morningbuzz

Connecticut Naloxone, FindMyPast, Google Maps, More: Monday Buzz, September 5, 2016

Just to make my life more exciting, my credit card data got stolen last week. I only have one card, so when one of my domain names expired a few days later, I had to let it be until I got my replacement card. So if you’ve tried to use ResearchBuzz.org as a domain and it didn’t work, that’s why. It should be back now. Thank you.

NEW RESOURCES

The state of Connecticut has created an online map to find pharmacies in the state which can prescribe Naloxone. “Governor Dannel P. Malloy today announced that the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection (DCP) has developed a new, interactive online map that will allow consumers to locate pharmacies across the state where pharmacists are certified to prescribe the overdose-reversing medication naloxone – commercially known as Narcan….In 2015, Governor Malloy enacted legislation to make this important medication accessible through a pharmacist prescription, and also ensuring that pharmacists are certified to provide vital information to patients about how to access drug addiction services, administer the medication, and understand the side effects associated with naloxone.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Genealogy peeps! FindMyPast is launching a new subscription offering. “Findmypast has bundled its core US collections, as well as a number of the company’s British offerings, into one package and is offering access to the records at a much lower price than before. In fact, the price is significantly lower than those of the company’s competitors.”

Google Maps has gone Pokemon. Slightly. “The good news for all you Pokemon fans out there is that it looks like Google has decided to add a new Timeline activity option in the form of ‘Catching Pokemon’, meaning that you can now log your Pokemon catching activities while you’re out and about.”

USEFUL STUFF

These look spiffy. From MakeUseOf: 10 Best Educational Chrome Apps for Students. “If you are in high school or college, you have probably seen the number of educational apps available on the Chrome Web Store. It can be tough to narrow it down or find the perfect tool to suit your needs. For specific subjects as well as keeping track of school assignments, grades, and tasks, these 10 Chrome apps will get you off to the right start this school year.”

Google Drive got a makeover/update whatever a while ago and I hate it. I told myself I’d get used to it after a while. Nope, still hate it. Anyway, this is for all my fellow Google-Drive-Interface-Haters: How to See the Number of Files in a Google Drive Folder.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Looks like OpenOffice is in trouble. “Not everyone is in a position to pay for their office software and this led to a market for free Microsoft Office competitors. One of the best known and most popular is OpenOffice, but the open source project is in trouble. Volunteer vice president Dennis E. Hamilton has warned that retirement of the project ‘is a serious possibility’. ” I switched to LibreOffice ages ago; it made OpenOffice look really clunky.

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

The latest giant password breach is Last.fm. “The contents of a March 2012 breach of the music tracking website Last.fm have surfaced on the Internet, joining a collection of other recently leaked ‘mega-breaches’ from Tumblr, LinkedIn, and MySpace. The Last.fm breach differs from the Tumblr breach, however, in that Last.fm knew about the breach when it happened and informed users in June of 2012. But more than 43 million user accounts were exposed, including weakly encrypted passwords—96 percent of which were cracked within two hours by researchers associated with the data breach detection site LeakedSource.”

Chrome has gotten a big security update. Be sure to patch! “The latest Google Chrome browser update comes with 33 vulnerability patches, including 13 that are high-severity. It’s all thanks to community contributors and bug fighters who submitted fixes for Chrome’s bug bounty program. Many of the vulnerabilities fixed in this release were part of the browser’s engine Blink, but some of the more high-severity discoveries were for Chrome’s built-in PDF reader, PDFium.”

A lawsuit over Yahoo’s email privacy has been settled (for a given value of “settled”.) “Days ago, a Silicon Valley federal judge signed off (PDF) on a settlement (PDF). The lawyers won, they were awarded $4 million (£3 million), and the public got nothing. What’s more, the settlement allows Yahoo to continue to scan e-mails without non-Yahoo users’ consent. (Yahoo Mail customers have granted consent to the scanning as a condition of using the service.) The major change the lawsuit produced was that Yahoo is agreeing to scan the e-mail while it’s at rest on its servers instead of while the mail is in transit.”

An in our latest episode of “IP stupidness,” Warner Brothers flags its own site as a pirate site. Read the article. Warner Brothers has done this multiple times.

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Good stuff from Network World: Which countries have open-source laws on the books? “… it’s become increasingly common over the past decade or so to see laws being passed to either mandate the use of open-source software or, at the very least, encourage people in government who make procurement decisions to do so. Here’s a map of the status of open-source laws around the world, via the magic of Google Fusion Tables.” Good morning, Internet…

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