NEW RESOURCES

The Baseball Hall of Fame has launched a new Web site focusing on Latino players. “La Vida Baseball was founded with the goal of celebrating Latino baseball, from the streets of Latin America to the major leagues. The platform will bring stories from the past to life and provide a new outlet for today’s athletes and fans to discuss the game through written stories as well as video and social content. La Vida Baseball’s expert staff and contributors, led by noted baseball historian Dr. Adrian Burgos, Jr., will combine storytelling and historical perspective, while socially-driven videos and cultural commentary will bring these stories to a broader Latino audience.”

CCTV: Joint efforts to make ancient books available online. “Gone are the days when you had to make a trip to the local library to borrow and then return a book. A joint effort made by five libraries in China have uploaded a large bunch of ancient books onto the internet. Now by clicking a mouse, you can read as much as 24,000 time-honored books of various categories. The National Library of China, Shanghai Library, Tianjin Library, Zhejiang Library and Yunnan Library unveiled their latest batch of ancient books available on their websites.”

Times of Malta: 3D map tools of Maltese islands launched. “The 3D map tools cover the whole of the Maltese islands and up to one nautical mile offshore. Users of the tools can fly around the data and view their zone of interest in new ways, including newly-published marine zones, such as underwater artefacts. For example, they can see sea-level rises and ancient coasts around the Maltese islands. The tools can also be used to measure and calculate heights, distances and areas.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Dmoz is finally being killed off. “Dmoz, one of the longest standing, human curated, directories on the Internet will be shut down for good on March 14, 2017. Directories played a huge part in the early days of the Internet, especially if they were curated by companies or volunteers.” And then payola and system-scamming ruined everything. Wrap your head around this: Dmoz lasted longer than Google Reader.

Box has added a new collaboration option (PRESS RELEASE). “Box, Inc. (NYSE: BOX) today introduced breakthrough updates to Box Notes, a real-time collaboration tool for teams built directly into Box. Available now, the new Box Notes features a streamlined web experience that makes it easy to create, edit and view all of your notes within a single browser window, and a new standalone desktop application for Mac and PC.”

TechCrunch: Facebook tests reaction and Dislike button (!) on messages. What could POSSIBLY go wrong? “Facebook finally has a Dislike button, but it’s not where you’d expect. How do you reply to a specific message in a rapid-fire chat thread? Facebook wants you to attach emojis to your friends’ messages the same way you do with News Feed posts.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: Wildfire Creates Automator-Like Workflows in Chrome. “Automator is one of the easiest ways to automate tasks on your Mac, and the ability to record mouse actions makes it so just about anyone can create their own workflows within seconds. Wildfire is a Chrome extension that attempts to bring a similar feature to Chrome.” Oooooooooooo.

TorrentFreak: Which VPN Services Keep You Anonymous in 2017?. “VPN services have become an important tool to counter the growing threat of Internet surveillance. Encrypting one’s traffic through a VPN connection helps to keep online communications private, but is your VPN truly anonymous? We take a look at the logging policies of dozens of top VPN providers.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Whoa! From The Guardian: Chinese official calls for easing of internet censorship. “China’s sprawling internet censorship regime is harming the country’s economic and scientific progress, a senior official has said in a rare public rebuke of longstanding Communist party policy. Internet restrictions had also cooled enthusiasm among overseas investors and should be relaxed for politically innocuous content, said Luo Fuhe, vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the top advisory body to China’s rubber-stamp parliament.”

Miami Herald: US police agencies with their own DNA databases stir debate. “Dozens of police departments around the U.S. are amassing their own DNA databases to track criminals, a move critics say is a way around regulations governing state and national databases that restrict who can provide genetic samples and how long that information is held.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

If you like living dangerously, you might want to check out this third-party patch for a recently-disclosed Windows vulnerability. “A new project going by the name of 0patch has created a ‘0patch’ for a zero-day, addressing the Windows gdi32.dll memory disclosure (CVE-2017-0038) yet to be fixed by Microsoft. As the issue is unlikely to receive an official patch until at least the middle of March, this third-party option is all that’s available for now.”

eWeek: Google Volunteer Team Patches Thousands of Open-Source Projects. “A 50-member team of Google engineers voluntarily worked to patch 2,600 open-source projects against a Java deserialization bug in 2016. A Google security researcher this week offered the first details on an effort by a 50-member volunteer team at the company last year to help patch more than 2,600 open-source projects against a critical vulnerability in a widely used Java process.” Good morning, Internet…

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