NEW RESOURCES

WisBlawg: WI DOJ Launches Attorney General Opinion Archive. “The Wisconsin Department of Justice has recently launched an archive of formal Attorney General opinions. The opinions, in PDF, are available from the first bound volume of opinions in 1912 to the present.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Next Web: Microsoft commits to major Windows 10 releases every 6 months. “Get ready to receive major Windows updates faster than ever. Just a few weeks after shipping the Creators Update, Microsoft says it now plans on releasing new versions of Windows in a ‘predictable twice-per-year’ pattern: once in March, and once in September.”

TechCrunch: Facebook will license its new 360 cameras that capture in six degrees of freedom. “On day two of Facebook’s F8 conference, Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer showed off designs for two new 360 cameras that the company is going to help push to market. The x24, with 24 cameras, and its little brother the x6, with six cameras, can each capture in six degrees of freedom for more immersive 360 content. Facebook plans to license the designs of the two cameras to select commercial partners to get each to market later this year.”

USEFUL STUFF

Sangaline: Internet Archaeology: Scraping time series data from Archive.org. “Skip to the Wayback Machine Scraper GitHub repo if you’re just looking for the completed command-line utility or the Scrapy middleware. The article focuses on how the middleware was developed and an interesting use case: looking at time series data from Reddit.”

MakeUseOf: How to Use Google’s Services Without a Gmail Account. “If you want to use Google Analytics to track your website’s traffic or find yourself needing access to Google Drive and Google Docs (or any of the many services Google offers), you don’t actually have to use a Gmail account to access them. You can use your existing email address instead!”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Google is celebrating Earth Day today. “Today’s Earth Day Doodle tells the story of a friendly fox whose bad dream about about climate change jolts it into action. The fox goes on a quest to care for the Earth—meeting some familiar faces along the way.”

Marketing Land: Hands on with Facebook’s AR Studio to create Snapchat-like camera effects. “People can upload 2D and 3D image assets, then arrange them into selfie masks, animated augmented-reality environments or a mix of both and play around with them in an in-app simulator. They can even test the masks on a diverse gallery of actors to ensure they work for everyone and write code to control their animations and access off-Facebook data, like a map of someone’s latest run. Facebook’s AR Studio is rolling out in a closed beta, so it will be a while until most people get their hands on it. Luckily, during its F8 developer conference in San Jose, Calif., this week, Facebook hosted a series of sessions and erected a booth to demo the software. Here is what it’s like to use.”

Artsy: Garage Museum Is Documenting All of Russia’s Art. “One hundred years have passed since the Russian Revolution, and several decades since the end of the Cold War. For many people today, however, Russia remains the same, the ‘riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’ that Winston Churchill declared it to be in 1939. But the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow is on a mission to paint a clear picture of at least one reality of Russian life—the art that is being made across the country.” A digital archive is one of the initiatives underway.

RadioFreeEurope: Two Years On, No Second Thoughts On Opening Ukraine’s KGB Archives ‘To Everyone’. “Just over two years ago, on April 9, 2015, Ukraine’s parliament adopted a historic law on opening up the country’s Soviet-era secret-police archives. In the new law’s first full year in effect, requests for information and access boomed by 138 percent.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Ghana News Agency: Government will regulate indecent social media content – President. “President Nana Akufo-Addo on Thursday said his government would institute regulations to guide and control indecent social media content. He said regulating indecent communication was essential and could help control content posted on social media, which would also avoid denigrating Ghanaian societal norms and values.”

CIO: IoT malware clashes in a botnet territory battle. “Mirai — a notorious malware that’s been enslaving IoT devices — has competition. A rival piece of programming has been infecting some of the same easy-to-hack internet-of-things products, with a resiliency that surpasses Mirai, according to security researchers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Week: Google is a monopoly — and it’s crushing the internet. “Five to 10 years ago, independent bloggers used to be able to get by on internet advertising, like the broadsheets of yore. But that changed quite quickly, and for two big reasons: Facebook and Google. They now gobble up the vast majority of internet advertising dollars — about 85 percent, as my colleague Jeff Spross writes — and a great many media outlets have been forced to move to direct subscriptions or other business models. Google and Facebook manage this because they are platform monopolists. They can exert tremendous influence through their control of how people use the internet — and crush productive businesses in the process.” Good morning, Internet…

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