NEW RESOURCES

The state of California has launched a new Web site with government and lobbyist information. “[Gavin] Newsom, a Democrat, joined former Republican state Sen. Sam Blakeslee and open-government advocates in announcing the launch of Digital Democracy, an online search engine that is now live which allows the public to hone in on specific bills or keywords, such as looking for all references in Legislative hearings to the controversial vaccine bill currently being weighed by lawmakers.
The site also puts several online tools in one place, including campaign contributions, conflict of interest filings and voting records of lawmakers.”

Now available: a database of information about 27,000 NSA contractors. “Resumes and details of 27,000 NSA contractors have been put together in a searchable database by Transparency Toolkit. Researchers used LinkedIn and similar websites where the spy agency employees were openly sharing about their jobs.”

USEFUL STUFF

I really need to title this section USEFUL OR PERHAPS NOT. You can now ask a mountain to shout your tweet.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google has released a Chrome extension for the color-blind.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The New York Times takes a look at the competition in the mobile search space

Hey! Apple’s got a Web crawler.

Interesting: Reddit has a video division.

I learned a new word today: Tweef. (It means “Twitter beef”.)

Google has released some very depressing research on ad injection. “In March, we outlined the problems with unwanted ad injectors, a common symptom of unwanted software. Ad injectors are programs that insert new ads, or replace existing ones, into the pages you visit while browsing the web. We’ve received more than 100,000 user complaints about them in Chrome since the beginning of 2015—more than any other issue. Unwanted ad injectors are not only annoying, they can pose serious security risks to users as well. Today, we’re releasing the results of a study performed with the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara that examines the ad injector ecosystem, in-depth, for the first time.”

From The Reformed Broker: The Revolution Will Be Periscoped.

Google is shutting down its PageSpeed service. “PageSpeed Service, which launched four-and-a-half years ago, applies a number of optimization techniques to a site to get it to the user faster. This ranges from compressing images to optimizing cache settings, JavaScript and CSS files. The service also caches static assets and then delivers them from Google’s servers around the world. In many ways, PageSpeed Service is similar to what CloudFlare does but without the focus on security.”

Oh, geez, another WordPress vulnerability? Good morning, Internet…

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