morningbuzz

Maryland, South Carolina, Bing, More: Tuesday Afternoon Buzz, June 16th, 2015

NEW RESOURCES

The state of Maryland now has an online database for certified pesticide dealers and businesses. If you click on the link in the article you’ll get an error. Take the period off the end of the URL and you’ll get to the right place.

The state of South Carolina has a new online database showing which companies get the most business from the state government. Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina was . “The next-highest vendor totals were: pharmacy benefit manager Catamaran PBM of Illinois with $329 million in business, healthcare company Medco Health Solutions of New Jersey with $303 million, BlueChoice Healthplan of South Carolina with $71.4 million, Bank of America with $51.2 million, printing business RL Bryan Company with $51.1 million, and law firm Nexsen Pruet, LLC with $49 million.”

The Library of Congress has released three new Student Discovery Sets. “The Library’s latest Student Discovery Sets are available now for the iPad and can be downloaded free of charge on iBooks. These sets cover Women’s Suffrage, Japanese American Internment, and Political Cartoons and Public Debates. They join nine previously published sets on the U.S. Constitution, Symbols of the United States, Immigration, the Dust Bowl, the Harlem Renaissance, Understanding the Cosmos, the Industrial Revolution, Jim Crow and Segregation, and Children’s Lives at the Turn of the 20th Century. Through a set of interactive tools, learners can zoom in on faces of suffragists picketing the White House, circle details of lively 19th-century political cartoons, and listen to stories of Japanese American combat veterans.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bing is going to encrypt search traffic by default. “Bing has already been offering users the option to encrypt search traffic for about a year and a half now. Beginning this summer, we will begin the process of encrypting search traffic by default. This means that traffic originating from Bing will increasingly come from https://www.bing.com as opposed to http://www.bing.com.”

Snapchat now offers 2-factor authentication. Guess what really huge major consumer Web site still doesn’t? Dingdingdingdingding! AMAZON!

USEFUL STUFF

How-To-Geek on managing a bunch of social media feeds in one place. Alternion looks interesting.

Good one from Hongkiat: 10 Useful Image Tools Every Social Media Marketer Needs. Or anybody who’s just trying to make social media images of the appropriate sizes without tearing all their hair out.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

FOSS Force takes a look at why SourceForge is such a mess. Makes me sad. Good afternoon, Internet…

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2 replies »

  1. I suspect that the reason Amazon hasn’t yet implemented 2 factor authentication is their rather unusual approach to unique users. Without describing how this happened, I have 3 separate Amazon user accounts that all use the same username/email address. The differentiating factor is the *password* on each! While I can imagine ways to enable 2 factor authentication in such an environment, there would be costs and complications associated with any attempt to do so. — Steve Rafferty

    • Hey Steve, Amazon obviously doesn’t care what I think, nor should they. But here’s the thing: in this day and age, offering a file storage service without also offering two-factor is just stupid. Unlimited storage for $60 a year? Sounds great, but it doesn’t even offer what is more and more becoming a basic security feature.

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