TWEAKS & UPDATES

Google, catching up with Bing, now offers a metronome. (Bing started offering one last September.) Google’s metronome goes between 40 and 208 BPM.

Google has added more political candidate information to its search. “Google announced today new election-related search results adding campaign funding details for candidate-specific searches, as well as candidate search trend comparisons. Now, searches for a specific candidate, along with the term ‘campaign finance,’ will return campaign finance information from the Center for Responsive Politics.”

USEFUL STUFF

From MakeUseOf: How to make a screencast tutorial with YouTube. I want to try this.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Scientists are making good use of Facebook Live. “Two weeks ago, the astronaut and physiologist Scott Parazynski got tens of thousands of concurrent viewers for an hour-long Q&A on how space travel affects the human body. More than 225,000 people have now seen the low-quality video in which Parazynski handles why people get taller in space and parries queries about UFOs. It’s a kind of live-video version of Reddit’s long-running Ask Me Anything feature.”

This should be interesting: MTV is making (or has made, as it was supposed to be filmed yesterday) a Snapchat music documentary. “MTV is teaming up with A$AP Ferg at South by Southwest to launch its first Snapchat music documentary, Mashable has learned exclusively. Titled ‘MTV Snapchat Docs: Art/Life/A$AP Ferg,’ the Snapchat series will follow the hip-hop star, who was tapped as a a featured artist for the Woodies, MTV’s annual emerging artists showcase at SXSW.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Feeling smug with your iPhone, because it doesn’t have all the malware problems that Android phones can have? Reconsider. “Typically, iPhones containing malware are infected by a malicious application and often on a jailbroken device. AceDeceiver can attack factory-configured (non-jailbroken) iPhones without any downloaded apps by infecting the PC it connects to. iPhone users that don’t connect their device to a PC are thought to be safe.”

Google has launched a new HTTPS transparency report. “The company says over 75 percent of requests to its own servers are now using encrypted connections (though traffic to YouTube is not included in this report).”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Researchers have developed an algorithm that can tell when you’re drunk tweeting. Airplane Mode is your friend. “…it turns out that pinpointing where we decide to tell the internet how wasted we are can tell scientists much more than that. Using the drunk tweeting data it was relatively easy to find the location of a user’s home, for example, due to phrases that referenced things like ‘couch’ and ‘finally back’ and probably a quest for pizza. ” Good afternoon, Internet…

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