NEW RESOURCES

Courier-Herald: 1-800-RECYCLE gets a new online database. “If you’re ready for a little spring cleaning, the Washington state Department of Ecology wants you to know they’ve revamped their 1-800 number to help you out…. there’s a new online 1-800-RECYCLE database that includes 1,578 different Washington recycling services you can search for to recycle 70 different items like large appliances like dishwashers, water heaters, stoves, washing machines, and dryers.”

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management: New OceanReports Tool Brings Ocean Data to Your Fingertips . “U.S. ocean waters comprise nearly four million square miles and are one of the largest Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) in the world. Now, when you outline any area in the U.S. EEZ using the OceanReports app, you can get detailed information about habitats and species, industries at work, potential hazards such as undersea cables or shipwrecks, economic value of ocean commerce, and detailed oceanographic information.”

CBS Detroit 62: New Website Aimed At Preserving Detroit’s Civil Rights History. “The online historical and educational resource is called Rise Up Detroit. It represents the efforts of Junius Williams, founder of Rise Up North, and Peter Blackmer, a project researcher and research fellow at Wayne State University’s Detroit Equity Action Lab.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Reuters: Facebook hires State Department lawyer as general counsel . “Facebook Inc on Monday named the legal adviser to the U.S. State Department as its general counsel, as the social media giant faces growing regulatory hurdles and privacy concerns.”

TechCrunch: Vine reboot Byte begins beta testing. “Twitter shut down Dom Hoffman’s app Vine, giving away the short-form video goldmine to China’s TikTok. Now a year and half since Hoffman announced he’d reimagine the app as V2 then scrapped that name, his follow-up to Vine called Byte has finally sent out the first 100 invites to its closed beta.” Here’s how I know I am old: I read the headline and thought, “Wait, like Byte the magazine?”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 5 Sites and Extensions to Tweak YouTube for a Better Experience . “YouTube is awesome. It’s the best video-streaming website for general purpose videos, and it’s choc-a-bloc full of great features. But with a few tweaks, it can be even better. The many problems with YouTube are well documented, from a comments section that often draws trolls and miscreants, to more benign annoyances like the cluttered and distracting interface. Most of these can be solved with the use of extensions and add-ons for a browser. Some of them require third-party websites, but it’s still easy to do.”

Hongkiat: 30+ Useful Chrome Extensions for Web Designers . “I love Google Chrome. Its simplicity, speed and performance are undoubtedly top-notch. But sometimes, being too simple can also be a problem, especially for us web designers who rely heavily on add-ons. I walked away from Chrome back in 2008 just because it had no addon . But now things have changed at the Chrome side as there are so many Chrome Extensions being created every day that are similar in function to Firefox add-ons. I dug into those extensions and through my personal experience picked up 40 extensions that can be very helpful for web designers to share with you guys.” Decent annotation for such a long list.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Guardian: Facebook urged to tackle spread of fake profiles used by US police. “The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has called on Facebook to address the proliferation of undercover law enforcement accounts on the social networking site following a Guardian report that revealed a secret network of accounts operated by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Loose online lips sink hack targeting governments and embassies. “Security researchers gave mixed grades to a recently discovered hacking campaign targeting government finance authorities and embassies. On the one hand, the attacks used carefully crafted decoy documents to trick carefully selected targets into installing malware that could gain full control of computers. On the other, a developer involved in the operation sometimes discussed the work in public forums.”

ZDNet: EU votes to create gigantic biometrics database. “The European Parliament voted last week to interconnect a series of border-control, migration, and law enforcement systems into a gigantic, biometrics-tracking, searchable database of EU and non-EU citizens. This new database will be known as the Common Identity Repository (CIR) and is set to unify records on over 350 million people.” Good evening, Internet…

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