Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of October 18th…

• Refresh: Rethinking The Browser

  Web browsers are due for a breakthrough. We’ve been waiting for one, since the introduction of Chrome. So, what’s next? What can make web surfing more fun and efficient? Julius Gehrig and Julius Sohn, creators of a Refresh browser concept, have come up with some ideas.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of October 17th…

• Lawsuit: "pivoting to video" was a disaster led by Facebook's cooked viewing data

  Several years ago media sites began firing writers en-masse to hire video people instead, because Facebook and other social media companies told them that this was the future. "Pivoting to video," some called it. But what Facebook actually delivered was "fraudulent" analytics. Advertisers slowly figured out the videos weren't being watched. Facebook lied about it for a while. Then it apparently admitted it. Then the media sites started firing the video people too.

• Wear Space

  "Think about the fact that there are people who would rather you wear techbro horse blinkers than build workspaces with quiet, private spaces for you to get your work done." - Chris Hartjes

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of October 16th…

• Does Canadian Privacy Law Apply to Google Search?

  The case arises due to a right-to-be-forgotten complaint (a complainant wants search results referencing news articles they say are outdated, inaccurate, and disclose sensitive information removed from the Google search index), but the court is not being asked whether the current law includes a right-to-be-forgotten. Instead, the very application of Canadian privacy law to Google search is at stake.

• Adobe Announces Fully-Featured Photoshop Finally Coming to the iPad

  Photoshop for iPad won’t arrive until some time in 2019, but when it does launch it will differ drastically from Adobe’s current lineup of Photoshop-related iOS apps. Rather than focusing on an individual subset of desktop features, like Adobe’s existing Photoshop Fix, Express, and Mix do, the aim with this forthcoming app is to provide the full desktop Photoshop experience on an iPad.

• Winamp 6, due out in 2019

  "You can listen to the MP3s you may have at home, but also to the cloud, to podcasts, to streaming radio stations, [and] to a playlist you perhaps have built," Alexandre Saboundjian, the CEO of Radionomy, was quoted as saying. "People want one single experience. I think Winamp is the perfect player to bring that to everybody. And we want people to have it on every device."

• Hackers got (very) personal data from 29M Facebook users.

  "People can check whether they were affected by visiting our Help Center. In the coming days, we’ll send customized messages to the 30 million people affected to explain what information the attackers might have accessed, as well as steps they can take to help protect themselves, including from suspicious emails, text messages, or calls."

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of October 12th…

• Stephen Hawking's final scientific paper published

  It's titled "Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair," co-authored with Sasha Haco, Malcolm J. Perry, and Andrew Strominger, about the black hole information paradox.

• Latest Revision to ARM Instruction Set Includes Optimizations Just for JavaScript

  "Everyone can enjoy the fact that ARMv8.3 makes JavaScript faster. Comp sci nerds can further enjoy the fact that we now have CPUs being optimized for a specific weird programming language and not the other way around."

• Sans Forgetica

  Sans Forgetica works by a learning principle called desirable difficulty, which is where an obstruction is added to the learning process in order to promote deeper cognitive processing which results in better memory retention.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of October 9th…

• Google+ shutting down after data leak affecting 500,000 users

  Google exposed the private details of almost 500,000 Google+ users and then opted not to report the lapse, in part out of concern disclosure would trigger regulatory scrutiny and reputational damage, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, citing people briefed on the matter and documents that discussed it. Shortly after the article was published, Google said it would close the Google+ social networking service to consumers.

• The 5 biggest announcements from the Google Pixel 3 event

  Months of leaks were finally confirmed at the Pixel 3 event today in New York City where Google just unveiled its newest flagship Android phone and a few new devices, including the Pixel Slate and Google Home Hub. Unlike a typical Google event, the company announced its new lineup at the top of the hour and made the products immediately available for preorder before the event even concluded.

• Wi-Fi 6

  The Wi-Fi Alliance, the trade group that develops and promotes wireless networking standards, is attempting to make Wi-Fi naming a bit simpler with the introduction of 802.11ax next year. The plan is to brand the new specification as "Wi-Fi 6," rebrand 802.11ac as "Wi-Fi 5," and 802.11n as "Wi-Fi 4," making it easy to tell at a glance which standard is newer and, hence, faster.

• IRL Glasses

  IRL Glasses block LCD/LED screens through horizontal polarized optics. By flattening and rotating the polarized lens 90 degrees, light emitted by LCD/LED screens is blocked, making it look like the TV or computer in front of you is off.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of October 5th…

• WarriorJS

  In WarriorJS, you are a warrior climbing a tall tower to reach The JavaScript Sword at the top level. Legend has it that the sword bearer becomes enlightened in the JavaScript language, but be warned: the journey will not be easy. On each floor, you need to write JavaScript to instruct the warrior to battle enemies, rescue captives, and reach the stairs alive. No matter if you are new to programming or a JavaScript guru, WarriorJS will put your skills to the test. Will you dare?

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of October 3rd…

• Vice, trailer
  

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of October 2nd…

• From Copyright Term to Super Bowl Commercials: Breaking Down the Digital NAFTA Deal

  While much of the focus is on the dairy industry, dispute resolution, and the auto sector, the agreement will have significant implications for intellectual property, digital policy, and broadcasting.

• CRTC Rejects Bell Coalition Website Blocking Proposal

  Instead of a ill-advised application to the CRTC, the Commission recommended that the issue be considered in two policy processes: the Copyright Act review and the broadcast-telecom review panel. Those are both better placed to assess the issue and address the myriad of concerns that Bell and its allies largely dismissed: the absence of court orders, implications for freedom of expression, net neutrality, privacy, and competition.

• Freewrite Traveler

  Weighs 1.8 pounds, features a full-size mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Brown keyswitches, has a 6-inch E Ink display, charges over USB-C, and sports a battery that should last for around 30 hours.

• The 5 biggest announcements from the Microsoft Surface event

  Surface Pro 6, Surface Laptop 2, Surface Studio 2, Surface Headphones, Surface All-Access, and Android App Mirroring.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of September 20th…

• Ralph Breaks The Internet, official trailer 2
  

• Amazon announces 11 new and refreshed Echo-branded gadgets

  Echo Dot, Echo Input, Echo Sub, Echo Link, Echo Plus, Amazon Smart Plug, Echo Auto, Fire TV Recast, AmazonBasics Microwave, Echo Wall Clock, and Echo Show.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of September 19th…

• 3D Emoji Town

  Codepen by George W. Park, using HTML and CSS (with JS only to make the town rotateable).

