NEW RESOURCES

Motherboard: ‘BuckHacker’ Search Engine Lets You Easily Dig Through Exposed Amazon Servers. “Contractors, governments, and telecom giants have all previously left data on exposed Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers, meaning anyone can access them without a username or password. Now, a search engine makes combing through leaky AWS datasets that much easier. Think of it as a barebones Google, but for info that the owners may have mistakenly published to the world.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Roundtable: Old Google Patent Search No Longer Accessible?. “As I covered at Search Engine Land when it launched in 2015, the new design and features should give you access to more filters. But it seems like maybe something is missing or people do not like change.” I hope this isn’t like when Google redesigned Google News.

TechCrunch: Twitch launches always-on chat rooms for channels. “Game streaming site Twitch today is debuting an always-on chat room feature it’s simply calling ‘Rooms.’ The addition was first announced at its developer event TwitchCon back in October, and was expected to launch before year-end. That timing shifted a bit, but the feature is going live today across both web and mobile for Twitch users worldwide.”

USEFUL STUFF

Alphr: Twitter tool turns your tweets into an ever-evolving playlist: What’s your Twitter soundtrack?. “Called Social Song, the tool lets you type any Twitter username into it before analysing tweets based on the use of emoji, use of words that convey a certain sentiment (such as happiness or anger), and images that contain certain facial expressions.” This is a nice idea, but every time I tried a different Twitter handle I got music that sounded like the soundtrack of an establishing shot for a Lifetime movie set in New England.

Lifehacker: How to Open Chrome Links With Your Keyboard. “We wrote about Vimium, the Chrome extension that adds customizable keyboard shortcuts, back in 2010 and 2012. But I think we buried the lede: If you install Vimium, you can open links without using your mouse, and without hitting the tab key over and over. If you browse the web a lot, you probably use your keyboard for everything but clicking links. Now you can ignore your mouse for minutes at a time.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BuzzFeed: Twitter Says Impersonating A Journalist During A Mass Shooting Doesn’t Violate Its Rules. “In the wake of the Florida high school shooting Wednesday, Twitter users began spreading doctored tweets targeting Miami Herald reporter Alex Harris. The shooting Wednesday left at least 17 dead. After the shooter entered the school and began the attack, some students posted on Snapchat and Twitter about what was happening. Harris was one of the first reporters to reach out to the students to help explain the situation. As the tweet went viral, Harris began getting harassment.”

Slate: Beware the Cuteness Economy. “In the recent BuzzFeed piece about Instagram-famous preschooler Mila Stauffer, Mila’s mother Katie defends her full-time job positioning her kid as a social media star against critics who wonder whether Mila has to spend too much of her time making videos. But none of the reasonable critiques aired in that piece quite define my own uneasiness. Even if Mila herself is happy as a clam, the selling of cute kids online is bad news for our relationships with real children.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ZDNet: Meltdown-Spectre flaws: We’ve found new attack variants, say researchers. “Researchers have developed a tool to uncover new ways of attacking the Meltdown and Spectre CPU side-channel flaws, which may force chipmakers like Intel to re-examine already difficult hardware mitigations.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

USA Today: Breaking up with Facebook: Users confess they’re spending less time. “More than a dozen U.S. users interviewed by USA TODAY say they are starting to question their always-on relationship with the giant social network. Not only are they liking it less, they say they’re scaling back how much time they spend there. And those rumblings of growing Facebook fatigue are starting to show up in tracking data.”

Medium: OK Google: Delete My Account (No Wait. No Really.). “I actually gave up on my adventure to delete my Google account early 2015. Disengaging with Google took me more time and mental effort than I had expected. I needed to actively push myself and go the extra mile to delete an account — and I had been actively working towards that goal for half a year. Several months of frustration based avoidance later, I finally revisited the goal of deleting my Google account. This was when I started moving collaborative projects away from the Googliverse and interacting on a need-to basis on Google Docs (I was that person who was always anonymous providing a ton of comments).” Good afternoon, Internet…

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