the Digital Preservation Network’s membership, operating model, and finances, the Board of Trustees of DPN passed a resolution to affect an orderly wind-down of DPN.  The DPN Board carefully considered potential changes to DPN’s current preservation and membership models and determined that it is not feasible to design and implement changes that would ensure sustainability.

“The Digital Preservation Network has provided innovative digital preservation services and leadership to the cultural heritage community for the past six years.  At its largest, DPN had 62 members and deposits from 27 institutions. However, membership has fallen to 31, a number insufficient to maintain the organization. The landscape of digital preservation services has changed considerably in the past six years, as have the community’s preservation needs.”

For additional information, see The Digital Preservation Network (DPN) to Cease Operations and Why is the Digital Preservation Network Disbanding?

Web Archiving in the United States: A 2017 Survey (released Dec 2018): Results of a Survey of Organizations Preserving Web Content

Matthew Farrell, Duke University; Edward McCain, University of Missouri; Maria Praetzellis, Internet Archive; Grace Thomas, Library of Congress; and Paige Walker, Boston College, National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA), December 2018

Part of an on-going series of surveys conducted by the NDSA, this final report on the 2017 Survey of 119 entities (predominantly academic libraries) in the United States, specifically focusing on their “background information about the respondent’s organization; details about the current state of their Web archiving program; tools and services used by their program; access and discovery systems and approaches; and program policies involving capture, availability, and types of Web content.”

The report concludes that the survey illustrates “significant growth in key areas, with continuing stagnation in others. Diversification of the field, maturation of programs and technological developments presented areas of progress for the profession while access to archived content and institutional support for program expansion remained relatively unchanged…”

A Framework for Library Support of Expansive Digital Publishing

David Hansen, Liz Milewicz, Paolo Mangiafico, Will Shaw, Mattia Begali, Veronica McGurrin Duke University Libraries, December 4, 2018

The authors note that in the context of this discussion of libraries and work in digital humanities, they are defining “expansive digital publishing” as being publications that are outside of the traditional publishing ecosystem and accepted practice. Such scholarly output may be characterized as:

• Works undertaken by scholars at multiple institutions and in different fields

• Using many different technologies

• Resulting in multiple scholarly outputs

• Growing over time

• Multiphase

• Intending to engage with multiple audiences

• Having an emphasis on digital tools and methods to enable forms of scholarship not achievable via traditional publishing.

Conclusions noted in this framework include the idea that “libraries must play an early and ongoing role in developing expansive digital publications” while recognizing that “it is important for libraries and publishers to develop a shared vocabulary for understanding digital project publication over time.”

A Smarter Way to Search Google Scholar

Dr. Tony Russell-Rose, December 11, 2018

The firm behind this piece, 2dSearch, already supports searching of Google, Bing, and PubMed. This white paper discusses the use of their graphical editor in building queries for Google Scholar. The author explains their unique contribution as follows: “2dSearch is a framework for search query formulation in which concepts are expressed as objects on a two-dimensional canvas. Transforming logical structure into physical structure mitigates many of the shortcomings of Boolean strings, eliminates many sources of syntactic error and makes the query semantics more transparent. Moreover, it offers new ways to for search strategies to be validated, shared and made reproducible. By integrating with Google Scholar, we hope to offer a tool of immediate utility to anyone wishing to search the world’s scientific literature in a systematic manner.”

ISO/IEC 20924:2018 Information technology -- Internet of Things (IoT) -- Vocabulary

Technical Committee: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 41 Internet of Things and related technologies

“ISO/IEC 20924:2018(E) provides a definition of Internet of Things along with a set of terms and definitions forming a terminology foundation for the Internet of Things.”

ISO/IEC/IEEE 26511:2018 Systems and software engineering -- Requirements for managers of information for users of systems, software, and services

Technical Committee: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 7  Software and systems engineering

“This document supports the needs of users for consistent, complete, accurate, and usable information. It provides requirements for strategy, planning, managing, staffing, translation, production, and quality and process-maturity assessment for managers of information for users. It specifies processes and procedures for managing information for users throughout the product- or systems-development life cycle. It also includes requirements for key documents produced for managing information for users, including strategic and project plans. This document provides an overview of the information-management processes that are specific for the management of information for users.... [It] is applicable for use by managers of information for users or organizations with information developers. This document can also be consulted by those with other roles and interests in the process of developing information for users:

• managers of the product and system development process;

• acquirers of information for users prepared by suppliers;

• experienced information developers who prepare information for users;

• human-factors experts who identify principles for making information for users more accessible and easily used; and

• user interface designers and ergonomics experts working together to design the presentation of information.”

Lightweight DITA: An Introduction (CN02) published by DITA TC

“OASIS is pleased to announce the publication of ’Lightweight DITA: An Introduction,’ a Committee Note from the members of the OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC.

“Lightweight DITA (LwDITA) is a simplified version of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). In comparison to DITA 1.3, it has a smaller element type and attribute set, stricter content models, and a reduced feature set. It also defines mappings between XML, HTML5, and Markdown so that authors can collaborate and publish across different markup languages.

“LwDITA is a work in progress. The Committee Note outlines the current plans in order to gain design clarity and receive feedback from potential users. Details may well change between the publication of this [Committee Note] CN and release of Lightweight DITA as an OASIS specification.”