A genealogy Web site is causing a lot of privacy concerns. “A site advertised as a family history and genealogy site known as FamilyTreeNow.com has been online since 2014, but is suddenly getting a lot of buzz on social media about all the personal information it publishes – but there is good news, you can opt out and have your personal details removed.” I tried the opt-out mechanism and am happy to report that it does work.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Microsoft will end security bulletins next month. “Microsoft next month will stop issuing detailed security bulletins, which for nearly 20 years have provided individual users and IT professionals information about vulnerabilities and their patches. One patching expert crossed his fingers that Microsoft would make good on its pledge to publish the same information when it switches to a new online database.”

I have mentioned Kevin Savetz and his “printable” Web sites in ResearchBuzz from time to time. Now he has a printables site for the US Constitution and other documents. “This site offers free, printable versions of the founding documents of our Republic, including the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, and other rights laid out by America’s founders.”

Google Operating System: Google Image Search Starts Playing YouTube Videos. “Google Image Search’s mobile interface tests a new feature that starts playing snippets from a YouTube video at the top of the search results page. It’s not disclosed as an ad, there’s no sound and you can’t stop or hide the video, which continues to play on repeat.”

Apparently Donald Trump will keep using Twitter from his own personal account. “NBC News reporter Kelly O’Donnell reports that transition officials say that while the administration will take control of the @POTUS account, Trump himself will stick to tweeting from his personal account.”

USEFUL STUFF

Konbini: Harvard Is Putting Its Photography Classes Online For Free. “Following in the footsteps of Stanford University, Harvard has announced that they are going to make their photography classes available for free online. The prestigious university has uploaded the program to their online platform Alison.”

Lifehacker: Roll Your Own, Self-Hosted Image Gallery with Chevereto. “For many people, Google Photos, Flickr, and other cloud-based image hosting services are perfect for backing up photos, sharing them, and organizing them into galleries. If you’d rather use a self-hosted solution you control, or maybe use one in addition to those cloud services, Chevereto is worth a look.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Soldiers in India have been advised not to use social media as an outlet for complaints. “Army Chief General Bipin Rawat on Sunday speaking at the Army Day Parade held in the national capital asked soldiers to not to use the social media platform for complaints also warned them of a strict action if proper procedure is not followed in filing complaints.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

From TorrentFreak, which is always worth a read: Porn Pirate Sites Use ‘Backdoor’ to Host Videos on YouTube. “Adult themed streaming sites are using a loophole in Google’s services to store infringing material at no cost. Google’s servers are increasingly being used as a hosting platform, by exploiting YouTube’s private publishing backdoor.”

BetaNews: The list of most common passwords of 2016 includes a few surprises. “Security breaches and data leaks are, obviously, a major concern, but they do have something of a silver lining. Leaks of passwords may open up the risk of individual accounts being targeted, but they also serve as a fascinating insight into the level of security people use for online services.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

ScienceBlog: Teens unlikely to be harmed by moderate digital screen use. “Parents and pediatricians alike may worry about the effects of teens’ screen time, but new findings from over 120,000 adolescents in the UK indicate that the relationship between screen time and well-being is weak at best, even at high levels of digital engagement. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.”

Kalev Leetaru in Forbes: Why Aren’t We Doing More With Our Web Archives? “Since the early days of the web there have been myriad projects launched to archive and preserve the digital world that increasingly powers our global society. Perhaps the best known is the Internet Archive, which has been crawling and preserving the open web for more than two decades. As of last October the Archive had preserved more than 510 billion distinct URLs (images, videos, style sheets, scripts, PDFs, Microsoft Office files, etc) from over 273 billion web pages gathered from 361 million websites and taking up more than 15 petabytes of storage. Much of this collection is available through the Archive’s public-facing Wayback Machine that allows you to plug in any URL and see all of the Archive’s snapshots capturing its evolution over the past 20 years. With such an incredible repository of global society’s web evolution, why don’t we see more applications of this unimaginable resource?” Good morning, Internet…

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