TWEAKS AND UPDATES

It looks like Google Maps might be bringing back reviews from anonymous users, which makes perfect sense because there’s absolutely no issue with fraud on Google Maps and no ongoing issue with consumer review fraud online in general. (Is that clear enough or do I need to bust out the irony font?)

More Google: Google Play is getting the Google Play Family Library. “It works like this. Everyone in the group will be able to access every single app, video and book that’s available to the account holder. If you decide to let the kids run wild on your media collection, you can even remove specific titles from the library to keep it more kid-friendly, or hide certain artists you might not want to share with others…”

USEFUL STUFF

From Witness: Four Ways to Save Live Video Broadcasts. Best as far as new information is #4.

Evernote? OneNote? Google Keep? How about Zoho Notebook? “Everyone’s note-taking needs and styles are different, and there probably isn’t a single app that satisfies them all. To that end, I was pleasantly surprised to see productivity software maker Zoho take a crack at this with its new Notebook app for iOS and Android.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Facebook banned gun sales, so now people are selling cans of Hawaiian Punch and throwing the guns in for free. Very expensive Hawaiian Punch.

Ouch. TurboPatent does not have anything nice to say about Yahoo’s patent holdings. “A summary of the report, published Monday by TurboPatent, claims that 44% of the thousands of patents have “high severity” issues and that nearly all of the patents, including pending ones, have deficiencies that could lead them to be invalidated. ”

From Slate: Why Twitter Won’t Give Us an Edit Button. Filled with lovely SlateSnark: “We got a partial explanation last fall from Kevin Weil, then the company’s head of product, who said at a Recode conference in October that nothing was imminent. ‘There are real challenges to editing tweets after you post them,’ he said. For instance, an edit that changes the meaning of a tweet could present problems for those who had rebroadcast it, because their commentary around it might no longer make sense. In the worst case, a user could theoretically tweet something benign, get it circulated widely, then change it to something offensive or graphic. OK, so: There are challenges. If only Twitter had a staff of hundreds of highly skilled engineers, designers, and product managers, plus $3.5 billion in cash on hand, perhaps it could solve them!”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Tuesday was a big fat Patch Tuesday. “Being part of Patch Tuesday, yesterday’s update rollout addresses security flaws in the Windows kernel, the Edge browser, the way BitLocker works and the way Windows handles printer drivers. All in all 52 vulnerabilities were addressed by this recent wave of patches, the vast majority of which allowed for remote code execution on affected machines.”

More lawsuits against tech companies, only this one is against Facebook, Google… and WordPress? “The Tel Aviv municipality and eight social workers employed by the city filed a lawsuit on Monday against media giants Facebook, WordPress and Google, seeking 2 million shekels (about $516,000). The suit accuses these companies of providing a platform for severe defamation and harassment of the social workers.”

The latest company to start a bug bounty program makes cars (PRESS RELEASE). “Reflecting the rapidly increasing convergence of connectivity technology and the automotive industry, FCA US LLC today announced the launch of a public bug bounty program on the Bugcrowd platform to enhance the safety and security of its consumers, their vehicles and connected services.” “FCA US” not ringing any bells? It used to be The Chrysler Group.

RESEARCH AND OPINION

I’ve known about this article for a while and I’m so glad it’s finally online: “‘Police took my homie I dedicate my life 2 his revenge’: Twitter tensions between gang-involved youth and police in Chicago”. “The hostile and adversarial relationship between youth and police in urban settings has remained pervasive and persistent for centuries. This is a tension historically rooted in the miasma of lack of trust; racial, ethnic, and cultural differences; and fear, anger, and hostility from racialized surveillance and policing. Indeed, most Black youth have little contact with police unless it involves harsh profiling and/or criminalization. In this article, we leverage the policing literature to examine how the perpetual detestation between urban youth and police is expressed in physical and digital contexts (e.g., Twitter).”

In case you were wondering: How well does Google index Harvard’s open-access repository? “From spring of 2015 to the spring of 2016, Rebecca Lewis (UMass-Boston), Alexis Dhembe (Simmons College), and Mark Jemerson (Simmons College) systematically searched for DASH works in Google and Google Scholar. They picked samples from several different categories of DASH records: peer-reviewed articles, working papers, dissertations, conference presentations, old deposits, new deposits, long deposits, short deposits, PDFs, and non-PDFs. They searched for these works by title, and by unique phrases from within the texts. They searched in plain Google and in Google Scholar. Altogether they tested the Google-discoverability of nearly 1,000 works in DASH.” Good morning, Internet…

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