Do you use NoScript to keep Firefox secure? If you do, you need to update it immediately – it has a serious security vulnerability. “The attack works because NoScript has a limited whitelist of trusted domains, allowing the host browser to load commonly-used tools from certain content delivery networks like googleapis.com. This feature tries to preserve websites’ functionality while simultaneously blocking any potentially malicious code.”
Japanese internment camp archives held at San Jose State University and other California Universities will be digitized. “Over the next two years, San Jose State and 14 other campuses in the California State University system will be digitizing 10,000 documents into a searchable database called the CSU Japanese American History Digitization Project.”
Wow, Reddit has kind of blown up, with moderators revolting over the firing of an employee and other recent changes to site policy. “The protest has taken place largely in the form of user protests and moderators making several major subreddits private. When a subreddit is made private, only a select few are able to access it in any fashion. This means the subreddit is effectively closed to public and search engines alike, displaying a lockout page not unlike a 404. As the situation is rapidly advancing, the list of subreddits partaking in the protest is bound to change, but the largest and most common subreddits appear to be showing solidarity in the protest. If one were to visit Reddit’s front page right now, you would note the disappearance of /r/Art, /r/gaming, /r/history, /r/science, /r/Music, /r/books, and many others.”
Microsoft has open-sourced WorldWide Telescope. “WorldWide Telescope began in 2007 as a Microsoft Research project, with early partners including astronomers and educators from Caltech, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, the University of Chicago and several NASA facilities. Over the past eight years, millions of people have downloaded and used WorldWide Telescope, coming to rely on its unified astronomical image and data environment for exploratory research, teaching and public outreach.”
It’s not a new resource per se; the new bit is that it doesn’t cost anything. The Cleveland Jewish News digital archive is now available for free. “On July 1, the Cleveland Jewish News unlocked its Digital Archive, making every story, photograph and advertisement available at the push of a few buttons….Issues of the CJN will be made publicly available online 90 days after publication. CJN digital edition subscribers have immediate access to all content as it is published.” I had to provide my name and e-mail to access, but I didn’t have to set up an account or anything.
History Colorado has launched an online database of selected items in its collection. “The database launched with images of 80,000 items and is continuing to grow. This database is an excellent resource for researchers to find primary sources on Colorado’s history.”
The Evernote Web Clipper extension can now save GMail attachments. “Popular note-taking service Evernote has released an update for its Web Clipper browser extension which now allows users to save Gmail messages that have attachments to their accounts so that they can easily bring them up later again when required. The update also adds more new functionality to the browser extension making it much more useful, and since it’s available for multiple browsers millions of users can take advantage of the features that it offers.”
Former Twitter CEO says Twitter’s new CEO will face “complex challenges”. Gee, you think? “Speaking to the Guardian before his last day at the company on Tuesday, Dick Costolo said that while Twitter had grown revenue by 97% year on year to $1.7bn (£1.1bn), the pressure placed on the company obscured its other achievements in bringing 302 million monthly active users on to the service.”
Twitter tool ThinkUp now lets you search your Twitter followers. You can search by a variety of ways, including hashtag, company, and emoji.
You can now share, manage, and create custom maps from Google Drive. “Whether you’re planning your next event, mapping out the best route to visit clients, or sharing the location of your food truck with fans, Google My Maps makes it easy to put your world on a custom map. Starting today, you can access My Maps right from Google Drive on your Google Apps account, so it’s even easier to create, find and share your custom maps.”
Apple is expanding its mapping fleet to new states. “Apple’s new cities are located in Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Apple will also continue surveying areas in Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Texas, Utah and Washington.”
The country of Kenya has a new database to help farmers with seed selection. “Mbegu means seed in Kiswahili language. According to the developers, MbeguChoice, which is the first of its kind in Sub-Saharan Africa, allows Kenyan farmers, agro-dealers and extension workers to analyse information on counties, crops, seasons and crop attributes such as drought-tolerance, disease- and pest-resistance, resulting in a list of suitable seed varieties and where they can be obtained.”
Crap. USA.gov is no longer going to update its blog. To get updates, you either have to follow them on Facebook (getting updates from a liked Facebook page? Fat chance), Twitter (possible if you’ve got Nuzzel, otherwise you’re relying on timing and luck), or e-mail (here’s hoping USA.gov’s newsletter either dodges a spam filter or doesn’t end up in GMail’s “promotional” tab). With RSS feeds I knew I was going to get USA.gov’s updates. Now? Plllbbbt.
Fold3 is giving free access to its Revolutionary War collection until July 15th.
I have an Academia.edu account just to ask people to upload papers. And Jonathas Magalhães did! His paper, Social query: a query routing system for twitter, is now available. “Social Query is a new and efficient way to get answers on the social networks. However, the popular method of sharing public questions could be optimized by directing the question to an expert, a process called query routing. In this work, we propose a Social Query System for query routing on Twitter, currently, one of the most popular social networks. The Social Query Systems analyzes the information about the questioner’s followers and recommends the most suitable users to answer the questions.” While Quora is an amazing resource, easily finding experts to answer questions is still a search area that could stand a lot of exploration.
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