afternoonbuzz

FoIA, CC ,MIT, More: Acrotastic Afternoon Buzz, February 6th, 2015

Now available: a new Raspberry Pi (PRESS RELEASE). “The Raspberry Pi 2 marks a major modification for the credit card-sized computer, with a new Broadcom BCM2836 ARMv7 Quad Core Processor powered Single Board Computer running at 900MHz with 1GB of RAM. For a superior user experience the new Raspberry Pi 2 boots up in less than half the time of its predecessor.”

Apparently About.com has a big security problem. “A security researcher disclosed Monday that ‘at least 99.88%’ of all topic links and all domains related to About.com are vulnerable to open XSS (Cross Site Scripting) and Iframe Injection (Cross Frame Scripting, XFS) attacks.”

Now that’s interesting: resorting to crowdfunding when your FoIA request turns out to be especially expensive. “The D’Amico family’s quest for facts about the cost of upkeep and renovations at the Servel House occupied by Idaho State University President Arthur Vailas is going to cost them — $1,235 to be exact. They’ve turned to the website Gofundme.com to help raise the money. ISU emailed the bill to the D’Amicos after the family submitted a Freedom of Information request for details on the $31,000 in annual maintenance and estimated $750,000 for improvements the university told the State Board of Education it spends or would have to spend on the Servel House on South Seventh Avenue to preserve it as a residence for the university’s president.”

Fold3 is making its Black History Collection free for the month of February.

Tumblr now lets you filter post archives by content type (text, photo, quote, link). This is important because Tumblr posts use all kinds of media — but shouldn’t this have been site browsing 101? Never mind, it’s there now.

Prada has put its almost-30-year archive online. “Here’s a public service announcement for all you fashion obsessives out there: Prada has just put its entire archive online. That’s right. If you head over to Future Archive right now, you can now check out the whole catalogue of runway images, advertising campaigns and catwalk videos going back all the way to 1987. That’s almost 30 years of Prada, Prada, Prada.” Hmm. What’s the opposite of a fashion obsessive? Because that’s what I am…

Is Google developing an Uber competitor? “According to a report from Bloomberg, Google, one of Uber’s largest investors, is set to become a competitor in the future. Stated by sources, Google internally is currently working on a line of autonomous taxi vehicles, which in the future, could rival any other app-powered taxi service.” Meanwhile, Uber is developing its own self-driving car project.

Creative Commons licenses are getting more and more use. “According to a new report, the State of the Commons, recently released by Creative Commons, the licenses were used on an estimated 50 million works in 2006 and on 400 million works in 2010. By 2014, that number had climbed to 882 million CC-licensed works. Nine million websites now use CC licenses, including major sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Public Library of Science, Scribd and Jamendo. The report includes a great series of infographics that illustrate key findings.”

A new Web site Tracks “warrant canaries” across several major Web sites. ” Like the birds that show a mine is safe by not being dead, the site tracks statements by websites like Pinterest saying they haven’t received national security requests. If such “warrant canaries” suddenly disappear, Canary Watch will flag that fact, revealing that the site actually has received a request without breaking any laws.” For more information about warrant canaries, check out the EFF FAQ.

MIT researchers are doing research on Facebook like patterns thanks to a Facebook page that posts the same picture every day (note the page the posts the same picture every day does not belong to the researchers.) “Bessi and co have compared the way people use this page with 73 public Facebook pages, 34 of them about science and 39 of them about conspiracy theories. They start by counting the number of likes for that each user gives to the pages visited. It turns out that this produces a power law or heavy-tailed distribution in which most users give a small number of likes while a few dish out a very large number. Curiously, the users of all the pages—the conspiracy theory pages, the science pages and the control page—follow this same pattern.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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