• Playstation Classic

  To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the original Playstation's release, Sony has just announced the Playstation Classic, a $100 mini version of the original Playstation console that comes preloaded with twenty games.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of September 18th…

• Captain Marvel, official trailer
  

• Linus Torvalds apologizes for years of being a jerk, takes time off to learn empathy

  In a lengthy email posted to the LKML on Sunday night, Torvalds expressed a change of heart. Taken to task over attacks that he recognizes were "unprofessional and uncalled for," he says he now recognizes that his behavior was "not OK" and he is "truly sorry."

• Google kills Google Inbox

  Google says that it "learned a lot about how to make email better" from Inbox, and now with the "popular Inbox experiences" ported over to Gmail, the company wants to "focus solely on Gmail."

• Supreme Court of Canada on Copyright Notices: Identification of IP Address “Not Conclusive of Guilt”

  The initial emphasis on last week’s Supreme Court of Canada’s copyright notice decision has focused on how Internet providers can pass along the specific costs associated with subscriber disclosures beyond those required for the notice-and-notice system to rights holders. The ruling rightly restores the notice system back to its intended approach, but it is not the only takeaway with implications for the recent flurry of file sharing lawsuits.

Contributed by Lauren Zacharias over the course of September 7th…

• Google Releases Chrome 69

  Google rolled out Chrome 69 this week including an updated UI. One immediately noticeable change is that the address bar will now hide the "www" prefix of URLs by default, though clicking into the address bar will still show the full URL with www included. 

  If you're not a fan of this change, www can be restored by going to chrome://flags/#omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url-scheme-and-subdomains in your address bar and setting Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Scheme and Trivial Subdomains to disabled.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of August 30th…

• Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking

  Mozilla’s going to study the effects of blocking trackers that slow page times starting next month, and it will make that feature on by default in Firefox 63 if it proves successful in improving performance. Mozilla’s will also “strip cookies and block storage access from third-party tracking content,” a move it will also test in September with beta users before implementing in Firefox 65, which is due out sometime in the next few months.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of August 27th…

• True Detective Season 3, teaser trailer
  

• windows95.app

  "This is Windows 95, running in an Electron app. Yes, it's the full thing. I'm sorry." - Slack developer Felix Rieseberg

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of August 22nd…

• All versions of Openssh share a critical vulnerability, including embedded code that will never be updated

  The defect was published last week by researchers from Qualys, who were releasing a patch that corrected it (the patch was intended to fix a different problem, and Qualys's researchers inadvertently and simultaneously discovered and fixed this very old bug).

• Le Burger Week Winnipeg 2018 Participants

  Le Burger Week Winnipeg is back! From September 1 to 7, 2018, various Winnipeg restaurants will create original and unique burgers for you to enjoy. You’ll see a wide variety of burgers from the classic patty and cheese, to things like a donut burger!

• PepsiCo to buy SodaStream for $3.2 billion

  Purchase, New York-based PepsiCo agreed to pay $144 per share in cash for SodaStream's outstanding stock, a 32 percent premium to its 30-day volume weighted average price.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of August 21st…

• Acme Logos

  Professional placeholder logos for your designs projects. Acme logos are for the times you need a professional logo to work with but don't have the real thing yet.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of August 20th…

• 2018 Hugo Award winners

  The 2018 Hugo Awards were held last night at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California. The Hugo award, voted on by members of the fan community, is considered the highest honor for science fiction and fantasy literature.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of August 9th…

• Red Dead Redemption 2, official gameplay trailer
  

• Automatic cross-posting of tweets to Facebook no longer works

  You can no longer automatically cross-post your tweets to Facebook . Twitter  announced today that functionality is now coming to an end, and users will instead have to copy a tweet’s URL if they want to share a tweet to Facebook going forward. In a statement, the company attributed the change to a recent Facebook update.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of August 7th…

• Let's Encrypt Root Trusted By All Major Root Programs

  Let's Encrypt announced yesterday that they are now directly trusted by all major root certificates including those from Microsoft, Google, Apple, Mozilla, Oracle, and Blackberry.  With this announcement, Let's Encrypt is now directly trusted by all major browsers and operating systems.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of July 30th…

• Pure CSS Stack

  A simple game built in Codpen with HTML, CSS, and absolute no javascript! 

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of July 24th…

• The web's transition from nomadism to feudalism

  Corporate Feudalism has emerged to create centralized, “safe” spaces for the peasantry to work & play. Attention is farmed and sold in exchange for convenience, protection, mediated self-expression & an indifferent audience. You can do anything if it’s within their borders.

• Today's the day that Chrome brands plain old HTTP "not secure"

  Since February, Google has planned to brand non-HTTPS sites as "Not Secure," and today, with Chrome 68, that change is being rolled out to a wide audience. With the change, every site now gets a label in its address bar: "Secure" if the site is loaded over HTTPS, "Not Secure" otherwise. In September, Google will make another change and remove the "Secure" label, marking the transition to a world where secure HTTP is the default rather than the exception.

• Court Rules Quebec Plan for Mandated ISP Blocking of Online Gambling Sites is Unconstitutional

  The provincial government introduced the rules in 2015, which create a list of unlicensed sites that ISPs must block or face financial penalties. While the government tried to frame the blocking system as a health and safety measure, it was always obvious from its own documentation that the plan was primarily focused on increasing revenues of Loto-Quebec, a provincially licensed online gambling site.

• Google launches a DRM-free audiobook store: finally, a writer- and listener-friendly Audible alternative!

  A decade ago, when Amazon acquired Audible, the two companies promised that they'd phase out their DRM, which locked listeners into using their proprietary software and devices to enjoy the books they purchased. Audible never made good on that promise, and stonewalled press queries and industry requests about when, exactly, this fairtrade version of their industry-dominating audiobook store would finally emerge.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of July 13th…

• Microsoft Teams for free

  On 12 July, Microsoft announced the release of its Teams communication tool for free, thereby propelling it into head-to-head rivalry with Slack. The free tier of Teams is catered for small- to medium-sized companies and is available for any organization’s first 300 users. Each user will receive 2GB of storage, along with 10GB for sharing amongst the group.

• Adobe to Launch Photoshop for iPad in Strategy Shift

  The app evolution strategy is a long-term effort that will spread to Adobe’s other programs in the future. A new version of Illustrator is in development but a longer way off from being released, the people familiar with the plans said.

Contributed by Julian Moffatt over the course of July 12th…

• How I dropped 250KB of dead CSS weight with PurgeCSS

  Nice right up on using PurgeCSS to clean things up at the end of the project.

