NEW RESOURCES

Microsoft’s overhauled Docs.com has gone public. “First reported by Microsoft-News, the new platform allows users to easily share documents regardless of whether they are Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, Office Mix or Sway with importing available from your PC or even through OneDrive.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WordPress 4.2.4 (a security release) is now available. “This release addresses six issues, including three cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and a potential SQL injection that could be used to compromise a site, which were discovered by Marc-Alexandre Montpas of Sucuri, Helen Hou-Sandí of the WordPress security team, Netanel Rubin of Check Point, and Ivan Grigorov. It also includes a fix for a potential timing side-channel attack, discovered by Johannes Schmitt of Scrutinizer, and prevents an attacker from locking a post from being edited, discovered by Mohamed A. Baset.”

USEFUL STUFF

Reader DA dropped me a note about Fetching ( http://fetching.io/ ), a plugin that lets you save and search your own personal browsing history. “Fetching is a new kind of bookmarking app. It keeps track of all the web pages you visit so you can easily re-find them later. It’s like your own personal Google — a search engine for all the web pages you’ve seen.”

Handy from GHacks: How to Save all Open Tabs Quickly in Your Browser.

From GeneaBloggers: Using Amazon for genealogy. I would have thought eBay would be even better.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The FIDM Museum is trying to crowdfund over $2 million to buy a fashion collection. “Join the FIDM Museum in #4for400, our social media fundraising campaign to acquire the Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection. This remarkable collection of 1,400 rare objects represents 400 years of fashion history. The Helen Larson Collection would serve as a one-of-a-kind cultural treasure for our communities – an inspirational and educational tool for generations to come.”

Iraq is digitizing the Baghdad National Library ahead of threats from Islamic State. “as Islamic State militants set out to destroy Iraq’s history and culture, including irreplaceable books and manuscripts kept in the militant-held city of Mosul, a major preservation and digitization project is underway in the capital to safeguard a millennia worth of history. In darkrooms in the library’s back offices, employees use specialized lighting to photograph some of the most-precious manuscripts.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

A vulnerability in Flash has been used to distribute malvertising. “According to a recent discovery, it seems that hackers have actually been taking advantage of another Flash vulnerability and for the past seven days, they have actually used Yahoo’s ad network to distribute malicious bits of code. The malware was hidden inside Yahoo’s ads which rely on Flash, meaning that anyone who visited a website with Yahoo ads could potentially have been infected.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

From Uber.la: You are killing Twitter. People who bot-tweet the same link four or five times over a 24 hour period annoy the crap out of me. Sure you might get more reactions, but you’re pissing in the data pool. Knock it off.

In the interest of fairness, Some Google+ love. “None of my real-life friends use it, and my grandma definitely doesn’t share any memes there. In fact, a lot of my online friends don’t have Google+ accounts, and those that do don’t use use them. Who says Google+ has to be Facebook, though? There is a select group of people that I follow — about 1,000, actually — that use Google+ every single day. I interact with dozens of posts every day, I share a fair number of my own, and I’ve met some amazing people.” Better hope there are a lot of amazing people out there, or Google will cut your service off at the knees (COUGH Google Reader COUGH).

ProgrammableWeb: The most popular programming languages of 2015. “The Top 10 ranking was calculated with help from computational journalist Nick Diakopoulos. The system was based on weighting and the combination of 12 metrics from 10 data sources, including the IEEE Xplore digital library, GitHub, and CareerBuilder, to determine the popularity of languages from an initial list of 48.” R was #6!

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Hunter Scott wrote a bot that enters Twitter contests. Entered 165,000 contests over a nine-month period, won about 1000. Love the cowboy hat. Good morning, Internet…

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