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Travel App Books Trips To Photo Destinations
At some time, we've probably all seen a photo of some great-looking place and thought "If I knew where that was, I'd go there". But it's never been easy to find out where the pictured but uncaptioned dream destinations are. A new app that seeks to provide that solution is Look&Book - an iOS/Android helper that can reportedly figure out where such photos were taken, if within Europe, and get on with making travel arrangements. Designed by a partnership between EasyJet and the mobile tech company Travelport Digital, Look&Book gets users to upload photos of places that they're curious about to a server via the app. Using image recognition technology, it then searches through a database of existing photos, attempting to match the scene in the submitted photo to one from its collection of Europe-wide locations. Assuming a match is found, it then goes on to find EasyJet flights going from the user's location, allowing them to select departure and return dates. The system is said to work best with screenshots from Instagram.
https://blog-digital.travelport.com/easyjets-new-app-feature-allows-users-to-book-trips-using-just-a-photo
Drop-In E-Mail
Maildrop is a free service that provides disposable e-mail addresses to use when signing up for new Web sites or apps. Its mailboxes are designed to be temporary and transient. A Maildrop inbox can hold at most 10 messages, and an inbox that doesn't receive a message within 24 hours will be automatically cleared. No attachments are allowed and messages larger than 100kb will be discarded. According to the Maildrop "How It Works" page, the service is designed to provide "no security" and "little to no privacy". Maildrop's front page gives a number of example uses for their disposable mailboxes. The Maildrop service works in any modern browser. Maildrop is a free software with source code available on GitHub under the MIT license. Self-hosting instructions and hardware requirements are included in the Maildrop GitHub repository. "Saving your inbox from spam" is Maildrop's raison d'etre, inviting you to use the MailDrop service whenever you don't want to give out your real address.
https://maildrop.cc
LGBTQ Histories
The British Library has created a timely resource that "charts the struggles for identity and legislative change faced by LGBTQ communities in the UK" going all the way back to the 1500s. Here, readers will find a well-organised selection of articles, items from the library's collection, people, a timeline, and works of literature, all relevant to British LGBTQ history. Visitors can browse these materials via the tabs at the top, or they can use the search tab to explore all the items in the LGBTQ Histories site by keyword or by fields such as theme, date range, format, and occupation. One of the featured items is the original manuscript of 'De Profundis' - Oscar Wilde's famous letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, written during 1896-1897 when Wilde was imprisoned. A more recent example is a 36-minute sound recording of a January 2018 conversation and interview between three trans-gender activists and Steven Dryden, the British Library's Broadcast Recordings Curator. Four of the British Library's recent blog posts relating to LGBTQ history are also featured, found at the foot of this site's main page.
https://www.bl.uk/lgbtq-histories
Control Your Cookies
Cookies allow Web sites to recognise you when you visit, which can be handy if it saves you having to log in every time you return. They can have other helpful functions too, such as storing your personal preferences so that site pages can be better tailored to your needs. There are other cookies that can track where you go and what you get up to on the Web, which you might be less enthusiastic about. You can clear out your cookies, but that can cause problems. A better option might be to use a browser add-on to manage your cookies instead, Cookie AutoDelete for Chrome will automatically delete any cookies not in use when you close a tab but keep the ones you want. You can whitelist cookies you want to keep and import and export your list.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-autodelete/fhcgjolkccmbidfldomjliifgaodjagh?hl=en
Protect Your Files With Kryptelite
If you worry about privacy, you can stop unauthorised access to your personal files or folders by encrypting them. Kryptolite is am industrial-strength free program that lets you do this with a few mouse clicks. The software is a cut-down free version of the Inv Softworks commercial program Kryptel and it can encrypt and decrypt any number of files and folders in a single operation without size restrictions. It secures your content using super-strong 256-bit AES cipher encryption and can also compress ZIP archives and shred sensitive data for good when needed. Easy to use, at its most basic the program can encrypt and decrypt files directly from the Windows right-click context menu, but there's also a wizard interface you can choose to perform the same tasks if you prefer.
Kryptelite is very configurable, allowing you to choose which commands to include in the context menu, change the icons used to denote encrypted content and much more. The software is available for all versions of Windows from XP and Vista to 7, 8 and 10.
https://www.kryptel.com/download/
Search Engine of the Month
This summer, the privacy-first search engine DuckDuckGo turned 10. Hard to believe perhaps, but it's been a full decade since the oddly-named site was launched and that's an impressive age for any business that has Google and Bing as its main competitors. How has DuckDuckGo grown in recent years? Can there be much more growth potential for such an odd bird as the service enters its second decade? It's privacy that sets DuckDuckGo apart.and it should be no surprise that it climbed new heights of popularity earlier this year in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In a blog post, the company published the results from a survey of Internet users in the weeks after the scandal which found growing concerns about online privacy and the consequent increasing interest in tools which help to make Web use safer. It also points out that regardless of whether users have a profile on the site or not, Facebook-run trackers operate on around 25 per cent of sites, collecting user data and creating shadow profiles for ad targeting even if you never visit the social network’s domain. By contrast, DuckDuckGo doesn’t track searches, doesn’t create user profiles, and shows the same results to everyone. It reveals pages on which you’ll be tracked and scores them for privacy. Near-weekly headlines about data breaches, dodgy tracking, and dishonest privacy practices are good news for DuckDuckGo, but the company doesn't have the field to itself when competing simply on search. There are others - like Startpage - in the same space and even Google Chrome offers an incognito searching option.
