morningbuzz

Big Game, Big Archive, More: Wednesday Morning Buzz, January 21st, 2015

Google has disclosed another Microsoft vulnerability before MS has released a patch. “Microsoft’s recent ‘call for better coordinated vulnerability disclosure’ seems to have hit a brick wall, with Google as quick as ever to expose yet another Windows security glitch. Rated medium for severity, the bug may just be the most troublesome of the three broadcasted this past month.”

NBC will stream the Super Bowl for free. And apparently with a minimum of annoyances: “Viewers can watch without having to log on and offer proof that they pay for the TV service through cable or a telecom. NBC will stream the Super Bowl to desktops and tablets via NBC Sports Live Extra, its live streaming service for sports. The deal doesn’t include phones, though, since Verizon Wireless has the exclusive on that distribution.”

Speaking of the Super Bowl, YouTube is going to produce its first halftime show.

The New Yorker has a big article about The Internet Archive, specifically the Wayback Machine. “This essay is about two hundred thousand bytes. A book is about a megabyte. A megabyte is a million bytes. A gigabyte is a billion bytes. A terabyte is a million million bytes. A petabyte is a million gigabytes. In the lobby of the Internet Archive, you can get a free bumper sticker that says ‘10,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes Archived.’ Ten petabytes. It’s obsolete. That figure is from 2012. Since then, it’s doubled.”

The FBI is warning about a rise in ransomware.

Crossword Cybersecurity has launched CLUE (press release). “CLUE, the cyber security research database, covers nearly 300 cyber security research projects from over 50 UK universities, representing over GBP 150m of research grant investment since 2007. It provides industry with a searchable view of the UK’s cyber security academic research landscape to enable organisations to collaborate with academia more effectively.” It looks like access is free but you have to e-mail someone to get it.

Phil Bradley noticed that UC-Riverside’s Web site INFOMINE went dark on December 15th.

Pond5 has launched a public domain project. “A media marketplace (and Shutterstock competitor) used by over 100,000 outlets with millions of video clips, stock illustrations and photos, and hundreds of thousands of sound effects and music tracks, Pond5 raised $61 million in financing last year from Accel Partners and Stripe Group.” Public domain materials available include video, audio, images, and a small collection of 3D models.

Oh look, yet another “nobody is using Google+” story

Facebook has announced its intention to shower fewer hoaxes in your news feed. My awkward wording is because I’m not sure how well it’ll work. “Today’s update to News Feed reduces the distribution of posts that people have reported as hoaxes and adds an annotation to posts that have received many of these types of reports to warn others on Facebook. We are not removing stories people report as false and we are not reviewing content and making a determination on its accuracy.” Good morning, Internet…

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