NEW RESOURCES

Torque Magazine has launched a new online archive. “The magazine, covering the fastener, tool and related industries, is now published ten times a year – with five in print and five exclusively digital enhanced issues. Both enhanced digital and print issues are available to read online in the new archive….”

From the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL): Wilfrid Laurier University makes nationally significant Ipsos polling data freely available to the world. “Wilfrid Laurier University, in collaboration with the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), is making a trove of nationally significant polling data, donated by market research firm Ipsos Canada, freely available to the world online. The data – now available on OCUL’s Scholars Portal Dataverse and platforms – come from a range of opinion polls and surveys on topics such as national and provincial politics, real estate buying habits, and Canadian heritage, among others.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

YouTube Blog: Step into the games with new VR videos. “YouTube’s become a global destination for people who love watching gaming videos. And we want to take gamers’ viewing experience a step further by exploring how VR videos can put them right at the center of the action. That’s why we partnered with gaming creators and publishers to experiment with the production of 360 and VR videos. What’s come out of those experiments, from ‘League of Legends’ to ‘Minecraft,’ was pretty exciting.”

Saturday fun from Kotaku: Twitch Is Marathoning 23 Seasons Of Power Rangers Next Week. “Since its 2013 North American debut, the Power Rangers series has produced 23 complete seasons of television. In celebration of the upcoming live-action movie, Twitch is streaming every single episode in one massive 16-day marathon, kicking off Tuesday, March 14.”

CIO New Zealand: Google offers new ‘Always Free’ cloud tier to attract users. “Google is letting its customers get a taste of its cloud for free, without a time-limited trial. The company quietly launched a new ‘Always Free’ tier on Thursday that lets people use small amounts of its public cloud services without charge, beyond the company’s limited-time trial.”

SEO Roundtable: Google Tests New Video Carousel In Search Results. “Google is testing a new video based carousel in the desktop search results. Pete Meyers from Moz spotted it and posted on Twitter about it.”

USEFUL STUFF

A thread on Reddit pointed me to a Twitter archive tool on GitHub: Shut Up Bird. “Archive and delete your Twitter posts. You’d like to get rid of your old tweets or likes but still have them nicely organized somewhere? Or maybe you want to setup a cron to regularly clean up your timeline? This tool creates an ePub e-book from a range of Twitter posts or likes and then (optionally) deletes them from your timeline.”

Streaming Media Europe: How to Assemble the Perfect Production Platform for Facebook Live. “Facebook Live has taken off like few platforms before it. One reason for its success was broad compatibility with existing live streaming tools and infrastructure: in particular, any product or service that could send a stream to a standard RTMP streaming server could broadcast to and through Facebook Live. However, by opening up Facebook Live’s application programming interface (API), Facebook spawned a range of integrations that both simplify and enhance its customer’s broadcasts. This article identifies some of the key products and services with these integrations in multiple product categories.” Technical but extensive.

I haven’t been linking to much about WikiLeaks because honestly, I don’t trust it, and I don’t like the way it treats the privacy of the civilians who end up in its leaks. (Casually.) But if you’ve been seeing news about WikiLeaks and the CIA, and you want a good overview, MakeUseOf has you covered: CIA Hacking & Vault 7: Your Guide to the Latest WikiLeaks Release. “After multiple teasers from WikiLeaks, on 7th March 2017 the whistle-blowing website released a set of documents called Vault 7. These were purportedly leaked from inside the Center for Cyber Intelligence unit of the CIA. To accompany the Vault 7 documents, WikiLeaks prepared a press release detailing the background and main discoveries of the leak. However, in the hours following its release there were a number of sensational headlines that claimed encryption on apps like WhatsApp and Signal had been compromised. This isn’t true, despite the widespread reporting. So what exactly did the Vault 7 leaks tell us, and should we worry?”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Magazine: Twitter’s Attempt to Protect Users From ‘Sensitive’ Profiles Backfires a Little. “In theory, this isn’t Twitter’s worst move as far as safety features go. It’s still not as bad as those two hours when the company announced it was no longer going to inform users when their handles were added to lists, before quickly realizing that was a nightmare of an idea and reversing it. But it also raises some important questions about how Twitter will decide what content is labeled sensitive, and where the censorship line is drawn.”

CNN: He was president when Twitter was banned; now he’s tweeting . “Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — who was in office when the country banned access to Twitter — joined the social media platform Sunday.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Engadget: Alphabet asks court to halt Uber’s self-driving car project. “Alphabet’s self-driving car division Waymo seeks to completely block Uber’s autonomous vehicle operations, according to new documents filed in federal court Friday. The documents are part of Waymo’s lawsuit filed against Uber last month and the company is seeking a preliminary injunction which could prohibit Uber’s self-driving vehicle tests while the case is ongoing.” Good morning, Internet…

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