• Design at 1x - It's a Fact

  Worth the read and refresher at why you want to start your designing at 1x resolution.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of July 11th…

• Browsh

  Browsh is a fully-modern text-based browser. It renders anything that a modern browser can; HTML5, CSS3, JS, video and even WebGL. It can be used from a terminal or from within a normal browser. Its main purpose is to significantly reduce bandwidth and thus both increase browsing speeds and decrease bandwidth costs.

• IdeaMILL

  Tuesday the City of Winnipeg unveiled an "idea mill", now open at the Millennium Library downtown. High tech tools such as 3D printers, sound booths for audio recording, and a media studio with PC computers loaded with graphics and design programs. You'll also find a craft room with sewing machines, and space for creative arts. 

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of July 10th…

• Greyhound to Discontinue Services in Manitoba in October

  Greyhound Canada has announced that it will discontinue passenger bus and freight services in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba by the end of October. The move comes due to a 41 per cent decline in ridership since 2010.

• Microsoft Takes on Apple's Entry-Level iPad With 10-inch Surface Go

  Priced at $399, the company's smallest and lightest tablet computer to date is aimed at the same $500-and-under market as Apple's 9.7-inch iPad, which starts at US$329.

• Stolen certificates from D-Link used to sign password-stealing malware

  The certificates were used to cryptographically verify that legitimate software was issued by D-Link and Changing Information Technology. Microsoft Windows, Apple’s macOS, and most other operating systems rely on the cryptographic signatures produced by such certificates to help users ensure that executable files attached to emails or downloaded on websites were developed by trusted companies rather than malicious actors masquerading as those trusted companies.

• Apple Releases macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 With AirPlay 2 Multi-Room Audio Support for iTunes

  The macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 update is minor in scale, focusing on bug fixes and security improvements. No major feature changes were discovered during the beta testing process, but Apple's release notes say it adds AirPlay 2 multi-room support for iTunes with the accompanying iTunes 12.8 update.

• Sonos files to go public, has sold over 19 million devices

  Sonos will trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol "SONO". Recent numbers seem impressive, with the company generating $655.7 million in revenue in the six months from October 2017 to the end of March this year, with a net income of $13.1 million. But the company’s $992.5 million in revenue in the 2017 - despite being up 10 percent from 2016 - wasn’t enough to put the company in the black, with a net loss for the fiscal year of $14.2 million.

Contributed by Julian Moffatt over the course of June 20th…

• Kotoba

  For those of you with a developer license on iOS, go download, compile and presto, a working stand alone dictionary for iOS.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of June 12th…

• Super Smash bros Ultimate, E3 trailer
  

• Death Stranding, E3 trailer
  

• Last Of Us Part II, E3 gameplay reveal trailer
  

• Ghost of Tsushima, E3 gameplay debut trailer
  

• Sable, E3 trailer
  

• Tunic, E3 announcement trailer
  

• Office 2019 for Mac Preview

  "Today we’re pleased to announce the commercial preview of Office 2019 for Mac – including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. Office 2019 for Mac is the next perpetual update to Office on Mac and is set to ship alongside Office 2019 for Windows in the second half of 2018."

• Third-Party macOS Security Tools Vulnerable to Malware Code-Signing Bypasses for Years

  Hackers have had an "easy way" to get certain malware past signature checks in third-party security tools since Apple's OS X Leopard operating system in 2007, according to a detailed new report today by Ars Technica. Researchers discovered that hackers could essentially trick the security tools -- designed to sniff out suspiciously signed software -- into thinking the malware was officially signed by Apple while they in fact hid malicious software.

• Canadian Music Industry Wants Government to Pay Copying Fee for Every Smartphone Sold in Canada

  According to documents released under the Access to Information Act, the collective arrived with a startling demand, asking the federal government to pay $160 million over the next four years to compensate for music copying.

• Protecting the Free and Open Internet: European Edition

  Reddit's management have posted a long explainer on the EU's extreme copyright proposal, which would snuff out sites like Reddit and make it impossible to start new ones.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of June 11th…

• Elder Scrolls VI, official E3 announcement teaser
  

• Fallout 76, official E3 trailer
  

• Doom Eternal, official E3 teaser
  

• Starfield, official E3 teaser
  

• Wolfenstein: Youngblood, official E3 teaser
  

• Halo Infinite, E3 announcement trailer
  

• Cyberpunk 2077, official E3 trailer
  

• Gears 5, E3 cinematic announce trailer
  

• Metro Exodus, E3 gameplay trailer
  

• Beyond Good and Evil 2, E3 cinematic trailer
  

• Assassin's Creed Odyssey, E3 official world wide premiere trailer
  

• Skull and Bones, E3 cinematic trailer
  

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of June 8th…

• The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, official teaser trailer
  

• Huawei Gets Called Out For Using Artist’s Work As Smartphone Launch Backdrop

  On Wednesday, Ireland-based freelance 3D artist Paul McMahon, who goes by the alias The Rusted Pixel, took to Twitter to call out the Chinese tech giant out for featuring his collection, comprising short animations, without permission at its Nova 2S event in December.

• Norman

  We present you Norman, world's first psychopath AI. Norman is born from the fact that the data that is used to teach a machine learning algorithm can significantly influence its behavior. We trained Norman on image captions from an infamous subreddit (the name is redacted due to its graphic content) that is dedicated to document and observe the disturbing reality of death.

• AMD unveils Threadripper 2

  AMD's Threadripper platform gave a hefty boost to the high-end desktop (HEDT) market: 16 cores and 32 threads using AMD's Zen architecture. Today, AMD announced the second generation of Threadripper: it's twice as big again, with up to 32 cores and 64 threads, and it uses the revised Zen+ core of the second-generation Ryzen chips.

• Firefox is testing features that let you customize colors and view two tabs in one

  Mozilla Firefox is testing out two new experimental extensions that let users further customize their browser and view tabs together more easily. The first one is called Firefox Color and it lets you change the colors of the background, text, icons, and the toolbar. The second feature that Firefox is testing is called Side View and it does basically what it sounds like: you can view two browser tabs at once in the same tab and window.

Contributed by Wil Alambre and Max Chiriac over the course of June 6th…

• Into the Spider-verse, official trailer
  

• Apple Maps embeds to web browsers in beta

  Right when Google Maps use rules bacame stricter!

Contributed by Wil Alambre and Max Chiriac over the course of June 4th…

• Microsoft buys GitHub

  Microsoft has reached an agreement to buy GitHub, the source repository and collaboration platform, in a deal worth $7.5 billion. The all-stock deal is expected to close by the end of the year, subject to regulatory approval in the US and EU.

