NEW RESOURCES

Now available: a database of vessels authorized to fish outside of EU waters between 2010 and 2014. “Three non-government organizations have announced the first-ever global website intended to fishing transparency throughour the Eurpean Union (EU). The Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), Oceana and WWF heralded a new era of fisheries transparency with the launch of an online database detailing 15,264 EU vessels authorised to fish outside EU waters between 2010 and 2014.”

Yahoo has launched Livetext, which sounds like a mutant combination of Snapchat, Vine, and Periscope. “Yahoo Livetext puts your words and your friend’s real-time reactions at the center of your conversation. Whether you’re watching Avicii DJ at the Creamfields Festival, at Venice Beach or taking in the view from the Eiffel Tower, you can spontaneously connect with the people you care about and invite them to experience moments with you. Your friend’s goofy look or giant smile, even her eye roll or silent sigh, suddenly become a part of your conversation. Simple conversations are transformed into vivid, authentic and memorable experiences that you can share anytime.”

Just can’t wait to upgrade to Windows 10? The ISO file is now available for download.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Congress.gov has gotten another set of updates. I’ll quote a couple of highlights. “We want to make Congress.gov more accessible, and our new feature, ‘Listen,’ helps us deliver on this goal. Listen appears on bill summary pages and will read the text of the bill summary aloud to you. If you would like to focus on certain text, you can highlight it and Listen will read the highlighted text to you. You can also download an audio file of the bill summary to listen to it on the go….When we released Congress.gov in 2012, you let us know that you wanted more content included in the appropriation tables to simplify the process of tracking appropriations. We listened, and delivered new appropriation tables with enhanced content, starting with a table for the most recent fiscal year, 2016. We continue to work our way back, and now have appropriation tables with enhanced content going back to 2005.”

The release candidate for WordPress 4.3 is now available.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Twitter is being sued for failing to remove a copyrighted photo. “Award-winning photographer Kristin Pierson has filed a lawsuit against Twitter, claiming that the social network failed to remove one of her photos. In a complaint filed at a federal court in California, Pierson demands a restraining order and compensation for the damage she suffered.”

Medical librarians, you may appreciate this: there’s a Twitter ‘bot out there that’s tweeting an ICD-10 code every minute. “EveryICD10 has been sharing a new ICD-10 code and description on the social media platform by the minute since July 9, when it first tweeted, ‘E73.8 Other lactose intolerance #icd10.’ Since then it has posted more than 14,500 codes, which at that rate could set it up to finish sharing all 68,000 of them by Oct. 1 when the new diagnostic library goes live.”

VentureBeat took a test drive of Google’s Your Timeline and seems to come away impressed but disturbed. “The last time Google did this — with Google Latitude — users could share such personal information with others. This time around, that’s not possible. It’s private — just as Google Photos, unlike the old Google+ Photos, wasn’t explicitly designed to be used for sharing. Indeed, Google Photos is fun to use for your own personal archival purposes, and people might well find themselves saying the same thing about the new Your Timeline service. The only trouble is, if Google can accurately reflect where you’ve been, things could get a little spooky.”

From the New York Times: Facebook Expands in Politics, and Campaigns Find Much to Like. “Since 2012, Facebook has doubled its government and politics team, which includes a political ad sales group, a data communications team and employees devoted solely to Democrats or Republicans. Katie Harbath, who was previously the chief digital strategist at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, oversees the political strategy side of Facebook’s Washington-based team. And Facebook has rolled out several tools since the last presidential election to help campaigns reach voters more efficiently and effectively. The two most important, campaigns and operatives said, are the site’s improved video capacities and the ability for campaigns to upload their voter files directly to Facebook.”

Is Twitter looking at Facebook too much for inspiration? (They are if they go to algorithim-only timeline displays). “Twitter leadership told investors on Tuesday they were considering revamping the entire look of the service to more closely mirror its ‘While You Were Away’ mobile feature – as Facebook-like as Twitter gets – in an effort to increase general interest in the product. A base of Facebook’s size – about 1.4 billion users against Twitter’s 300 million – isn’t a realistic goal, said Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research Group, who still has the stock listed as a ‘buy’.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

A new phishing campaign uses Google Drive. “A new attack that uses phishing web pages hosted on Google Drive has been discovered by Aditya K Sood, architect of Elastica Cloud Threat Labs, and his research team. The attack lends Google credibility to fool security-trained users exploiting the trust users have with Google. This latest attack was built on previous techniques from last year by adding advanced code obfuscation.” Good morning, Internet…

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