Report: Snap Inc. spent millions to get better at augmented reality The Social Software Weblog The creators of Snapchat are running toward an IPO at full speed, but it seems to have nabbed itself a neat holiday gift along the way. According to a report from The Calcalist (as interpreted by The Times of Israel), … Read more
Social media used to prove MH17 was downed by Russian Buk missile Mashable! by Nicole Gallucci The mystery surrounding the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 may have been resolved. Three Leaders Three Narratives: Digital Diplomacy at the UN General Assembly Exploring Digital Diplomacy by Ilan Manor The yearly session of the UN General Assembly may be … Read more
Open Access Is a Human Rights Issue EFF.org Updates by Elliot Harmon A BBC article has been making the rounds this week about #icanhazpdf, a “secret codeword” that people use to access research papers from limited-access journals. The idea is simple: when researchers—or, for that matter, curious readers—find a reference to an article that they can’t … Read more
UN: Encryption and Anonymity Must Be Protected TorrentFreak For the past several years and particularly in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, interest in encrypted and anonymous communications has spread to a much wider audience. Survey: Many Users Never Read Social Networking Terms of Service Agreements All Facebook by Kimberlee Morrison As reported by SocialTimes last … Read more
Leak Exposes Hollywood’s Global Anti-Piracy Strategy TorrentFreak The Sony Pictures leak has caused major damage to the Hollywood movie studio, but the fallout doesn’t end there. Contained in one of the leaked data batches is a complete overview of the MPAA’s global anti-piracy strategy for the years to come. Google moves engineers out of Russia BBC … Read more
President Obama writes his first line of Javascript Mashable! by Stan Schroeder The U.S. now has a “coder-in-chief:” President Barack Obama has written his first line of code Peter Sunde: The Pirate Bay Should Stay Down TorrentFreak A few weeks ago Peter Sunde was released from prison where he’d been serving a sentence for his involvement in … Read more
Man vs. Machine: Could Facebook?s people-sourced search beat Google?s algorithm? from The Next Web by Drew Olanoff It?s a well-known fact that most people don?t get past page one of Google?s search results. This is why the company is doubling down on integrating a social layer into everything that it does. While algorithms can crawl … Read more