NEW RESOURCES

WMUK: Online Archive Shows Graphic Design Was Big In West Michigan. “Do you know who designed your chair? How about the utensils in your kitchen? Or the ads in your favorite magazine? We rarely think about the people behind the everyday things we use or view. So you might not know that – before computers became popular – West Michigan was something of a graphic design hub.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

IFTTT Blog: Gmail on IFTTT just got even better. “Over one billion people have an email address that ends in gmail.com — so it’s not surprising that it’s one of our most popular services. To help you do more with Gmail, we’re happy to share that the service now has several new options to explore.”

Neowin: Microsoft gives Bing Search app “a whole new look” on Android, including animated gif search. “Microsoft has released a major update for its Bing Search app on Android devices, bringing ‘a whole new look’ to the app. The new version ditches the bright teal design that was originally introduced on iOS in 2015, and which made its way to Android devices in February 2016.”

Digital Trends: FAA Offers To Refund Drone Registration Fees And Wipe Details. “Up to a million drone owners have so far done as they were told, hitting the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) website to register their information. But then in May a U.S. appeals court affirmed an earlier lower court ruling that said the policy was in violation of a preexisting law banning regulation of model aircraft. So for the last few months, buyers of new drones have been able to fly them without first registering their details. But the story doesn’t end there.”

News18: Travel Search Engine Kayak Launches Travel Searches by Emoji. “For some cities, the corresponding emoji is an obvious match: New York City is represented by the Statue of Liberty; Las Vegas is a slot machine; Tokyo gets sushi; and Toronto is fronted by the maple leaf. But others are more controversial.”

USEFUL STUFF

CNET: How to set up a shared library with Google Photos. “Although we are both equipped with an iPhone, I take many more photos than my wife, which makes me the photo keeper of the family. When the occasion arises to show a photo of one of our two kids to a friend (that we have not already posted to Instagram), she asks me to dig through the photos on my phone and find the requested image. Now, thanks to new shared libraries from Google Photos, I no longer need to serve as the family’s photo retriever.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: Muffled by China, Taiwan President Embraces Twitter as Megaphone. “Over the past year, China has doubled down on its campaign to reduce Taiwan’s presence on the world stage, whether by luring away its few remaining diplomatic allies — most recently Panama — or blocking its participation in international organizations like Interpol and the World Health Organization. Now President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan is trying to tweet the island back into the global conversation.”

Daily Dot: Over 130 YouTube stars take a stand against the FCC’s net neutrality repeal. “A group of more than 130 YouTube personalities and online video creators have signed an open letter warning the Federal Communications Commission that dismantling net neutrality would be disastrous for them and their communities.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BetaNews: Petya author releases master decryption key for all versions of the ransomware. “The Petya ransomware — and several variants — wreaked havoc with data around the world, but now the author of the original malware has released the master decryption key.”

Ars Technica: Encrypt all the webpages: Let’s Encrypt to offer wildcard certificates for free. “Let’s Encrypt, the free and open certificate authority (CA) launched as a public service by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), says it will begin providing free “wildcard” certificates for Internet domains in January 2018. Wildcard certificates allow anyone operating a domain to link a single certificate to multiple subdomains and host names within a domain.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Motherboard: The Same Twitter Bots That Helped Trump Tried to Sink Macron, Researcher Says. “New research from Emilio Ferrara, the University of Southern California academic who exposed the role of bots in the 2016 US election, shows that many Trump bots went dark and later turned into MacronLeaks bots. This, Ferrara wrote in a new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server this week (which is currently being peer-reviewed), suggests that there may be a ‘black market’ for right-wing political bots that can lay dormant for months before being activated to promote the next conservative demagogue.”

Digital Journal: Google Sheets used to create a virtual machine that computes data. “A developer has demonstrated how he used a Google Sheets spreadsheet to emulate the operation of a computer processor. The spreadsheet, written using scripts, features four registers, a memory area and the ability to calculate Fibonacci numbers.” Good morning, Internet…

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