NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, not sure how long it’s been around, not too much documentation here yet but the walkthrough looks easy enough: https://www.sheet2site.com/. From the front page: “Generate a website from Google Sheets. No coding necessary. Build a site with pictures, text and links. Update it instantly by editing your sheet.” I have not played with it yet.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TorrentFreak: Streaming Link Search Engine Alluc Shuts Down. “After 13 years, the popular streaming link search engine Alluc is shutting down. The people behind the site, which was regularly used by pirates, say they will focus on other projects instead. The team still see a future for ‘uncensored search’ and hope someone else will fill the gap the site leaves behind.”

Mashable: Snapchat is testing a new feature that looks very familiar. “Instagram and Facebook are no longer the only places you can tag your friends in embarrassing photos. Snapchat has confirmed to TechCrunch that it is testing a new feature that allows users to tag others in photos and videos.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: EasyEmail Extension Brings Better Automatic Replies to Gmail. “It can be hard to start an email, but it feels even worse when you’re going insane after sending the same canned response to a question for the ninth time this week. If you’d like a little help replying to the messages in your ever-growing inbox, EasyEmail uses machine learning (along with your email data) to auto-generate potential replies you’re too lazy to type yourself. (Whether the Chrome extension’s features are worth a mild invasion of privacy is up to you.)”

Hongkiat: Auto-Generate Table of Contents Using Tocbot. “Lengthier content is becoming the norm with a stronger reception from Google and as well as the users. But it can get a bit tiring to read the long-form content with tons of sub-headings to browse. Enter Tocbot, a free table of contents generator built on JavaScript. This automatically creates a fixed ToC list on any page and updates your position as you scroll past each heading.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Wired: Social Media Is Reshaping Sex Work—But Also Threatening It. “ONE MORNING LAST May, Melody Kush discovered that someone was using her Twitter photos to catfish people into paying for a Snapchat premium account that didn’t even exist. Kush is a sex worker—an erotic model, to be precise—and for someone who does much of her work via social media, that kind of scam isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s an existential threat to her brand. She asked the imitator to stop; they refused, and blocked her. So she screenshotted the person’s snapcode and asked her 114,000-person Twitter following to report the account for her.”

Engadget: Snapchat and Instagram pull Giphy stickers over racist GIF. “When Snapchat and Instagram introduced Giphy stickers for Stories, they expected to offer PG-rated GIFs that even their young patrons can use. Unfortunately, things don’t always go as planned: both platforms have disabled the feature after users discovered an extremely racist GIF that says ‘N—- Crime Death Counter — Keep Cranking Bonzo, the Numbers Just Keep on Climbing!’ among Giphy’s offerings.”

Digital Trends: Waymo is now working on self-driving trucks in Atlanta . “Waymo has already made significant strides in the self-driving car arena, and now, it’s frying bigger fish. On Friday, the self-driving unit of Alphabet announced that it would be launching a pilot program in Atlanta, where the company’s autonomous trucks will begin carrying freight intended for Google’s data centers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Guardian: Google and Facebook don’t qualify for first amendment protections. “…are these companies’ practices of privileging certain information really analogous to what newspaper editors do, and therefore similarly protected by the first amendment? The answer is no. Making decisions about what and how information is conveyed does not automatically make one an editor entitled to first amendment protection. That is what the supreme court decided, for example, in Rumsfeld v Forum of Academic and Institutional Rights (Fair), when a group of law schools argued that it could bar military recruiters from recruitment fairs for its students. ” Good evening, Internet…

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