NEW RESOURCES

Punk zine Maximum Rocknroll, which has been around since forever (or 1977) is raising money to create a digital archive of punk. “Since 1977, Bay Area punk institution Maximum Rocknroll has been producing a radio show, publishing a monthly magazine, releasing records, organizing shows, and supporting worldwide punk projects. As MRR enters its 40th year, we are undertaking our most ambitious project ever: creating a comprehensive online database of our record collection and music reviews. The project will also see out-of-print issues of the magazine fully digitized. We’re asking for your help to make it possible.” At this writing MRR has raised almost $10,000 of the $15,000 goal.

Wow: Opera has released a free VPN app for iOS. “Opera’s new VPN app for iOS is free for everybody with no restrictions on the amount of data that it can be used for. Like all of the previous VPN integrations that Opera has done, this one also uses the SurfEasy VPN service that Opera acquired in March last year.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Google Street View has added imagery from Argentina. “In its more than 2.7 million square kilometers, Argentina is home of some of the most spectacular natural settings on the globe. Starting today in Street View, you can experience a selection of Argentina’s most breathtaking national parks right from your Google Maps app for Android or iOS.”

An online art archive is going offline at the end of the year. ” Turbulence.org, an online project that has commissioned new net art and networked hybrid artworks since the mid-1990s, announced over the weekend it would be going offline on December 31, 2016. According to the announcement — made via a mass email to past and present artists, as well as in a public Facebook update — the organization can no longer sustain the operating costs needed to maintain its online archive.”

Yahoo has launched a new Labs feature for Tumblr. Nice idea at least two years too late. “Yahoo-owned blogging platform Tumblr quietly launched a new program today called Tumblr Labs that will allow users to opt-in to testing out new and experimental features on the site. Some of the initial experiments are of a more frivolous nature – like being about to change the color of a post on your Dashboard, for example. Meanwhile, other experiments may appeal to those who use the service in a more professional fashion – like an advanced queuing system for scheduled posts.”

Dropbox has a new “Education” service tier. “The new offering is quite similar to the Business tier albeit at a discount. Pricing starts at $49 per user, per year with a minimum of 300 users although Dropbox is open to the idea of working with smaller teams. There’s also volume pricing should you need additional licenses.”

All signs point to an eminent Facebook chatbot invasion. “There are more than 10,000 developers building bots for Facebook’s messaging platform, Messenger’s head of product said in an interview Tuesday. Speaking in an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt on Tuesday, Stan Chudnovsky said there are ‘tens of thousands’ of developers currently working on bots for the platform. That represents a huge increase from the few dozen bots that initially launched.”

Don’t want to sign in with Facebook? How about signing in with Slack? “Slack is colonizing the enterprise landscape beyond the walls of its own app. Today, the company is unveiling a new feature called ‘Sign in with Slack’ — which will let Slack users sign into and use other apps using their Slack identities.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

A US senator is getting into Facebook “Trending News” kerfuffle. “Republican Senator John Thune has asked that if the allegations are true the company is misleading the public about the feature. [I’m having a little trouble parsing that – TJC.] His letter asks Facebook to respond to questions quickly and prepare staff to brief members of Congress.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Hey, it’s Tuesday! And that means it’s security patch day! “Adobe has issued security updates to fix weaknesses in its PDF Reader and Cold Fusion products, while pointing to an update to be released later this week for its ubiquitous Flash Player browser plugin. Microsoft meanwhile today released 16 update bundles to address dozens of security flaws in Windows, Internet Explorer and related software.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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