• macOS High Sierra 10.13.5

  The macOS High Sierra 10.13.5 update introduces support for Messages in iCloud, a feature that Apple has been testing and working on since macOS High Sierra was announced last June. macOS High Sierra 10.13.5 can be downloaded directly from the Mac App Store or through the Software Update function in the Mac App Store on all compatible Macs that are already running macOS High Sierra.

• What’s New in Safari 12

  List of new features in Safari 12

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of May 30th…

• Fallout 76, teaser trailer
  

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of May 17th…

• Introducing the Xbox Adaptive Controller
  

• Google announces YouTube Music and YouTube Premium

  Google is breaking up its premium YouTube Red service into two new offerings: a YouTube Music streaming service, available either for free with ads or for $9.99 per month, and a YouTube Premium for original video content, costing $11.99 per month.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of May 15th…

• Introducing Microsoft Surface Hub 2
  

• Rage 2, official gameplay trailer
  

• Bohemian Rhapsody: The Movie, official teaser trailer
  

• Supreme Court declines to hear "podcasting patent" case, handing win to EFF

  Personal Audio’s US Patent No. 8,112,504 describes a “system for disseminating media content representing episodes in a serialized sequence.”

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of May 14th…

• Decade-old Efail attack can decrypt previously obtained encrypted e-mails

  Unfixed bugs in widely used e-mail programs make it possible for attackers to obtain the plaintext of messages that are encrypted using the PGP and S/MIME standards, researchers said early Monday morning. The attacks assume that an attacker has possession of the encrypted e-mails and can trick either the original sender or one of the recipients to open an invisible snippet of one of the intercepted messages in a new e-mail.

• Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets

  Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive - like the one on your personal computer - storing an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine.

• Klout is out

  Klout, a service that tracks how much social media attention its users draw and rates their expertise based on the content of their posts, will be switched off on May 25—an announcement that has ironically had Klout trending on Twitter today.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of May 10th…

• The Predator, teaser
  

Contributed by Julian Moffatt and Wil Alambre over the course of May 9th…

• The Best Place for Error Messages on Forms

  Everywhere!

• Emergency Alert Compatible Devices Lookup

  To learn more about how emergency alerts are broadcast in your region, when a test alert will take place, and what devices are compatible with it, choose your wireless carrier from the provided pulldown.

• Valve will soon let you stream Steam games to phones and tablets

  The free Steam Link app will be available for phones and tablets running Android or iOS (though Android support will be in beta for launch) starting the week of May 21. Apple TV and Android-based TV platforms will also run the software, Valve said, essentially turning those set-top boxes into versions of Valve's own standalone Steam Link hardware.

• Chrome OS is getting Linux app support

  “We put the Linux app environment within a security sandbox, running inside a virtual machine,” Liu told VentureBeat. “We made sure the user experience is seamless to the user. Whether you use a web app, whether you are using an Android app, or whether you are using a Linux app, the window treatment and the way you launch the app from the launcher is the same.”

• The New Material.io
  

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of May 8th…

• Google I/O 2018 Keynote
  

• An online collection of high-res scans of M.C. Escher’s prints

  The Boston Public Library has digitized their collection of M.C. Escher prints. The level of zoom you can get to with these images is amazing.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of May 7th…

• Luke Cage, season 2 trailer
  

• Microsoft Build Keynote 2018
  

• Hundreds of big-name sites hacked, converted into drive-by currency miners

  The sites all ran the same piece of JavaScript hosted on vuuwd.com. The highly obfuscated code caused visitors' computers to dedicate 80 percent of their CPU resources to mining the digital coin known as Monero with no notice or permission. The attacker behind the campaign took control of the sites by exploiting a Drupal vulnerability that makes code-execution attacks so easy and reliable it was dubbed "Drupalgeddon2." Although Drupal maintainers patched the critical flaw in March, many vulnerable sites have been slow to install the fix. The lapse touched off an arms races among malicious hackers three weeks ago.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of May 3rd…

• The 2017 Panic Report

  "It's all in here: how Transmit 5 went, what's happening with Coda, and so much more. It's the (belated) 2017 Panic Report… and it's a whopper!"

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of May 2nd…

• Red Dead Redemption 2, official trailer 3
  

• Google Maps Platform

  Beginning on June 11, 2018, you’ll need to enable billing with a credit card and have a valid API key for all Google Map projects. When you enable billing, Google will give you $200 free usage every month for Maps, Routes, or Places. Based on the millions of users, 98% of customers can continue to use Google Maps Platform API for free with this credit.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of May 1st…

• Ant-Man and The Wasp, official trailer
  

• Pure CSS Francine

  HTML/CSS drawing in the style of an 18th-century oil painting. Hand-coded entirely in HTML and CSS, minimal SVG. Because of the artistic nature of this project, artist did not concerned themselves with cross-browser-compatibility, so the live preview looks best in Chrome.

• Google opening up ".app" TLD registration

  "Starting today at 9:00am PDT and through May 7, .app domains are available to register as part of our Early Access Program, where, for an additional fee, you can secure your desired domains ahead of general availability. And then beginning on May 8, .app domains will be available to the general public through your registrar of choice."

Contributed by Max Chiriac over the course of April 26th…

• Design Canada - Documentary Film Trailer

  Through the lens of graphic design, Design Canada follows the transformation of a nation from a colonial outpost to a vibrant and multicultural society.

Contributed by Julian Moffatt over the course of April 16th…

• Mustard UI

  Other than the Nashville Predators colours, this CSS framework does look good.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of April 13th…

• Incredibles 2, official trailer
  

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of April 12th…

• How Android Phones Hide Missed Security Updates From You

  Not only do many Android phone vendors fail to make patches available to their users, or delay their release for months; they sometimes also tell users their phone's firmware is fully up to date, even while they've secretly skipped patches.

• Apple has begun notifying macOS users of coming 32-bit app incompatibility

  Apple began the transition to 64-bit hardware and software technology for Mac over a decade ago and is working with developers to transition their apps to 64-bit. At our Worldwide Developers Conference in 2017, Apple informed developers that macOS High Sierra would be the last version of macOS to run 32-bit apps without compromise.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of April 10th…

• Building the World's Largest Telescope
  

• FIDO Alliance and W3C Achieve Major Standards Milestone in Global Effort Towards Simpler, Stronger Authentication on the Web

  The W3C has advanced Web Authentication (WebAuthn), a collaborative effort based on Web API specifications submitted by FIDO to the W3C, to the Candidate Recommendation (CR) stage. The CR is the product of the Web Authentication Working Group, which is comprised of representatives from over 30 member organizations. CR is a precursor to final approval of a web standard, and the W3C has invited online services and web app developers to implement WebAuthn.

