morningbuzz

Twitter, North Carolina, Android, More: Wednesday Buzz, December 30th, 2015

NEW RESOURCES

A new Web site claims to be able to tell if your tweets are grumpy, happy, neutral, or emo. Apparently mine are more happy than anything else. Must be all that snark talking to Glenn Fleishman.

TWEAKS & UPDATES

The state of North Carolina has updated its online collection of Wildlife magazine. “the magazine has grown into a popular monthly magazine designed to educate the public about North Carolina’s natural heritage and wildlife management practices. The magazine first began including color photographs in the mid-1970s, and the last forty years of this archive include a stunning collection of nature photography. Since 1951, the first issue of odd-numbered years includes the Biennial Report of the Wildlife Resources Commission, and beginning in fall 2011, a special Outdoor Guide has been issued in the fall and a Fishing and Boating Guide in the spring.”

Google is going to strip Oracle’s Java code out of Android. Hopefully while giggling maniacally and muttering “take that!”. “Google has confirmed that it will no longer use proprietary Java application programming interfaces (APIs) from Oracle in future versions of Android, according to VentureBeat. Instead, it will switch to OpenJDK, an open-source version of Oracle’s own Java Development Kit.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 15 Essential Chrome Extensions for Google Drive. Anything that makes Google Drive better is all right with me.

Nevil Patel over at Techno Nutty has a roundup of OCR software. Five online, five desktop.

Macworld: 12 awesome iPhone camera tricks anyone can do. Essential reminder to me that there’s a big difference between pointing your iPhone at something and making an effort to best use the camera.

TubeFilter is publishing a monthly chart of the most popular channels on YouTube. I had seen exactly two of these. A fascinating look at what people are watching.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Here’s your happy story for the day: Google Cardboard was used to help save the life of a baby born with a severe heart defect. “‘Dr. Juan-Carlos Muniz who runs our MRI program came to me two weeks before surgery and handed me a piece of cardboard with a smartphone in it,’ [Dr. Redmond] Burke said. ‘I looked inside and just by tilting my head I could see the patient’s heart. I could turn it. I could manipulate it. I could see it as if I were standing in the operating room.'”

T-Mobile claims it isn’t throttling YouTube, it’s optimizing it. “T-Mobile has tried to downplay concerns this week by saying that its ‘optimizing’ YouTube, rather than ‘throttling’ the service and that ‘using the term “throttle” is misleading.’ A spokesperson told DSL Reports that ‘because video is optimized for mobile devices, streaming from these sites should be just as fast, if not faster than before.’ It’ll just look like crap. Bleah.

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

This is me, sighing. The security software company AVG has a Chrome extension. And until very recently that Chrome extension had a big security hole. “You’d normally expect antivirus software to improve your web browser’s security, but just the opposite was true for AVG until today. The company has fixed an exploit in its protective Chrome extension, WebTuneUp, that would let maliciously-coded websites compromise your PC to a ‘trivial’ degree. It could read your email on the web, for example.”

Russia is telling Google to pay up after a court action by a citizen. “The Moscow city court has dismissed Google’s cassation appeal against the decision to penalize it 50,000 rubles ($688) at the suit of a resident of Russia’s Urals city of Yekaterinburg who alleged that a search engine specialist was reading his private e-mails.”

Another day, another legal action: Facebook must face two shareholder lawsuits. “NEW YORK A federal judge has certified two shareholder class action lawsuits accusing Facebook Inc (FB.O) of hiding concerns about its growth forecasts prior to the social media company’s initial public offering in May 2012.” Good morning, Internet…

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