NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me: an online archive of photographs taken in New York City in the 1990s. From the front page: “This blog is dedicated to my collection of personal NYC photos. As a film student and a young writer/photographer in the 1990’s, I always carried a camera with me. You will find here over 1000 images of long gone NYC landmarks, transformed locations and NY street scenes all taken between 1991 and 1998.”

Citizens of South Africa have a new tool for getting information on municipal budgets. “Municipal Money, a new web based tool built for National Treasury by Code for South Africa, makes this information for all South African municipalities accessible in an easy-to-understand format with a few clicks of a mouse. The site also links to all the original Treasury source documents allowing anyone with the requisite skills to dig deeper. It is searchable by municipality or street address, and it also allows side-by-side comparisons between two municipalities.”

New records regarding UFO sightings in Spain are now available online. I could only find the story at this one source. This source is indexed by Google News, but I’m not super-confident. Alas, my Spanish is not good enough to dig for more possibilities.

The Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at UT Dallas is launching a new Web site to bridge the gap between medical treatment and art. “The institute’s Art and Medicine website will include research and programming on the innovative partnerships between art museums and medical schools developing initiatives for students to strengthen their diagnostic and clinical skills through art. The website also will host documents from the first national forum examining art museum and medical school partnerships bridging the arts and sciences through collaborative programs.”

GoDaddy has launched a search engine for emoji domain names. “Technically, emoji domains have been around for years. GoDaddy provides a timeline on its search site. But they were difficult to search for and required some understanding of how the domain name system handles characters. (If ASCII or Punycode mean anything to you, you probably already knew about emoji-based domains.) GoDaddy’s site aims to make it easy for anyone with a phone to find available emoji domains.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Looks like Giphy might have a home for your Vine videos. “The Vine.io website will not be shut down, as Twitter’s earlier announcement specified, but instead will act as a digital archive for the videos. Giphy is offering its importation tool as an alternative means of saving that content.” The import tool is not yet available.

Facebook Live has added new filters for Halloween. “The limited edition masks include a jack-o’-lantern, a witch, a skeleton, and a few animals. This is the first time Facebook has introduced Snapchat-style face filters. The filters are admittedly less flattering than Snapchat’s, but if you want to look like half your face skin is peeling off, it’s a pretty good option.”

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive has gotten some upgrades. “The archive is switching from a low-resolution real media format to the current web standard, which is higher quality. Through generous funding by the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation, one HD server was purchased, enabling future broadcasts to be available in HD. The new server is capable of recording 10 channels at a time.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the Dakota Pipeline protest is on Facebook Live. “Chairman of the Sioux Standing Rock Tribe called the police tactics disproportionate, and said they included using rubber bullets. Activists said some of the protesters were kept in dog kennels after they were arrested. Protesters took to social media to show police cordons in head-to-toe military gear and armored vehicles on the land where the pipeline is being erected.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Naked Security has a would-be-funny-if-it-weren’t-so-awful story about a recently patched PayPal security bug. “In a delightfully short and sweet technical article, UK security researcher Henry Hoggard recently reported on a PayPal authentication bug he found. He was paid a bounty by PayPal, and the hole is now closed, so revealing it doesn’t give away any security secrets that might still be abused… …so we thought we’d tell you the story, given that it’s Friday afternoon and all that, because it’s almost funny.”

Not the way it usually goes: a Japanese court has rejected a man’s request to have the record of his arrest removed from Google search results. “The Tokyo District Court dismissed on Friday a man’s claim demanding that Google Inc. remove a record of his arrest on a fraud charge more than 10 years ago in internet search results. Presiding Judge Katsuhiko Okazaki said in the ruling, ‘Leaving the fact of the arrest known at low cost serves the public interest.'”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Hey! Using Google Glass to learn morse code. “Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have built a system that can teach people morse code while they’re concentrating on something else entirely. To do it, they modified a set of Google Glass (remember that?), which has a built-in speaker and bone-conduction transducer that simulates the experience of being tapped on the side of the head.” Good morning, Internet…

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