https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/03/01/going-over-to-the-duck-side-a-week-with-duckduckgo/
At some time, we've probably all seen a photo of some great-looking place and thought "If I knew where that was, I'd go there". But it's never been easy to find out where the pictured but uncaptioned dream destinations are. A new app that seeks to provide that solution is Look&Book - an iOS/Android helper that can reportedly figure out where such photos were taken, if within Europe, and get on with making travel arrangements. Designed by a partnership between EasyJet and the mobile tech company Travelport Digital, Look&Book gets users to upload photos of places that they're curious about to a server via the app. Using image recognition technology, it then searches through a database of existing photos, attempting to match the scene in the submitted photo to one from its collection of Europe-wide locations. Assuming a match is found, it then goes on to find EasyJet flights going from the user's location, allowing them to select departure and return dates. The system is said to work best with screenshots from Instagram.
https://blog-digital.travelport.com/easyjets-new-app-feature-allows-users-to-book-trips-using-just-a-photo
Drop-In E-Mail
Maildrop is a free service that provides disposable e-mail addresses to use when signing up for new Web sites or apps. Its mailboxes are designed to be temporary and transient. A Maildrop inbox can hold at most 10 messages, and an inbox that doesn't receive a message within 24 hours will be automatically cleared. No attachments are allowed and messages larger than 100kb will be discarded. According to the Maildrop "How It Works" page, the service is designed to provide "no security" and "little to no privacy". Maildrop's front page gives a number of example uses for their disposable mailboxes. The Maildrop service works in any modern browser. Maildrop is a free software with source code available on GitHub under the MIT license. Self-hosting instructions and hardware requirements are included in the Maildrop GitHub repository. "Saving your inbox from spam" is Maildrop's raison d'etre, inviting you to use the MailDrop service whenever you don't want to give out your real address.
https://maildrop.cc
LGBTQ Histories
The British Library has created a timely resource that "charts the struggles for identity and legislative change faced by LGBTQ communities in the UK" going all the way back to the 1500s. Here, readers will find a well-organised selection of articles, items from the library's collection, people, a timeline, and works of literature, all relevant to British LGBTQ history. Visitors can browse these materials via the tabs at the top, or they can use the search tab to explore all the items in the LGBTQ Histories site by keyword or by fields such as theme, date range, format, and occupation. One of the featured items is the original manuscript of 'De Profundis' - Oscar Wilde's famous letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, written during 1896-1897 when Wilde was imprisoned. A more recent example is a 36-minute sound recording of a January 2018 conversation and interview between three trans-gender activists and Steven Dryden, the British Library's Broadcast Recordings Curator. Four of the British Library's recent blog posts relating to LGBTQ history are also featured, found at the foot of this site's main page.
https://www.bl.uk/lgbtq-histories
Control Your Cookies
Cookies allow Web sites to recognise you when you visit, which can be handy if it saves you having to log in every time you return. They can have other helpful functions too, such as storing your personal preferences so that site pages can be better tailored to your needs. There are other cookies that can track where you go and what you get up to on the Web, which you might be less enthusiastic about. You can clear out your cookies, but that can cause problems. A better option might be to use a browser add-on to manage your cookies instead, Cookie AutoDelete for Chrome will automatically delete any cookies not in use when you close a tab but keep the ones you want. You can whitelist cookies you want to keep and import and export your list.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-autodelete/fhcgjolkccmbidfldomjliifgaodjagh?hl=en
Protect Your Files With Kryptelite
If you worry about privacy, you can stop unauthorised access to your personal files or folders by encrypting them. Kryptolite is am industrial-strength free program that lets you do this with a few mouse clicks. The software is a cut-down free version of the Inv Softworks commercial program Kryptel and it can encrypt and decrypt any number of files and folders in a single operation without size restrictions. It secures your content using super-strong 256-bit AES cipher encryption and can also compress ZIP archives and shred sensitive data for good when needed. Easy to use, at its most basic the program can encrypt and decrypt files directly from the Windows right-click context menu, but there's also a wizard interface you can choose to perform the same tasks if you prefer.
Kryptelite is very configurable, allowing you to choose which commands to include in the context menu, change the icons used to denote encrypted content and much more. The software is available for all versions of Windows from XP and Vista to 7, 8 and 10.
https://www.kryptel.com/download/
Search Engine of the Month
This summer, the privacy-first search engine DuckDuckGo turned 10. Hard to believe perhaps, but it's been a full decade since the oddly-named site was launched and that's an impressive age for any business that has Google and Bing as its main competitors. How has DuckDuckGo grown in recent years? Can there be much more growth potential for such an odd bird as the service enters its second decade? It's privacy that sets DuckDuckGo apart.and it should be no surprise that it climbed new heights of popularity earlier this year in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In a blog post, the company published the results from a survey of Internet users in the weeks after the scandal which found growing concerns about online privacy and the consequent increasing interest in tools which help to make Web use safer. It also points out that regardless of whether users have a profile on the site or not, Facebook-run trackers operate on around 25 per cent of sites, collecting user data and creating shadow profiles for ad targeting even if you never visit the social network’s domain. By contrast, DuckDuckGo doesn’t track searches, doesn’t create user profiles, and shows the same results to everyone. It reveals pages on which you’ll be tracked and scores them for privacy. Near-weekly headlines about data breaches, dodgy tracking, and dishonest privacy practices are good news for DuckDuckGo, but the company doesn't have the field to itself when competing simply on search. There are others - like Startpage - in the same space and even Google Chrome offers an incognito searching option.
https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/03/01/going-over-to-the-duck-side-a-week-with-duckduckgo/
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