NEW RESOURCES

Greater Greater Washington tipped me off about a new resource that shows transit developments across many cities in North America. “Developed by Chicago-based urbanists and transit professionals Yonah Freemark and Steven Vance, the new transit project visualisation is an extension of the popular transit openings and construction starts post that Freemark has published on his blog The Transport Politic annually since 2009.”

The Art Gallery of Ontario has launched an online archive of rare Holocaust photos. “Henryk Ross (1910–1991) was a Polish-Jewish photojournalist employed by the Jewish Administration’s Statistics Department. At great risk to himself, Ross took thousands of photos of daily life in Poland’s Lodz Ghetto, which was occupied by German forces in 1939 and was the country’s second largest ghetto for the Jewish population after Warsaw. Ross hid his negatives by burying them in the ground after the last remaining residents of the ghetto were sent to Auschwitz, and excavated them only after the area was liberated from Nazi occupation in January 1945. Over half of the original 6,000 negatives survived, making his collection one of the largest of its kind to survive the Holocaust.”

The state of Pennsylvania is the latest to show its snow plow locations online. “The public can view the location of more than 500 PennDOT plow trucks and more than 200 contracted rental trucks this winter through the 511PA website.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Now on Snapchat: the White House. “In light of the number of Americans who use the service to consume news and share with their friends, the White House is joining Snapchat to engage this broad cross-section of the population in new and creative ways. Tomorrow, our Official Story will take you behind the scenes of the White House’s State of the Union preparations, with footage and angles you won’t find anywhere else.”

If you’re interested in Android Wear, you’ve got a new Twitter account to follow. @AndroidWear has just one tweet at this writing.

China has begun testing a Tibetan language search engine. “China has begun the trial of its first Tibetan launguage search engine, putting it on course for release in the second half of 2016, the developer said on Monday. ‘Cloud Tibet’ has news, picture, video and audio search options, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.”

USEFUL STUFF

From Free Technology for Teachers: 82 Google Tools Tutorial Videos. (YouTube video playlist.)

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

You may have been hearing about a new iOS app called Peach. The New York Times has an overview.

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Now this is just getting silly. Apparently Trend Micro had a serious security flaw. “Tavis Ormandy, an information security engineer with Google, wrote he found bugs in Trend Micro’s antivirus product that could allow remote code execution by any website and steal all of a users’ passwords.” It’s been patched.

Forbes asked visitors to turn off their ad blockers. Then it served up malware. Really? Sigh.

It’s not quite a bug bounty program, but GM has launched a vulnerability disclosure program. “On January 5, General Motors quietly flipped the switch on Detroit’s first public security vulnerability disclosure program, launched in partnership with the bug bounty and disclosure portal provider HackerOne. General Motors Chief Cybersecurity Officer Jeff Massimilla told Ars the new portal was a first step in creating relationships with outside security researchers and increasing the speed with which GM discovers and addresses security issues.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Dave Winer: It’s time to care about the open Web. “Finally journalists are writing about the problems of silos. It’s the big story of tech, but one that never seems to make headlines, even though the limits of silos have completely formed what we understand as technology, and is in the process of reforming our idea of journalism. Yet the force for change in technology is the opposite of a silo, platforms where there is no lock-in, where it’s easy to switch, where products and services compete only on the basis of performance, features and price.” Yup. Good morning, Internet…

I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!