TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Plbbbt. The Next Web: Snapchat now asks you to turn on location services to use basic filters. “Snapchat has finally come up with a feature we dearly hope Facebook will not be cloning. The company is now asking users to enable location services when using its basic filters.”

Plugh! Plover! Eric Raymond: The Adventure begins again. “Colossal Cave Adventure was the origin of many things; the text adventure game, the dungeon-crawling D&D (computer) game, the MOO, the roguelike genre. Computer gaming as we know it would not exist without ADVENT (as it was known in its original PDP-10 incarnation)…. Though there’s a C port of the original 1977 game in the BSD game package, and the original FORTRAN sources could be found if you knew where to dig, Crowther & Woods’s final version – Adventure 2.5 from 1995 – has never been packaged for modern systems and distributed under an open-source license.
Until now, that is.”

USEFUL STUFF

Digital Trends: Fake it till you make it! How to shoot and edit amateur vlogs that look pro. “It’s easy for just about anyone to produce and upload a video, so knowing how to make the content stand out is all the more important. Whether you’re interested in starting a vlog, making tutorial or demonstration videos, or doing your own hands-on product reviews, we’ve put together a few best (and easy to achieve) practices to help get you pointed in the right direction – using digital cameras and smartphones that you probably already own.” Extensive, well-written, good ideas. Highly recommend this article.

PC World: 4 Google Translate features you’ll use every day. “Google Translate’s knowledge of more than 100 languages can help you in your daily workflow as much as it can help you on your next trip. The features below show how it can help you with entire documents or websites, or even your native tongue.” Quick article but I did not know about translating documents.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

MIT Technology Review: An Open-Source (and Cute) Alternative to Amazon Echo. “Mark 1 is no Amazon Echo: it looks like an ’80s clock radio mashed up with WALL-E, and speaks with a robotic, bass-heavy British accent. But the startup behind it, Mycroft, hopes it has similar appeal to hackers, students, and companies who want a voice-enabled assistant that they can run on all kinds of devices and alter at will.”

Motherboard: How Terrorists Slip Beheading Videos Past YouTube’s Censors. “Google services—namely YouTube—are the most plentiful and important links used by terrorist organizations to disseminate their propaganda. And despite all of YouTube’s efforts to keep them out thus far, such groups still manage to sneak their media onto its servers.”

Al Jazeera: How social media influences food trends. “How is our obsession with photographing food altering the way the restaurant industry and food producers around the world look at themselves? Taking photos of what you eat and posting them to social media applications such as Instagram is a global social phenomenon that seems to be growing. Cloud eggs, Unicorn Frappuccinos and avocado toast all have one thing in common: Social media made them a hit.”

Wired: The GIF Turns 30: How an Ancient Format Changed the Internet. “THE WEB’S FAVORITE file format just turned 30. Yep, it turns out the GIF is a millennial, too. At the same time, 30 makes the GIF ancient in web years, which feels a bit weird, given that the proliferation of animated GIFs is a relatively recent phenomenon. Today, Twitter has a GIF button and even Apple added GIF search to its iOS messaging app. Such mainstream approval would have seemed unthinkable even a decade ago, when GIFs had the cultural cachet of blinking text and embedded MIDI files. But today they’re ubiquitous, and not in some nostalgic sense.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Check Point Blog: The Judy Malware: Possibly the largest malware campaign found on Google Play. “Check Point researchers discovered another widespread malware campaign on Google Play, Google’s official app store. The malware, dubbed ‘Judy’, is an auto-clicking adware which was found on 41 apps developed by a Korean company. The malware uses infected devices to generate large amounts of fraudulent clicks on advertisements, generating revenues for the perpetrators behind it.”

Ars Technica: People who were impersonated by anti-net neutrality spammers blast FCC. “Fourteen people who say their names and addresses were attached to anti-net neutrality comments without their permission have asked the US Federal Communications Commission to notify other victims of the impersonation and remove fraudulent comments from the net neutrality docket.”

Deutsche Welle: Facebook slams proposed German ‘anti-hate speech’ social media law. “Facebook isn’t happy about a draft law, currently in committee in the Bundestag, that would impose fines on social media platforms if they fail to delete hate speech and other sorts of illegal expression. The German weekly business newspaper Wirtschaftswoche published excerpts from a German-language statement to be released on Monday in which the social media giant went on the attack.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Ubergizmo: Study Finds WhatsApp Groups Helps Students Express Themselves Better. “There are plenty of ways for students to form discussion groups via digital means. This can be done on forums, apps like Skype, or even WhatsApp. In fact it seems that maybe WhatsApp could be the way to go because a recent study found that students who participate in WhatsApp group chats can express themselves better.” Good morning, Internet…

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