NEW RESOURCES

NB Herald: Sweden Opens Its First Virtual Design Museum. “Sweden today announces the opening of Sweden’s First Virtual Design Museum, also its first design museum focusing on both architecture, design and fashion. The first exhibition, ‘Live from Sweden’, offers visitors a glimpse into the Swedish lifestyle and the design objects Swedes surround themselves with.”

New-to-Me, but apparently around for a while: a database of used eyeglasses made freely available for people would could not otherwise afford glasses. This is wonderful. From the About page: “Respectacle is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that uses the power of the Internet to facilitate redistribution of quality, used eyeglasses to underserved communities worldwide.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ars Technica: Firefox’s faster, slicker, slimmer Quantum edition now out. “Mozilla is working on a major overhaul of its Firefox browser, and, with the general release of Firefox 57 today, has reached a major milestone. The version of the browser coming out today has a sleek new interface and, under the hood, major performance enhancements, with Mozilla claiming that it’s as much as twice as fast as it was a year ago. Not only should it be faster to load and render pages, but its user interface should remain quick and responsive even under heavy load with hundreds of tabs.” If you’re interested in which extensions are broken and which are okay, the comment thread is interesting.

Google Blog: New tools to make your job search simpler. “To help the millions of people who turn to Google to start their job search, we worked with leaders across the industry to introduce a new experience earlier this year. Since then, we’ve seen more than 60 percent of employers showing jobs in Search and connected tens of millions of people to new job opportunities. Now, based on feedback from job seekers, we’re introducing some new features to help make the process more efficient. Directly in Search, you can access salary information for job postings, improved location settings, job application choices, and in a couple of weeks, the ability to save individual jobs.”

Engadget: CompuServe’s still-active forums are finally shutting down. “It turns out that Instant Messenger (AIM) isn’t the only thing that AOL is shutting down next month. On December 15th, Oath (AOL and Engadget’s dear parent) is also closing what remains of the CompuServe forums which, yes, still actually exist. CompuServe had the first ever mainstream online forums well before the internet came along, letting users connect to its central servers via old-school dial-up modems. You can credit (or blame) the company for allowing some of the first online group chats about subjects like investing, politics and religion.” Why yes, I am old enough to remember the squeal of a 1200 baud modem — and a 300 baud modem!

Advertising Age: Snapchat Filters Ads Now Target People — Not Just Places. “Brands can now apply more-advanced targeting tools to Snapchat photo filter campaigns, enabling them to reach select audiences and experiment more with the creative messaging, the company says.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CogDogBlog: Google Image Search Tilts Towards The Photo Scraper Sites. “In theory, their motto is about not doing evil, but Google sure does some smelly things that we can only guess at because of their opaqueness. Like giving favorable image search results to sites that obviously scrape content from other sites and serve it up as shoddy copies.”

Haaretz: Israel Plans to Issue Google and Facebook Precedent-setting Tax Bills Within a Year. “Israel is planning to hand multinational internet corporations Google and Facebook a tax bill within a year, said Tax Authority chairman Moshe Asher. If Israel does manage to collect taxes from the internet giants, that would put it among a select group of countries that have started demanding taxes from these corporations, which until now have paid very little.”

TechCrunch: Facebook says Russia did try to meddle in Brexit vote. “BuzzFeed has obtained a statement from Facebook in which the tech giant admits, for the first time, that some Russia-linked accounts may have used its platform to try to interfere in the UK’s European Union referendum vote in June 2016. Which means Russian agents weren’t just using Facebook to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election, and in other recent elections in the West — such as those in France and Germany.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Sunlight Foundation: Tweets by @realDonaldTrump are official statements of the @POTUS, says Justice Department. “The question of whether the personal or campaign social media accounts of elected officials are official statements has been debated for a decade now, with increasing relevance to our politics as more politicians and member of the public join. This week, federal government lawyers helped to put the debate to rest, at least for the presidency, when their filing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia stated that President Donald J. Trump’s tweets at @realDonaldTrump are ‘official statements of the President of the United States.’ (Hat tip National Law Journal).” Good afternoon, Internet…

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