TWEAKS AND UPDATES

UC-Berkeley: Berkeley commits to accelerating universal open access, signs the OA2020 Expression of Interest. “The University Library at UC Berkeley took a major step today in its commitment to achieving universal open access for scholarly journal literature by signing the OA2020 Expression of Interest, in collaboration with UC Davis and UC San Francisco. OA2020 is an international movement, led by the Max Planck Digital Library in Munich, to convert the entire corpus of scholarly journal literature to open access by the year 2020. Open access promotes free, immediate access to research articles and the rights to use these articles to advance knowledge worldwide. OA2020 is a framework to achieve open access, and one solution for the rising costs of subscription journals and the need for reduced barriers in accessing and reusing information.”

TechCrunch: The days of Google Talk are over. “The days of Google Talk are quickly coming to an end. As the company announced today, the messaging service that allowed Gmail users to talk to each other since it launched in 2005, will now be completely retired.”

Etsy has released a transparency report. It appears to mostly concern intellectual property violations, from the statistics. “The Transparency Report is one way we demonstrate our commitment to be a mindful, transparent, and humane business. We’re not required to share this information, but we believe that it’s the right thing to do because it reflects our values and helps our community better understand how we approach these important topics. As in prior years, we’ve included information about requests for member information and intellectual property (IP) takedowns, and shared some of the ways we strive to keep Etsy.com a reliable, trustworthy place to shop and do business.”

From the YouTube Blog: Enjoy your personal concert with VR videos on YouTube. “Any music fan will tell you, there’s nothing better than seeing your favorite band live. But if you’re one of the millions of people who can’t make it to a show, YouTube is giving you the next best thing. We’re working with some amazing artists to bring you live performances and music videos in VR.”

The Next Web: These are the 51 new emoji we could see in 2017 . “Soon, you’ll be able to rave about dinosaurs, beards, and monocles solely through the use of emoji. Emojipedia recently created a mock-up of potential emoji in Apple-style. These were among the dozens of emoji proposed for inclusion in Unicode 10 last year.” I suspect the “exploding head” one could get a lot of use.

USEFUL STUFF

Barbara Feldman: 3 Easy Ways to Compress Images that are Too Big to Upload to WordPress. “In order to control site loading times, disk space used, and as a security measure, WordPress limits the file size of any image uploaded to the Media Library. The default maximum size is 2MB. You can change this limit (in php.ini, .htaccess, or wp-config.php) if you wish, but that’s a lesson for another day. Here are three free online tools for optimizing images that are too big to upload.”

MakeUseOf: Secure Your Facebook With These 6 Simple Tricks. “Facebook’s ubiquity makes it dangerous in so many ways. Aside from the threat of picking up malware, the ever-present risk of someone hacking your account — plus privacy issues from Facebook itself — mean you must be vigilant when using the service. Thankfully, it only takes a few moments to make sure you’re not at risk for Facebook issues. Here are six easy ways to avoid becoming a victim on Facebook.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Bloomberg Quint: Deciphering Google Searches Seen as Luxury Investors’ Must-Have. “The new essential for luxury investors is a tool for looking beyond the latest line of Prada purses and Birkin bags. It’s Google searches. That’s according to Macquarie analysts who say that in a stock-picker’s world, an uptick in exploration via the world’s biggest advertising company is a good sign that a retailer is gaining strength.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Outlook India: HC directs Google, YouTube to remove objectionable video clips. “A full bench of the Bombay High Court today directed Google India and YouTube to immediately remove video clips posted on websites recently which allegedly show judiciary in bad light and bring disrepute to the Judges. Complaints which defame judiciary should be brought to the notice of the High Court Registry which in turn would inform Google and YouTube about these objectionable video clips, said the full bench headed by Chief Justice Manjula Chellur.”

CBR: Symantec dealt major blow as Google loses trust in security certificates. “Google are aiming to boost the confidence of Chrome users with engineers announcing plans to reduce trust in Symantec certificates. This gradual shift is set to reach a point in early 2018 when Chrome 64 will only trust certificates that are issued from Symantec for 279 days or less. The scale of the misissuance by Symantec has exploded from an initial 127 certificates under scrutiny, to a figure noted as at least 30,000.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT Technology Review: Machine Learning Opens Up New Ways to Help Disabled People. “FCC rules require TV stations to provide closed captions that convey speech, sound effects, and audience reactions such as laughter to deaf and hard of hearing viewers. YouTube isn’t subject to those rules, but thanks to Google’s machine-learning technology, it now offers similar assistance.”

World Jewish Congress: An anti-Semitic post is uploaded to social media every 83 seconds, WJC research finds. “The World Jewish Congress has found that more than 382,000 anti-Semitic posts were posted to social media platforms over the course of 2016 – an average of more than 43.6 posts per hour, or one post every 83 seconds. The WJC survey, conducted by the Israeli monitoring firm Vigo Social Intelligence, also determined that an overwhelming 63 percent of all anti-Semitic content online can be found on Twitter.” The full report and detailed analysis of this study will be released next month. Good morning, Internet…

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