TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Washington Post: New Facebook service aims to make apartment hunting easier. “Technology has already transformed the search for an apartment and a roommate along with every other social interaction. Tech companies have been entering the real estate market for a while now, disrupting the traditional method of working with a real estate agent or broker to find a place to live. Before that, Craigslist began connecting renters and owners without agents. Now Facebook, which has more than 2 billion global users per month, has opened its Marketplace to partner with two rental listing services in the United States: Apartment List and Zumper. Both rental listing companies have already integrated their information into Facebook Marketplace.”

CNET: YouTube deletes 150,000 videos following boycott. “YouTube is trying to clean up its site as it deals with controversies concerning minors on the service. The Google-owned video site has drawn ire because some videos with children were the target of sexually inappropriate comments. In response, YouTube killed hundreds of accounts and removed more than 150,000 videos from the platform this week, a spokeswoman said in a statement. The site also turned off comments on more than 625,000 videos targeted by alleged child predators.”

9to5Mac: Apple Support launches YouTube channel featuring how-to tutorial videos for iPhone and iPad. “Apple began a support Twitter account early in 2016, answering customer queries and tweeting out the occasional iOS tip. It has now expanded into a dedicated Apple Support YouTube channel. The account features highly-produced tutorial videos explaining all sorts of iOS features from how to change your wallpaper to deleting your call history.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: The Best Websites to Order 3D Prints From. “The 3D printing trend has lost a lot of its mainstream buzz, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead or dying. The industry continues to grow, evolve, and expose itself to new opportunities all the time. You can 3D print a lot of cool and clever stuff these days, and there’s no end in sight for this nifty new technology.”

TechCrunch: Jellies is a kid-friendly, parent-approved alternative to YouTube Kids. “As YouTube reels from a series of scandals related to its lack of policing around inappropriate content aimed at children, obscene comments on videos of children, horrifying search suggestions, and more, a new app called Jellies has arrived to offer parents a safer way to let their kids watch videos on mobile devices.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Ars Technica: Ubuntu 17.10: Return of the GNOME. “If you’ve been following the Linux world at all, you know this has been an entire year for spring cleaning. Early in 2017, Canonical stopped work on its homegrown Unity desktop, Mir display server, and its larger vision of ‘convergence’ —a unified interface for Ubuntu for phones, tablets, and desktops. And now almost exactly six years after Ubuntu first switched from GNOME 2 to the Unity desktop, that has been dropped, too. The distro is back to GNOME, and Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.10, a major update with some significant changes coming to the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system.” Nice overview, but I might be biased because I really hated Unity.

The Next Web: From photo manipulation to beer recipes, AI is finding its way into everything. “I think it’s safe to say that 2017 has been the year of artificial intelligence. It seems every day a new startup was entering the field to offer a new twist on marketing, photo manipulation, or voice assistants that utilized artificial intelligence technology. Add to that the fact that more and more business leaders see the next big thing being AI and you have an almost endless amount of startups and thought leaders looking into what AI can be injected into.”

Associated Press: Dictionary.com chooses ‘complicit’ as its word of the year. ” Russian election influence, the ever-widening sexual harassment scandal, mass shootings and the opioid epidemic helped elevate the word ‘complicit’ as Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2017. Look-ups of the word increased nearly 300 percent over last year as “complicit” hit just about every hot button from politics to natural disasters, lexicographer Jane Solomon told The Associated Press ahead of Monday’s formal announcement of the site’s pick.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Techdirt: Yet Another Legal Action By Dogged Privacy Activist Brings Good News And Bad News For Facebook In EU’s Highest Court. “The Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems has appeared a few times on Techdirt, as he conducts his long-running campaign to find out what Facebook is doing with his personal data, and to take back control of it. In 2011, he obtained a CD-ROM (remember those?) containing all the information that Facebook held about him at that time. More dramatically, in 2015 Schrems persuaded the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that the Safe Harbor framework for transferring personal data from the EU to the US was illegal under EU laws because of the NSA’s spying, as revealed by Edward Snowden.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Newswise: New UCI Study Reveals How Social Media Can Help People Lose Weight. “Sharing the triumphs and tribulations of your weight loss journey with other members of an online virtual support community plays an important role in achieving success, according to a new study from the University of California, Irvine. Entitled ‘Weight Loss Through Virtual Support Communities: A Role for Identity-based Motivation in Public Commitment,’ the study examines the role of virtual communities and public commitment in setting and reaching weight loss goals.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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