TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BBC: Predatory comments prompt YouTube ad suspension. “Mars, Lidl, Adidas and others have pulled all advertisements from YouTube after some were found next to clips used by predators to target children. Investigations by the BBC and the Times found tens of thousands of ‘predatory’ accounts have been used to leave explicit comments on children’s videos. Problems with the video-sharing site’s reporting system have been blamed for letting the accounts persist. YouTube said it was ‘working urgently’ to clean up the site.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: How To Manage Multiple Calendars With Google Home. “Google Home, the search giant’s answer to Amazon’s Echo speaker, launched with at least one glaring omission: The ability to access and manage multiple calendars. That’s particularly surprising considering that so may people use Google’s own Calendar app to organise their lives, but, thankfully, the company now seems to be rolling out an overdue update.”

DZone: Google Big Query Meets SQLite: The Business of Baseball Games. “Baseball is America’s greatest past time. Let’s blend attendance data at baseball games from Google Big Query with weather data from SQLite for some interesting insights…. In this blog series, we’ll be experimenting with the most interesting blends of data and tools. Whether it’s mixing traditional sources with modern data lakes, open-source DevOps on the cloud with protected internal legacy tools, SQL with NoSQL, web-wisdom-of-the-crowd with in-house handwritten notes, or IoT sensor data with idle chatting, we’re curious to find out: will they blend?” This article is really, really interesting and really, really technical.

The Next Web: This Chrome extension stops impulse purchases by forcing you to think about them. “I’ve got all the self-control of an untrained, ADHD-addled labradoodle puppy. Suffice to say, this time of year is always mildly financially ruinous for me, as I inevitably fill my apartment with all the discounted crap my credit card will permit. If you’re like me, you’ll want to check out Icebox, from comparison site Finder.com, which promises to stop impulse purchases by making you — wait for it — think about them.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Channel News Asia: Indonesian terrorists turn to social media to raise funds. “Indonesian terrorist organisations are increasingly turning to social media to raise funds for terror activities as it is easy to open accounts using false identities, according to the Indonesian Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (PPATK).”

TechCrunch: Snapchat seeks salvation in long-form and “hands-on” AR ads. “Snap Inc’s stock tanked after missing revenue expectations by $30 million last quarter, so Snapchat is looking to win over businesses with immersive new ads formats. This week it introduced two new forms of ads: Promoted Stories which string together multiple Snaps into a longer-form slideshows openable from a tile on the Stories page that’s shown to everyone in a given country, and Augmented Reality Trial ads that let people play with an AR version of a product overlaid on the world around them.”

The Telegraph: WordPress ignoring terrorist propaganda, campaigners say. “One of the world’s biggest blogging websites is turning a blind eye to pages run by Isil, even after they have been reported, anti-terrorism campaigners say. WordPress.com has hosted hundreds of links to extremist videos, as well as propaganda pages from the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of the Iraq and the Levant (Isil), according to the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), a US anti-terror think tank.”

Geo.tv: Access to news channels, social media suspended in Pakistan. “After Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) ordered to take all news channels off air, social media access via internet browsers to Facebook, Youtube and Twitter were also blocked on Saturday. The access to services was temporarily restored after 3pm but was blocked again shortly after.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BetaNews: Time to change your password: Imgur was hacked in 2014. “While much of the US was celebrating Thanksgiving, social image hosting site Imgur was made aware of a security breach that took place back in 2014. Around 1.7 million user accounts were affected. This is a relatively small percentage of Imgur users, and COO Roy Sehgal points out that the site has never asked for ‘personally-identifying information.’ Nevertheless, the company is contacting the owners of affected accounts, advising them to change their passwords.”

The Hindu: Google faces inquiry over location data collection. “After Google reportedly confirmed the practice of gathering location data from Android devices even when the service was disabled by users, regulators in South Korea summoned representatives of the tech giant this week for questioning. Data protection officials in Britain are also looking into the matter, CNNMoney reported on Friday.”

TorrentFreak: Google Wipes 786 Pirate Sites From Search Results. “Google and several leading Russian search engines have completely wiped 786 ‘pirate’ sites from their search results. That’s according to telecoms watch Rozcomnadzor, which reports that the search providers delisted the sites after ISPs were ordered by a Moscow court to permanently block them.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Science Alert: Scientists Have Built a ‘Hallucination Machine’ For a Drug-Free Brain Trip. “Using some deep Google AI trickery and a virtual reality headset, scientists have built a device they’re calling the Hallucination Machine – an experience a lot like tripping out, but without any of the actual drugs. This mind-bending immersive experience, several years in the making, has been put together to try and help experts understand exactly how the brain processes what we’re perceiving, and how that might differ between reality and hallucinations.” Good morning, Internet…

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