NEW RESOURCES

Orange County Register: Marijuana laws for every city and county? Our database shows California slow to accept Prop. 64 . “Fewer than one in three California cities (144 out of 482) allow any kind of cannabis business to operate in their borders. And just 18 of the state’s 58 counties permit cannabis businesses in their unincorporated areas. Also, fewer than one in five California cities welcome medical marijuana dispensaries, while fewer than one in seven allow recreational cannabis stores, where anyone 21 and older has been able to shop for legal weed since Jan. 1. These are some of the findings in a first-of-its-kind investigation, tracking and compiling the cannabis ordinances in all 540 city and county jurisdictions in California, a study conducted by Southern California News Group and other Digital First newspapers.”

Delaware Historical Society, a press release as a PDF file: Wilmington 1968: New Website Empowers Community Reflection . “Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Wilmington high school students converged on Rodney Square. Subsequent to these protests, looting and fires prompted a request for the National Guard to restore peace. Although other American cities experienced the same level of uprising after April 4, 1968, Wilmington, Delaware experienced the longest peace-time occupation in modern times. Wilmington remained under martial law for nine and a half months. This extensive patrol of Wilmington by the National Guard drastically changed the city from the inside out. Residents went about their days and nights watched, restricted, angry, and fearful. Numerous businesses along Market Street closed. ”

NHPR: New Website Aims To Help N.H. Consumers Compare Health Care Choices. “A website developed by the New Hampshire Insurance Department has new features aimed at helping consumers make educated choices about health care. The department’s health price transparency website…allows residents to compare the price of various health care services across doctors, hospitals and outpatient facilities.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ubergizmo: Facebook Now Allowing Users To Unsend Messages. “It has recently been discovered and confirmed that Facebook has been deleting messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg to users. Given that Facebook has no message unsend feature, some have argued that this move was an abuse of Facebook’s powers over its users, but there is a silver lining to this debacle.”

Neowin: Microsoft open sources the File Manager from Windows 3.0 and you can run it on Windows 10 . “Last week, Windows 3.1 turned 26 years old. For many, it was their first version of the OS, and the anniversary might have left some feeling nostalgic. Luckily, Microsoft has open sourced the version of File Manager that shipped on Windows 3.0, and you can even compile it to run on Windows 10 today.” If they open-source Winsock 1.1 I am probably going to need therapy.

USEFUL STUFF

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Atlantic: A Landslide of Classic Art Is About to Enter the Public Domain. “The Great American Novel enters the public domain on January 1, 2019—quite literally. Not the concept, but the book by William Carlos Williams. It will be joined by hundreds of thousands of other books, musical scores, and films first published in the United States during 1923. It’s the first time since 1998 for a mass shift to the public domain of material protected under copyright. It’s also the beginning of a new annual tradition: For several decades from 2019 onward, each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier.

The Star Online: Iran to block Telegram, nation’s widely used social media app. “Telegram, the most popular social media app in Iran, will be blocked nationwide, state media reported Sunday. The semi-official Fars news agency quoted Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi, the telecommunications minister, as saying the app used by an estimated 40 million Iranians – half the population – would be blocked starting 10am April 9.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Brian Krebs: Don’t Give Away Historic Details About Yourself. “Social media sites are littered with seemingly innocuous little quizzes, games and surveys urging people to reminisce about specific topics, such as ‘What was your first job,’ or ‘What was your first car?’ The problem with participating in these informal surveys is that in doing so you may be inadvertently giving away the answers to ‘secret questions’ that can be used to unlock access to a host of your online identities and accounts.” Or be like me and make up phony answers to your secret questions.

From Medium with a serious disclaimer: P.F. Chang’s Security Flaw revealed, following Panera Bread’s leak. “The morning of April 4th, I woke up to news reports of Panera’s Bread security flaw and the possible data exposure it could have caused, as featured on Krebs on Security, Dylan Houlihan’s original post, and numerous other news sites. Little did I know, merely 2 days after Panera Bread’s public disclosure took place, would I be discovering a similar and equally serious vulnerability on one of my favorite restaurant chains’ website — P.F. Chang’s.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechCrunch: Bots on Twitter share two-thirds of links to popular websites: Pew . “It’s official: Bots are doing a lot of PR grunt work on Twitter — especially when it comes to promoting porn websites. That perhaps unsurprising conclusion about what automated Twitter accounts are link sharing comes courtesy of a new study by the Pew Research Center which set out to quantify one aspect of bot-based activity in the Twittersphere.”

Forbes: The Amazing Ways Google Uses Artificial Intelligence And Satellite Data To Prevent Illegal Fishing. “Using the publicly broadcast Automatic Identification System for shipping, machine learning algorithms have been shown to be able to accurately identify illegal fishing activity in protected areas. This works in much the same way as the ‘cat or horse?’ example for image recogntion I gave above. By plotting a ship’s course and comparing it to patterns of movement where the ship’s purpose is known, computers are able to ‘recognize’ what a ship is doing.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

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