Google is taking additional steps to protect users from malicious extensions. ” In the case that malicious software has managed to hijack your settings, we’ve added a “reset browser settings” button, so you can get things back to normal. But since the bad guys continue to come up with new ways to cause our users headaches, we are always taking additional measures. We previously announced that we’re making it more difficult for malware to secretly install unwanted Chrome extensions. Starting today, we’ll start enforcing this policy…. From now on, to protect Windows users from this kind of attack, extensions can be installed only if they’re hosted on the Chrome Web Store. With this change, extensions that were previously installed may be automatically disabled and cannot be re-enabled or re-installed until they’re hosted in the Chrome Web Store.”

Twitter has come out in favor of the FCC’s Net Neutrality plan. “Twitter‘s endorsement of the plan, which would prevent ISPs from speeding up some websites at the expense of others, is significant given the company’s role as a major media company, and its historical advocacy of free speech. In its blog post, Twitter pointed out a familiar refrain of net neutrality advocates: that emerging companies depend on access to the internet platforms that will carry their products and ideas.”

There now exists what I would describe as a federal Web archiving task group. “A function of government is to provide information to its citizens through publishing and to preserve some selected portion of these publications. Clearly some (if not most) .gov web sites are “government publications” and the U.S. federal government puts out information on .mil, .com, and other domains as well. What government agencies are archiving federal government sites for future research on a regular basis? And why? To what extent? In part inspired by discussions at last year’s Leviathan conference, and in part fulfilling earlier conversations, managers and staff of three federal agencies that each do selective harvesting of federal web sites decided to start meeting and talking on a regular basis – the Government Publishing Office, the National Archives and Records Administration and the Library of Congress. Managers and staff involved in web archiving from these three agencies have now met five times and have plans to continue meeting on a monthly basis during the remainder of 2015.”

Apparently social media around the Oscars was better for Facebook than Twitter. “Nielsen figures showed there were a total of 5.9 million Oscar-related tweets. That’s down about 65% from last year’s 17.1 million, though the latter figure was global while the 5.9 million referred to the U.S. In 2013, there were 8.9 million tweets about the show. That figure is also global…. Facebook, meanwhile, reported that 21 million people had 58 million interactions related to the Oscars Sunday night. That’s way up from 11.1 million users having 25.4 million interactions last year.”

An archive of contemporary art in New York City is underway: “The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has awarded $75,000 to Artstor in support of the James Dee Archives project. The Archives are composed of approximately 250,000 slides, transparencies, negatives, and photographs documenting contemporary art in New York City over the last four decades, and Artstor is digitizing and maintaining the archive for use in research and education. The gift will support the processing of the collection, developing crowdsourcing software for collaborative cataloging, and the outreach to galleries and individuals who would be helpful in interpreting the images.”

This should be interesting: Apple will release its first iOS public beta. Considering some of the bugs that have come up after iOS releases, this is a good idea. “It’s unclear if iOS 8’s public betas will receive the same updates as the ones for developers, but 9to5Mac does report that iOS 9 will be available for public preview after it’s unveiled at WWDC in June. Public betas for iOS will reportedly be limited to 100,000 users, who, like developers, will be able to report bugs to Apple via a dedicated app.”

Did you know that searching for health information online can lead to privacy issues? “Marketers care very much about what diseases and conditions people are searching for online. Tim Libert, a doctoral student at the Annenberg School For Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the paper says that over 90% of the 80,000 health-related pages he looked at on the Internet exposed user information to third parties. These pages included health information from commercial, nonprofit, educational, and government websites.”

It’s not you being fumble-fingered: Gmail is suggesting incorrect autocomplete e-mail addresses. Good morning, Internet…

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