NEW RESOURCES

Big thanks to Janet C for the heads-up! Ohio University has digitized one of its early student newspapers. “The Green and White, Ohio University’s student newspaper from December 1911 to July 1939, has been added to the Libraries’ online Ohio University Student Newspapers collection. More than 1,000 issues of The Green and White are now available and can be found alongside issues of The Post (1999-2011), which were digitized in 2015.”

Those of you interested in privacy when searching may wish to check out this new search engine. “The brand new search engine Peekier has a very different way of handling the mentioned aspects. First off, it doesn’t place cookies, and doesn’t save your IP address or any other information. The results are mainly taken from Bing, which is why you can actually consider Peekier as a true alternative to Google, just by looking at the quantity and quality of the search results. The search keywords are not saved, and aggregrated into a history either. However, they are stored for service purposes, but in a way that prevents them from being assigned to a user.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Washington Post: This app will notify you if Trump tweets about a company you’re invested in. “Trump’s tweets are proving again and again to have the capacity to make significant waves. Now there’s an app that will send a phone notification to users if Trump tweets about any companies where they own stock. The feature was created by Trigger Finance, an app that notifies, or ‘triggers,’ users about changes in market indicators, Business Insider reported. Since the launch of the feature Wednesday, it’s become the most popular trigger on the app, according to the company.”

USEFUL STUFF

A little obscure, but clever. From Barzul: How to capture custom-sized screenshot in Google Chrome. “Learn how to capture a custom-sized screenshot of any web page in Google Chrome without using any extensions. You can customize the screenshot width and length according to your preference.”

Saving this here because I’m thinking about making one for work, from Lifehacker: Build a Silent, Texting Doorbell With an Amazon Dash Button. “The doorbell itself is an Amazon Dash button, while the software that powers it runs on a Raspberry Pi (it can run on any computer, as long as it’s always on). The idea here is as simple as it sounds: someone presses the button on the Dash, you get a text message.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Might be interesting for those of you who work with a lot of vintage multimedia. From Visual News: This is What Snapchat Would Look Like in the 50s. “If you’ve ever used Snapchat, you know just how addicting it can be. Even though the popular app has only been around for a few years, that hasn’t stopped it from becoming one of the most used social sharing tools today. But have you ever wondered what it would have looked like if Snapchat had been around for decades? What about in the 50s? Thanks to Stockfilm, you can now see exactly what that would have looked like.”

From Linux.com: The Best Linux Distros for 2017. You will see neither vanilla Ubuntu or vanilla Mint on this list.

Be careful when you have voice-operated devices around the house and make sure you know the defaults! From The Register: TV anchor says live on-air ‘Alexa, order me a dollhouse’ – guess what happens next. “A San Diego TV station sparked complaints this week – after an on-air report about a girl who ordered a dollhouse via her parents’ Amazon Echo caused Echoes in viewers’ homes to also attempt to order dollhouses.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

BuzzFeed: Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Is A Security Disaster Waiting To Happen. “This is not a far-fetched scenario. Putting aside the specter of state-sponsored Russian hacking, in the past year alone, the Twitter accounts of Kylie Jenner, Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Richards, Sundar Pichai, Drake, Travis Kalanick, the National Football League, and the foreign minister of Belgium (to name a few) were hacked or accessed by someone who wasn’t supposed to have access. Many of these infiltrations didn’t require sophisticated skills or the ability to hack Twitter. Bad actors can often gain access to an account through a third-party app that has permission to post to Twitter, for example. These hacks didn’t take the expertise or resources of a nation-state; some of them were done by a Saudi teenager.”

DARKReading: Non-Web App Vulnerabilities Outpace Web App Flaws. “As experts start to sift through the vulnerability and attack data of the previous year, most statistics bubbling to the surface are anything but surprising. Predictably, researchers pretty much agree across the board that the total number of application vulnerabilities found keeps increasing. But digging deeper, there was a surprise: On the vulnerability front, the total number of Web application vulnerabilities actually decreased in 2016.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

From PC Magazine and the delightfully crabby John Dvorak: Why LinkedIn Under Microsoft Is Doomed. “There are two things Microsoft will most likely do to LinkedIn. The first would be to leave it alone, which—from what I can tell—will worsen the product. But Redmond could also come in and ruin the product with a few years of meddling, just as it did with everything from Nokia to WebTV.”

OTHER STUFF I THINK IS COOL

Interesting! From SingularityHub: You Can Now Wear a Nanoscale Archive of 1,000 Languages Around Your Neck. “Now, anybody can own and wear the Rosetta Disk on a necklace. Shrunken down to a wearable size of two centimeters in diameter, the Rosetta Wearable Disk gives anyone the ability to wear the key to human language for future generations.” Before y’all run off and buy one, I have to spoil the party and tell you this thing costs $1000. Good morning, Internet…

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