• Mark Zuckerberg's Testimony Before Congress

  Live blog by The Verge. Over the course of two days, Mark Zuckerberg will be testifying before Congress and facing difficult questions about how Facebook was used for election interference, the company’s data-sharing policies, and the continuing fallout around the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This first hearing takes place before a joint session of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees.

• The Internet has serious health problems, Mozilla Foundation report finds

  Edited by Solana Larsen and written by Mozilla Foundation research fellows, the report is an evaluation of "what's helping and what's hurting the Internet," and it focuses on five broad areas of concern - personal privacy and security, decentralization, openness, "digital inclusion," and general Web literacy.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of April 9th…

• Solo: A Star Wars Story, official trailer
  

• The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, trailer
  

• Bootstrap 4.1

  "Today we’re shipping our first minor release, v4.1! This release comes later than expected and some of the fixes we intended, but there’s still a boatload of fixes, docs updates, build tool changes, and even a few small new features."

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of April 5th…

• Streetmix

  Design, remix, and share your street. Add bike paths, widen sidewalks or traffic lanes, learn how all of this can impact your community.

• Atomic Bomb Blast Simulator

  You just type in an address, select a nuclear bomb size, and the map shows the radiuses of the resulting fireball, radiation, shockwave and heat, as well as estimated fatalities and injuries. Developed by The Outrider Foundation, and inspired by Nukemap.

• Braille Neue

  This typeface communicates to both the sighted and blind people in the same space. Designed by Kosuke Takahashi, overlaying Braille onto the letters into one simple font. The aim is to use this universal typeset for Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics 2020 to create a universal space where anyone can access information.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of April 2nd…

• 1.1.1.1

  Cloudflare, a company with a history of resisting surveillance and censorship orders has announced a new DNS service, hosted at the easy-to-remember address of 1.1.1.1, which accepts connections under the still-novel DNS-over-HTTPS protocol, and which has privacy designed in, with all logs written only to RAM (never to disk) and flushed every 24 hours.

• Where's Waldo, in Google Maps

  Google Maps adopted "Where’s Waldo?" drawings and tagged them at real locations on Android, iOS and desktop. Users have to find Waldo, donned in his signature red-and-white striped shirt whilst waving amiably. The game will be made available through to 4 April.

• Google is shuttering its URL shortening service, goo.gl

  The company says that new and anonymous users won’t be able to create links through the goo.gl console as of April 13th, but existing users will be able to use it for another year, after which it will be discontinued completely.

• Apple Shares Recommended Graphics Cards and Chassis in New eGPU Support Document for macOS High Sierra 10.13.4

  macOS 10.13.4 introduces official support for external graphics processors on Thunderbolt 3 Macs. Alongside the release, Apple has published a detailed support document that outlines how eGPU support works and provides graphic card and chassis recommendations for use with your Mac.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 27th…

• HP Joelcraft
  

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 26th…

• MS Edge on iPad and Android Tablets

  Microsoft hasn’t included iOS 11 split screen support, so you can’t run the browser alongside another app. Passwords will roam across Edge on Windows 10 to iPad and Android tablets, and the reading list and reading view features are both supported too.

• First official Chrome OS tablets

  Google is really going with the contradictory name of "Chromebook tablets" for these devices. Notebooks (and Chromebooks) get the "book" name from the fact that they have hinges that allow them to open and close like a book. When you take the hinge away and make a tablet, it's not really a "book" form factor anymore.

• Dropbox shares soared in biggest tech IPO since Snapchat

  Dropbox ended the day of trading, under the ticker symbol “DBX,” with a market valuation of around $10 billion.

• Thousands of servers found leaking 750MB worth of passwords and keys

  Researcher Giovanni Collazo said a quick query on the Shodan search engine returned almost 2,300 Internet-exposed servers running etcd, a type of database that computing clusters and other types of networks use to store and distribute passwords and configuration settings needed by various servers and applications.

• Die With Me

  Dries Depoorter & David Surprenant's "Die With Me" is a chat app available for iOS and Android, but only if your device has less than 5% of its battery left.

Contributed by Julian Moffatt and Wil Alambre over the course of March 22nd…

• WON'T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?
  

  The world so badly needs more people that try and be a little bit like Mr. Rogers. If you don’t know who he is, you need to spend a week watching his show wherever you can find it. If you do know who he is, you should definitely try and find this movie in theatres.

• Deadpool 2, official trailer
  

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 21st…

• Hermetica

  There ought to be a 'Helvetica' of esoteric and occult symbols. Standardized, simple, beautiful - and vectorized. So Avana Vana went ahead an a set... and it looks brilliant!

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 20th…

• Rhapsody in Grey, by Brian Foo

  This song generates a musical sequence using EEG brain wave data of an anonymous female pediatric patient with epilepsy. The song examines the periods before, during, and after a seizure. The goal is to give the listener an empathetic and intuitive understanding of the brain's neural activity during a seizure.

• A Selfish Argument for Making the World a Better Place
  

• 100TB SSD

  The world has a new record holder for the largest SSD, and it comes in at 100TB. The Nimbus Data ExaDrive DC100 is a new, massive drive that is currently being tested with select customers and will be available to purchase this summer.

• XOXO 2018

  XOXO is the much-loved culture and tech conference in Portland, organized by Andy Baio and Andy McMillan. After skipping 2017 with the chance it might never return, the conference is back in full swing for a September 6-9 event!

• Firefox 59 can stop website notifications

  The Mozilla Foundation released a new version of Firefox this week—release number 59. It treads further down the performance improvement path that November's Quantum release began, but its most interesting feature is a quality-of-life one: Firefox 59 users can prevent some websites from popping up requests to send notifications to your device or from requesting to use your camera unexpectedly.

• YouTube didn’t tell Wikipedia about its plans for Wikipedia

  “Wikipedia’s content is also freely licensed for reuse by anyone, and that’s part of our mission: that every single person can share in free knowledge,” Wikimedia says. “We want people all over the world to use, share, add to, and remix Wikipedia... At the same time, we encourage companies who use Wikimedia’s content to give back in the spirit of sustainability.”

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 16th…

• Avengers: Infinity War, official trailer
  

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 15th…

• Inside the booming black market for Spotify playlists

  An August 2015 exposé by Billboard quoted an unnamed major-label executive who claimed playlist adds were being sold for “$2,000 for a playlist with tens of thousands of fans to $10,000 for the more well-followed playlists.”

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 14th…

• RIP Stephen Hawking

  Stephen Hawking, physicist and author of "A Brief History of Time" has died at his home in Cambridge, at the age of 76. His children said, "We will miss him for ever".

