NEW RESOURCES

All of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speeches are now available online. “The archive includes more than 46,000 pages of drafts, reading copies and transcripts. The library’s complete collection of audio recordings of FDR is also available online for the first time.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Dropbox is shutting down its Mailbox and Carousel services. “It was no secret Dropbox had let Mailbox wither away since acquiring it, and now the company has announced it will be shutting the service down along with its photo service, Carousel.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf has an extensive guide to Google Drive.

From Gizmodo: 16 Hidden Chrome Settings Worth Tweaking. “The chrome://flags page is a strange and wonderful trove of hidden settings for Google’s browser. It lets you peek under the hood of the application and tinker around with some experimental options not yet ready for prime time. Here are 16 of the most useful flag settings you might want to tweak.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Facebook is shutting down its Creative Labs division. Silly me, I thought that was a sound card company. “Since it was founded two years ago, Creative Labs has been one of the most interesting parts of Facebook. Built as a startup within the company, it built a series of experimental social apps designed to test new interfaces and interaction patterns. But the experiments have come to an end: Facebook said today that the division has been shuttered. As a result, the division’s apps are being discontinued.”

Google’s removal of some search results from its Israel search engine is shrouded in a bit of mystery. “Google has removed from its Israeli portal google.co.il the results of a search that refer to a famous businessman who in the past served as a double agent for the KGB and the Shin Bet security service, and whose name was under a gag order imposed by the military censorship – according to a report on Sunday on the Israel media website the Seventh Eye. But Google is hinting that the removal is due to libel suits rather than the military censor. A source at Google, who requested anonymity, said that the company had not received any requests related to the businessman.”

Looks like Yahoo might hang on to Alibaba. If they do they can still point to the company having value… “After that long and tumultuous journey, it appears that Yahoo has given up on its plans to spin off its stake in Alibaba, CNBC reports. Instead, the company is now considering the sale of its core business. Yahoo could announce its new plans as soon as Wednesday, Dec. 9, according to CNBC.” Can we start calling them Yalibaba now?

Google has announced its best of 2015 on Google Play, or, as I like to call it, “The annual reminder that I am completely out of touch”.

From Popular Photography: How the Baseball Hall of Fame Is Trying to Preserve Classic Photographs “Even if you’re a huge baseball fan, the name Charles M. Conlon is probably still not a familiar one. But, he’s responsible for some truly amazing and enduring photographs taken during some of baseball’s golden years. There’s currently a large-scale effort to restore some of his recovered work for display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Oh look, another Flash update. “The December update fixes 78 CVE-classified security vulnerabilities in Flash Player for OS X, Windows, Linux, and Android. The patch includes 75 separate vulnerabilities that could be exploited by an attacker to remotely execute code on a vulnerable system.” Seventy-five!

I’ve heard about this for Google, but not for Yahoo. But a court in Japan has ordered Yahoo Japan to remove some pages from its search results. “The Tokyo District Court has issued an injunction ordering Yahoo Japan Corp. to remove some Internet search results that a Japanese man claimed suggest he may have been involved in a crime in the past, sources said Monday.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

It is 2015, so of course there is a Miss Piggy chatbot. On Facebook Messenger. I tried chatting with her but got no response. I am not cool enough for Miss Piggy. Good morning, Internet…

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