Gongol.com Archives: December 2014
The terrible humanitarian crisis in Syria and Iraq
Woman sent to prison for five years for promoting terrorism on Facebook
She lives in the UK, and inciting terrorism -- even if she's trying to incite it in Syria -- is against the law there
Firefox dumps Google search for Yahoo
An interesting move; Yahoo hasn't really been a meaningful independent player in search for some time. But Firefox, which is trying a sort of brand-reboot after having given up quite a lot of ground to the Google Chrome browser, is now in a five-year agreement with Yahoo to provide Yahoo as the default search engine (while still listing others). Yahoo, meanwhile, is reciprocating by encouraging users of its properties to "upgrade" to Firefox.
YouTube builds in a GIF maker
A smart adaptation to new uses of old technology. There's nothing new about GIFs, but people are using them in lots of social-media applications that otherwise don't allow for easy video consumption.
An awesome visualization of the phases of the Moon
Heavy rains knocked out power to San Francisco, and that hurts the tech industry
Seagate rolls out 8-terabyte hard drive for $260
We're screwing up anti-microbial treatments, and it's going to have costly consequences
Google is pulling its engineering operations out of Russia
Rumor has it the company doesn't want to have to follow a law that requires them to store data about Russian users on Russian-based computers
Google's core revenues from search-related advertising may be tapering off
Farewell to the Merle Hay Cinema
Washington Post says President Obama had the worst year in Washington
And he largely brought it upon himself