• Cryptocurrencies fall as Google announces ad ban

  Google is banning ads related to cryptocurrency from its vast advertising network, effective in June. Cryptocurrency markets reacted negatively to the news. The price of bitcoin is down about 6 percent since the Wall Street Journal first reported the new policy early Wednesday morning. Other major currencies, including Ethereum and Litecoin, are also down modestly.

• 400,000 high res images, via The Met's Open Access initiative

  "Using the Creative Commons zero license (CC0), the third most visited museum in the world has essentially turned over a trove of high resolution images to any individual or business who wish to use, copy, or modify them for their projects—with no conditions attached."

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 13th…

• Let's Encrypt now supports Wildcard Certificates

  "Wildcard certificates are only available via ACMEv2. In order to use ACMEv2 for wildcard or non-wildcard certificates you’ll need a client that has been updated to support ACMEv2913. It is our intent to transition all clients and subscribers to ACMEv2, though we have not set an end-of-life date for our ACMEv1 API yet."

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 8th…

• Canada's Vertical $10 Note

  Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Bank of Canada Governor Stephen S. Poloz today unveiled the new $10 bank note featuring Viola Desmond during a ceremony at the Halifax Central Library.

• Ghostery Just Went Open-Source

  Along with going open source, Ghostery is also announcing two new, simpler ways it plans to make money. The first part of the new business model will be Ghostery Insights, a paid, premium product designed for academics, journalists, researchers, and anyone else curious about the webpage and tracker ecosystem online. The second part will be Ghostery Rewards, a kind of affiliate marketing system that users can opt into.

• New Google Feature Lets Artists Post Messages to Search Results

  Starting today, artists can post videos, GIFs, images and good old-fashioned text to a prominent space inside their search results' "Knowledge Panel," the blocked-off area containing photos, a bio and links to areas like YouTube and Spotify. Artists can control the customized content on a dedicated site for verified people, places and things. Fans will be able to tell if the updates are legit by the blue checkmark next to the artist's name.

• Nintendo Direct, 3.8.2018
  

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 7th…

• Jurassic World Alive
  

• Previewing Android P

  Highlights include enhancements to the notification panel, indoor positioning, and support for iPhone X-style notches. This developer preview only works on the Pixel 1, Pixel 1 XL, Pixel 2, and Pixel 2 XL.

• Packets, Please

  A game where you are the boss of CosmoCast, a corrupt, post-Net Neutrality ISP. Your job is to "boost, throttle or disconnect" people based on their activities, working at breakneck speed to keep the packets flowing in the way that optimizes the internet for your shareholders at the expense of your users.

• Explore Disney Theme Parks on Google Street View

  Google and Disney announced today that all U.S. Disney theme parks and resorts are on Google Street View. They feature 360-degree panoramic views of attractions from Disneyland to the ESPN Complex to the water parks.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 6th…

• Luke Cage, season 2, teaser
  

• The Swords of Ditto, gameplay trailer
  

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 5th…

• Mary Poppins Returns, teaser
  

• The World of Linux Handhelds in 2018

  "It’s a kind of middle ground for Linux handhelds. After all, the concept of Linux handhelds preceded the advent of smartphones and since then there is probably less of a need for the general public - iOS and Android already seem to answer the needs of most users so far. In fact, it has clearly become a niche market, with only smaller companies operating in it. But the good news is, there are several efforts underway to get there, in several directions."

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 2nd…

• Thumbor

  Thumbor is a smart imaging service. It enables on-demand crop, resizing and flipping of images. It features a very smart detection of important points in the image for better cropping and resizing, using state-of-the-art face and feature detection algorithms (more on that in Detection Algorithms).

• sendback.io

  Simulating different HTTP response codes is hard. This service mocks HTTP status codes for you, so you can build your applications faster. Send a request (GET, POST, PUT or DELETE) to our their mocked APIs to receive the status code that you need.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 1st…

• Light II

  The Light Phone 2 is a simple, 4G LTE phone with a beautiful black & white matte E-ink display. It brings a few essential tools, like messaging and an alarm clock, so it's even easier to ditch your smartphone more often, or for good. Currently on IndieGoGo.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 28th…

• Ralph Breaks The Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2, trailer
  

• Announcing Flutter beta 1

  Flutter is an open source mobile UI framework that allows developers to make super-fast, cross-platform mobile apps. The beta also works with a pre-release of Dart 2, with improved support for declaring UI in code with minimal language ceremony.

• Amazon acquires Ring

  According to a Reuters report, the online retailer agreed to buy Ring, maker of connected video doorbells and smart home security cameras, for reportedly more than $1 billion. Amazon's acquisition of Ring comes a few months after the company purchased Blink, a maker of smart home security cameras, for a reported $90 million.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 26th…

• Ride-sharing comes to Winnipeg

  TappCar, an Edmonton-based ride-sharing company similar to Uber and Lyft, announced today it had secured MPI coverage for its drivers and would begin operations in Winnipeg this Friday (March 2nd).

Contributed by Max Chiriac over the course of February 23rd…

• Subway 'MyWay' Rewards Program Launches in Canada This March

  Subway MyWay Rewards will offer four tokens for every dollar spent and once 200 tokens have been reached ($50 worth of spending), a $2.00 reward will be granted. So that works out a $2 discount on $50 spent, or 4% off.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 22nd…

• Swype Keyboard Discontinued

  "The core technology behind Swype will continue to be utilized and improved upon across other Nuance offerings - and integrated into our broader AI-powered solutions - most notably in Android-based keyboard solutions for our automotive customers," the company said.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 20th…

• Samsung 30TB of SSD

  On the inside, the drive has nine flash controllers driving 32 1TB packages of NAND flash, with each package containing 16 layers of 512Gb 3-bit-per-cell V-NAND. There's also 40GB of DDR4 RAM. The RAM is unusual, too; the 8Gb chips are built using Through Silicon Vias (TSVs), enabling them to be stacked vertically. They're assembled into 10 packages each of 4GB.

• New Google Pay app for Android

  "The app, which begins rolling out today, is just one part of everything we’ve got planned. We’re currently working on bringing Google Pay to all Google products, so whether you’re shopping on Chrome or with your Assistant, you’ll have a consistent checkout experience using the cards saved to your Google Account. We’re also working with partners online and in stores, so you’ll see Google Pay on sites, in apps, and at your favorite places around the world."

• Apple updates all OSes to address Indian Telugu crash

  Apple has released software updates for all four of its consumer operating systems to tackle an issue that allowed usage of the Indian Telugu character to cause those devices to crash.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 16th…

• Google removes 'view image' button from search results

  "For those asking, yes, these changes came about in part due to our settlement with Getty Images this week. They are designed to strike a balance between serving user needs and publisher concerns, both stakeholders we value."

