NEW RESOURCES

Creative Commons has launched a new image search engine. “While Creative Commons licenses can be used across a variety of media, including video, audio, music, and much more, the search engine for now only focuses on images given that they comprise half of the total commons. The engine pulls in photos from Flickr, 500px, Rijksmuseum, the New York Public Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as its initial sources.” There are over 9 million images in the engine at this writing.

Now available: lots and lots and lots of San Francisco club remixes. “‘Somebody just came and dropped off this whole bag of cassettes,’ Jim Hopkins says, showing me a plastic grocery bag full of hand-labeled tapes sitting in the corner of the DJ booth at 440 in the Castro, where he is the midweek resident. He’s recently been working on a new project, the SF Disco Preservation Society, and he’s taken on the somewhat thankless but admirable task of transferring two decades’ worth of club mixes from local nightlife luminaries like Larry Reed, Ellen Ferrato, David Harness and others from analog tape to digital, and uploading them to his website where you can now listen to them — and work out to them — for free. ‘A lot of these guys are getting up in years,’ Hopkins tells SFist, ‘and this is stuff that shouldn’t be lost.'”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Merriam-Webster Dictionary has added a bunch of new words. “In the website announcement, Merriam-Webster highlights new tech-related terms (binge-watch, ghost someone, NSFW listicles and humblebrags), political phrases (town hall, truther, SCOTUS and FLOTUS) and familiar words that combine to give a metaphor or imagery (train wreck, side-eye, weak sauce and face-palm).”

A new version of Opera is now available. “Opera today announced that version 43 of its Opera web browser is the fastest version ever that it has released for the desktop. It says that instant page loading and Profile Guided Optimization is what makes Opera 43 its fastest version ever for the desktop. It has been working on improving page loading speeds since last year and has already launched features such as page-load speed optimization, native ad-blocking, and faster start-up.”

USEFUL STUFF

HubSpot’s got an extensive overview on how to do 360-degree video. ” 360° video — which could be described as a form of virtual reality that creates immersive visual content without additional hardware other than a screen — isn’t as easy as buying a new camera and uploading your video online. Like any other visual content, it has to be created and shared strategically. Not sure where to begin? We’ve got you covered with these five steps.”

Lifehacker: How to Get Through to Your Member of Congress When Their Phones Are Slammed. “It’s a tough to get through to your representatives right now. Their offices are slammed and phones are ringing off the hook. How can you, the concerned citizen, get your message through? We talked to some staffers to find out.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Seattle Times: Librarians take up arms against fake news. “Janelle Hagen is a school librarian whose job goes far beyond checking out books. She and many other librarians are equipping students to fight through lies, distortion and trickery to find their way to truth. Helping students become smarter evaluators of the information that floods into their lives has become increasingly necessary in an era in which fake news is a constant.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

TechCrunch: Legal challenge to Facebook EU-US data transfer mechanism kicks off in Ireland. “Another legal challenge to a data transfer authorization mechanism relied upon by Facebook and thousands of other companies to legally move user data from the European Union to the U.S. for processing has kicked off in the Irish High Court today. The hearing is expected to last three weeks, and is taking place in Ireland because Facebook’s European headquarters are located in the country.”

Gizmodo: Facebook Makes Bullsh*t Claim It Would Take ‘Wonder Machine’ to Track Hate Speech. [Asterisk added by me.] “On Monday, a Syrian refugee named Anas Modamani and his lawyer appeared in a Würzburg courtroom to duke it out with Mark Zuckerberg’s social network. Modamani sued Facebook over a 2015 selfie he took with German chancellor Angela Merkel. The photo went viral, but it also began to appear with statements saying Modamani was a terror suspect, and a number of fake news reports shared on Facebook falsely linked him to terror attacks in Brussels and Berlin. In court, Modamani’s lawyer Chan-jo Jun argued that Facebook has the technical capability to detect the selfie and prevent it from being spread further.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

CNET: Google just made ‘zoom and enhance’ a reality — kinda. “This, my friends, this glorious TV and movie trope, may be coming true. The ability to ‘zoom and enhance’ an image, one that’s far too low-res for humans to understand, is now way, way closer thanks to a team of AI researchers at Google.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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