TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PopBuzz: The ‘which meme are you?’ Instagram filter will reveal your inner meme. “Are you the shocked Pikachu or are you the Spongebob’s pink glasses? The ‘which meme are you?’ or ‘Que MEME eres?’ Instagram filter will reveal all…”

USEFUL STUFF

The Next Web: Visual accessibility will be a priority in 2020 — here’s how to adapt your site. “It’s no surprise that visually impaired people are demanding better access. Populated with Instagram ‘stories’ and online stores that display 360-degree, high-definition product images and video, the web has become a visual public space. That puts many people at an unnecessary disadvantage.”

Motherboard: How to Take Your Twitter Feed Back From the Algorithm. “Maybe it’s not the people or topics who end up floating into my feed, but the algorithms that put them there that need muting. By adding a few strings—little bits of code used by Twitter to tag types of tweets—to your muted keywords list, you can change the way the Twitter algorithm sends content to your feed.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BuzzFeed News: Twitter And Facebook’s Race To The Bottom. “Ultimately, Facebook and Twitter descended into chaos by their own doing. Over the course of 10 years, they made a series of misguided product decisions that transformed them from online amusement parks into hellscapes. Here’s how it happened.”

Deutsche Welle: The influence of social media in art. “Using social media has long become part of many artists’ everyday lives, says curator Anika Meier at the Leipzig Fine Arts Museum. Social media have actually been part of their working lives for quite some time now — as is proven by the approximately 50 video installations, sculptures, photographs and paintings by 35 predominantly young artists at the Leipzig exhibition ‘Link in Bio.'”

Daily Dot: People are spreading awareness about the Australia fires on social media. “In the hot, dry weather during the summer, Australia quite commonly experiences bush fires. Under ideal weather conditions, bush fires play an integral role in its ecosystem. Eucalyptus trees depend on bush fires to clear away vegetation beneath them, which would otherwise inhibit their growth. Eucalyptus trees, along with other species, also rely on the flames to trigger the release of their seeds. However, in less than ideal conditions–high temperatures, drought, or an overabundance of rain–the fires can turn deadly.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: GirlsDoPorn: Young women win legal battle over video con. “A US judge has awarded $12.8m (£9.8m) to 22 unnamed women, ruling that they were tricked into appearing in widely distributed online porn videos. Some of the models duped by the owners and operators of the GirlsDoPorn website had become suicidal, he said. They were told the videos were for a private collector or overseas DVDs, according to the 181-page judgement.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: A month at sea with no technology taught me how to steal my life back from my phone. “A survey this year revealed that Australians, on average, spend 10.2 hours a day with interactive digital technologies. And this figure goes up every year. This is time we don’t get back. And our analogue lives, which include everything not digital, shrink in direct proportion. I recently decided to spend four weeks at sea without access to my phone or the internet, and here’s what I learnt about myself, and the digital rat race I was caught in.” He spent four weeks at sea AND ONLY BROUGHT FOUR BOOKS. Forget the phone, that’s the scary part.

Ars Technica: Oracle copied Amazon’s API—was that copyright infringement?. “Early this year, the Supreme Court will hear an important case that will determine the legal status of application programming interfaces under copyright law. If the high court sides with Oracle in its multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Google’s Android platform, it could stifle competition and entrench dominant technology firms—possibly including Google itself.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

The Washington Post: 4 million cards. 4,000 drawers. And a whole lot of paper cuts. A coalition of book lovers rushes to save U-Va.’s card catalogue.. “They’d just finished setting up projectors to create a replica of the planetarium Thomas Jefferson had envisioned spanning the University of Virginia’s Rotunda dome when Neal Curtis and Sam Lemley stopped. They looked at each other. And they decided they had to come up with a plan — immediately They walked into the school’s Alderman Library and promised they wouldn’t leave that night until they had found a way to save the old card catalogue.” Good evening, Internet…

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