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 15th…

• Incredibles 2, sneak peek
  

• How Chrome's ad filtering works

  "We've previously discussed some of the details surrounding how Chrome protects users from intrusive ads, but as we approach the launch date of February 15, we wanted to go under the hood and discuss how this feature works in more detail."

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 12th…

• Cryptocurrency startup LoopX pulls exit scam after raising $4.5M in ICO

  The sketchy investment platform, which promised to earn backers’ money with its proprietary trading algorithm, has abruptly gone dark after raising $4.5 million in a series of initial coin offerings (ICO). The company has since also pulled its website and deleted its social media fingerprint, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram accounts.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 9th…

• Chrome to mark all non-http as "not secure" July 2018

  Beginning in July 2018 with the release of Chrome 68, Google Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as "not secure"

• Apple Confirms iPhone Source Code Leak is Real, But Says its Security Doesn't Depend on Secrecy

  "Old source code from three years ago appears to have been leaked, but by design the security of our products doesn't depend on the secrecy of our source code. There are many layers of hardware and software protections built into our products, and we always encourage customers to update to the newest software releases to benefit from the latest protections."

• Winnipeg Public Library launches free movie streaming service

  Winnipeggers now have access to thousands of classic movies, documentaries and independent films for free with their library card. On Friday, the Winnipeg Public Library became the latest Canadian library system to partner with the online streaming service Kanopy.

• In Thailand, Buddhist Monks Grapple with the Meaning of Video Games

  "The danger in playing a game is not the game itself, but the desire it may cause - since in Buddhist thought, desire is the cause of suffering. 'If you lose or win, you want to do it again and again. You’re always thinking about the game. If you cling to that mindset, it causes mental suffering or physical suffering.'"

Contributed by Wil Alambre and Julian Moffatt over the course of February 8th…

• Venom, teaser trailer
  

• Emoji 11.0

  The Unicode Consortium announced today the approved Emoji 11.0 list for 2018.

• CSS Grid layout crossed sections

  Lovely write up with sample code. Nice.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 7th…

• Deadpool 2, trailer
  

• Jessica Jones, season 2 trailer
  

Contributed by Max Chiriac and Wil Alambre over the course of February 6th…

• Falcon Heavy Test Flight
  

• Font Awesome 5 Free

  "The internet's most popular icon toolkit has been redesigned and built from scratch. On top of this, features like icon font ligatures, an SVG framework, official NPM packages for popular frontend libraries like React, and access to a new CDN."

• Windows 10 S becoming a mode, not a version, as Microsoft shakes up its pricing

  According to leaked documents provided to Microsoft's partners, with version 1803, Windows 10 S will be a mode of Windows 10 Home, Windows 10 Education, and Windows 10 Pro, rather than a distinct version. Switching Windows 10 Home S and Windows 10 Education S to regular Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Education will be free; switching from Pro S to Pro will continue to cost $49.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 5th…

• Solo: A Star Wars Story, official teaser
  

• Westworld Season 2, trailer
  

• Skyscraper, trailer
  

• Mission Impossible: Fallout, trailer
  

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 2nd…

• Free Entry to Manitoba Provincial Parks for February 2018

  “Manitobans love the great outdoors and our parks are just as beautiful at this time of year as they are in the warmer months,” Sustainable Development Minister Rochelle Squires said. “We encourage everyone to take advantage of the activities and the scenery our parks have to offer.”

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 1st…

• Lazy Loading in Google Chrome

  Defer loading certain below the fold third-party iframes and below-the-fold images on the page until the user scrolls near them. Android only, at least initially. LazyLoad as a feature doesn't need to be Android specific, but the plan is to start with Android since the benefits of LazyLoad will likely have the most impact on Android, and this will also help minimize any negative impact to user experience. If LazyLoad is successful on Android, then desktop platforms will be considered as well.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 30th…

• Ant-man and the Wasp, teaser trailer
  

• Cisco releases high-urgency security alert for VPN devices

  A vulnerability in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN functionality of the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a reload of the affected system or to remotely execute code.

• More than 2,000 WordPress websites infected with keylogger

  "Unfortunately for unsuspecting users and owners of the infected websites, the keylogger behaves the same way as in previous campaigns," Sucuri researcher Denis Sinegubko wrote in a blog post. "The script sends data entered on every website form (including the login form) to the hackers via the WebSocket protocol."

Contributed by Wil Alambre and Max Chiriac over the course of January 29th…

• 1080p HD live stream of The Forks
  

• Time Crystals

  Time crystals, a theoretical phase of matter proposed in 2012, can now be reliably created and measured, thanks to researchers at UC Berkeley. “This is a new phase of matter, period, but it is also really cool because it is one of the first examples of non-equilibrium matter,” Yao said. “For the last half-century, we have been exploring equilibrium matter, like metals and insulators. We are just now starting to explore a whole new landscape of non-equilibrium matter.”

• Icongram

  With icongram you can easily use SVG icons from popular icon sets on the fly.

Contributed by Max Chiriac over the course of January 26th…

• unDraw.co

  A constantly updated collection of beautiful svg images that you can use completely free and without attribution.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 25th…

• Whopper Neutrality
  

• Make Your Own "Oh No" Comic

  I'm a big fan of Alex Norris's "webcomicname", and now you can make your own by randomly mixing up panels, thanks to this Glitch web app.

• Alphabet launches a cybersecurity company called "Chronicle"

  This analytics platform will be powered by the massive amount of computing power and storage in Alphabet's server infrastructure. Gillett says this will give Chronicle two big advantages: first, Gillett says, Chronicle "should be able to help teams search and retrieve useful information and run analysis in minutes, rather than the hours or days it currently takes." Second, tons and tons of cheap Google storage will help Chronicle customers "see patterns that emerge from multiple data sources and over years."

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 24th…

• macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 Beta Displays Warnings When Opening 32-Bit Apps as Part of Apple's Phase Out Plan

  As of January 2018, all new apps submitted to the Mac App Store must be 64-bit, and all apps and app updates submitted must be 64-bit by June of 2018. The next version of macOS after High Sierra will include "aggressive" warnings about 32-bit apps before they are phased out entirely.

Contributed by Julian Moffatt and Wil Alambre over the course of January 23rd…

• The Ultimate Guide to JavaScript Frameworks

  Holy cow there are a lot of them.

• Using CSS Clip Path to Create Interactive Effects

  CSS-Tricks with a nifty little example of using clipping paths create various effects within the browser. Support is limited at present, but keep an eye on this for the future.

• CSS Reference

  A very nice visual guide to CSS.

• Field Notes: Item Numbers

  "Yes, you read that right. Item Numbers. This is some next-level Field Notes nerdery you’re about to witness. All in good fun, of course."

Contributed by Julian Moffatt and Wil Alambre over the course of January 22nd…

• CKEditor Has Released Letters Documentation

  CKEditor has been working on a collaborative editing environment. They released some more details and documentation. Go check it out.

• Seedship

  A free web game, made in Twine by sci-fi writer John Ayliff, where you're an AI searching for a new planet for the dying human race.

• Flicks

  Facebook announces that it has invented a new unit of time. A flick (frame-tick) is a very small unit of time. It is 1/705600000 of a second, exactly. Slightly larger than a nanosecond that exactly subdivides media frame rates and sampling frequencies.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 19th…

• Amazon announces twenty finalist cities for HQ2

  Amazon reviewed 238 proposals from across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to host HQ2, the company’s second headquarters in North America. Today, Amazon announced it has chosen the 20 metropolitan areas to move to the next phase of the process. Spoilers: Winnipeg is not on the list.

• Twitch challenges YouTube with new video producer tools, Disney partnership

  "The challenge frequently faced is that when the time comes to share recorded content with the world, success is in the hands of algorithms," Twitch's press release stated. "Video Producer gives creators more options, more control, and more opportunities to find viewers, grow an audience, and make a living doing what they love."

• Google makes machine learning image classifier available to the public

  "Our first Cloud AutoML release will be Cloud AutoML Vision, a service that makes it faster and easier to create custom ML models for image recognition. Its drag-and-drop interface lets you easily upload images, train and manage models, and then deploy those trained models directly on Google Cloud. Early results using Cloud AutoML Vision to classify popular public datasets like ImageNet and CIFAR have shown more accurate results with fewer misclassifications than generic ML APIs."

Contributed by Wil Alambre and Julian Moffatt over the course of January 17th…

• Cosmos: Possible Worlds, teaser
  

• A topic-centric list of high-quality open datasets in public domains. By everyone, for everyone!

  As described. This is pretty awesome!

• The soundtrack to Kurzgesagt

  Epic Mountain is a music and sound design company based in Munich that does all of the music for Kurzgesagt episodes. They’ve put four volumes of their Kurzgesagt music on Spotify, iTunes, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp.

• Sounds.com is a new subscription service for music samples

  Meant for music creators, Sounds.com is a way to access, download, and build personal libraries of royalty-free samples, loops, and sound packs for use in personal or commercial work.

• Chromecast and Google Homes reportedly overloading home Wi-Fi

  "Following initial research and investigation, our engineering team is confident that they've determined one of the key origins of the issue. From what we have gathered so far, the issue appears to be related to some of the recent versions of Android OS and Google Apps."

• YouTube raises subscriber, view threshold for Partner Program monetization

  In posts to its Advertiser and Creator blogs, YouTube details how it's changing the threshold for monetization through its YouTube Partner Program (YPP), from 10,000 lifetime views to 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months.

• The Road Movie, trailer
  

• The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

  This takes me back to my youth, which I gladly spent typing away in front of the IBM PC XT.

• A wishlist of scientific breakthroughs by Robert Boyle

  300 years old and we have broken through most of this wish list thanks to science.

• First Look at Nintendo Labo
  

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 12th…

• Fahrenheit 451, teaser
  

• Vestaboard
  

• Researcher finds another security flaw in Intel management firmware

  Today, researchers at F-Secure have revealed another weakness in Intel's management firmware that could allow an attacker with brief physical access to PCs to gain persistent remote access to the system, thanks to weak security in Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT) firmware - remote "out of band" device management technology installed on 100 million systems over the last decade, according to Intel.

• Facebook says it plans to transform the News Feed to promote "meaningful posts"

  “By making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.”

• Uber claims MPI’s insurance plan does not mesh with its business model

  “Based on the deficiencies in the MPI proposed product versus the type of insurance that is available to ridesharing companies in cities across North America, Uber will, unfortunately, be unable to consider expansion of services to Winnipeg on March 01, 2018,” the company said in its statement.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 11th…

• Nintendo Direct Mini
  

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 8th…

• My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman, trailer
  

• Apple Releases macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 Supplemental Update With Spectre Fix

  There's also a Safari 11.0.2 update available for macOS Sierra 10.12.6 and OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 that is designed to mitigate the effects of the Spectre vulnerability. Customers running macOS Sierra and OS X El Capitan should download the new version of Safari to make sure their machines are protected.

Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 4th…

• Critical flaws revealed to affect most Intel chips since 1995

  The researchers who discovered the vulnerabilities, dubbed "Meltdown" and "Spectre," said that "almost every system," since 1995, including computers and phones, is affected by the bug. The researchers verified their findings on Intel chips dating back to 2011, and released their own proof-of-concept code to allow users to test their machines.

• Intel Memory Access Design Flaw Already Addressed by Apple in macOS 10.13.2

  According to developer Alex Ionescu, Apple introduced a fix in macOS 10.13.2, with additional tweaks set to be introduced in macOS 10.13.3, currently in beta testing. AppleInsider also says that it has heard from "multiple sources within Apple" that updates made in macOS 10.13.2 have mitigated "most" security concerns associated with the KPTI vulnerability.

• Spotify Hit With $1.6 Billion Copyright Lawsuit

  On Friday, Wixen Music Publishing filed a lawsuit in California federal court that alleges that Spotify is using Petty's "Free Fallin'," the Doors' "Light My Fire" and tens of thousands of other songs without a license and compensation. The plaintiff is seeking a damages award worth at least $1.6 billion plus injunctive relief.

• Logan Paul controversy highlights the carelessness of online celebrity in the YouTube era

  When your brand is built on boundary-pushing stunts and a rapid (even daily) production cycle with little oversight, it’s easy for good judgment to fall by the wayside. The controversy has renewed questions about YouTube’s role in addressing the abusive and inappropriate content that often proliferates on its platform, and particularly how it responds when its most famous stars violate its stated standards.

• Opera 50 Beta RC with Cryptocurrency Mining Protection

  "After we recently updated the rules for our built-in ad blocker mechanism, we eliminated cryptocurrency mining scripts that overuse your device’s computing ability. Simply enable Opera’s ad blocker to prevent cryptocurrency mining sites from doing their dirty work on your computer. You can find and change NoCoin in Settings (Preferences on macOS) > Basic > Block ads and under the Recommended lists of ad filters."

• Chrome is turning into the new Internet Explorer 6

  While Google championed web standards that worked across many different browsers back in the early days of Chrome, more recently its own services often ignore standards and force people to use Chrome.