Firefox maker Mozilla will kill off support for RSS and Atom feeds in this December's release of Firefox 64.

Along with dropping RSS and Atom syndicated-feed support, Firefox 64 will no longer contain the Live Bookmarks feature for subscribing to RSS feeds, nor the feed-preview feature.

Instead of maintaining built-in RSS support, Mozilla believes users should install RSS-reader Firefox add-ons.

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This past year, many people deleted their social media accounts following revelations about privacy violations on social media platforms and other concerns related to hate speech.

As people adopt their resolutions for the year, it is likely that many more will reconsider their social media use.
However, as a scholar of social media and religion, I'd argue that rather than just stop using social media, people could use it to improve their overall well-being. Here are three ways to do so.

1. Be active
Studies have shown that there is a big difference between passive social media use and active use. Scrolling through a newsfeed and merely looking at what others have posted is considered passive social media use.

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Global social media and technology giants are gearing up to fight sweeping new rules proposed by the Indian government that would require them to actively regulate content in one of the world’s biggest Internet markets, sources close to the matter told Reuters.

The rules, proposed by the Information Technology ministry on Christmas Eve, would compel platforms such as Facebook, its messaging service WhatsApp and Twitter to remove unlawful content, such as anything that affected the sovereignty and integrity of India. This had to be done within 24 hours, the rules propose.

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Excessive social media use has negative consequences that include the kind of risky decision-making associated with drug and gambling addicts, new research shows.  

Researchers at Michigan State University had 71 study participants take a survey gauging their Facebook dependence; it included questions about users feelings when unable to access the website, the influence Facebook has had on a users job or education, and attempts to quit.  

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GitHub is the number one signal in my API world. The activity that occurs via GitHub is more important than anything I find across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social channels. Commits to repositories and the other social activity that occurs around coding projects are infinitely more valuable, and telling, regarding what a company is up to than the deliberate social media signals blasted out via other channels. I’m always working to dial in my monitoring of GitHub using the GitHub API, but also via the RSS feeds that are present on the public side of the platform.

I feel RSS is often overlooked as an API data source, but I find that RSS is not only alive and well in 2018, it is something that is actively used on many platforms.

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How do you spot a fake?

When users of Microsofts Edge mobile browser visit a news website with a dubious reputation, they will now get a warning to proceed with caution.

As spotted by The Guardian, Microsoft has partnered with the news watchdog organization NewsGuard to provide Edge users with more information about the news veracity of the site they are visiting.

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Live Bookmarks combines Firefoxs bookmarking functionality with the dynamic nature of RSS feeds to create auto-updating bookmark folders that list all recent entries from RSS feeds.

The removal causes quite the issues for users who make use of the feature. Mozilla announced that it plans to export the list of feeds to an OPML file which the majority of RSS readers support.

While there are some alternatives that might work for some users, there was not a real solution to regain the functionality once it is removed.

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We have all thought about it. Maybe it's time to flick Facebook. Terminate Twitter. Silence social for good, and just be a person again.

Sadly, if this dream of going off the grid is about reclaiming your lost privacy, that might not actually be possible, according to new research.

A new study by researchers at the University of Vermont shows that social media posts by people you're connected with can actually be used to predict your own future posts – and even more accurately than if your own previous posts were being mined for insights.

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A long-running feud was thrust back into the spotlight today with a contentious report claiming that over half of Facebooks monthly active users are actually fake.  

The report, written by Facebook critic Aaron Greenspan, alleges that the social media giant has no way to accurately measure its true user base — or in other words, accounts that are matched up to real people — and that Facebooks reported metrics substantially overestimate the number of real monthly active users.

Notably, Greenspan is a former Harvard classmate of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I

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Just because you are not on Facebook or Twitter does not mean your data is safe from the social media giants or their prying algorithms. A study from the University of Vermont adds yet more evidence to the argument that your privacy is no longer in your hands, even if you abstain from social media.

Researchers from UVM's Department of Mathematics and Statistics published a paper in this week’s issue of the journal Nature Human Behaviour demonstrating that social media users not only generate substantial behavioral data about themselves but also about members of their social circle.

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Amazon is now letting anyone create and publish Alexa skills into the Alexa skills store. Amazon first made it easy to create custom skills last year with its Alexa Skill Blueprints program, and it’s taking those custom responses and allowing them to be published in the store for everyone to download and use. There are currently more than 80,000 existing Alexa skills in the store, but todays announcement means the store will be growing significantly with user-generated custom skills.

Amazon is primarily aiming this new functionality at content creators, businesses, brands, and other organizations. Publications, local sports teams, YouTubers, and others will all be able to broadcast their latest updates by simply adding a recorded audio feed URL to a blueprint skill directly and then publishing it on the store.

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As social medias influence over politics and elections has risen, so too has our collective anxiety about it. Over the last three years in particular, the use of megaplatforms like Facebook and Twitter as vectors for misinformation has been the subject of congressional hearings and not a few columns on the websites of some of our finer magazines. And as we gear up for elections in 2019 — and, assuming we make it through this year, in 2020 — the anxiety is gearing up, too. On Monday, in anticipation of the European Parliamentary elections in May, the Mozilla Foundation, an influential internet-advocacy non-profit, released an open letter to Facebook, co-signed by 32 civil rights and transparency groups, demanding that the social network implement measures designed to increase transparency, facilitate research, and combat misinformation.

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In many ways, content on the internet is beautifully linked together and accessible, but despite the interconnectivity of it all we still frequently find ourselves visiting this site, then that site, then another site, all in an effort to check for updates and get the content we want. Thats not particular efficient and theres a much better way to go about it.

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Get updates about volcanoes & earthquakes as RSS feeds

Schools can not do it all. We have known this for a long time, yet we often seem to deny this reality in policy and action. For decades we have piled expectations onto our schools, asking them to develop scholars, citizens, and workers and to provide for the academic, nutritional, social, and developmental needs of children. Schools, as critics are quick to point out, invariably fall short of these expectations.

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Earlier, it had been proposed that, due to its social functions, the mobile phone has become associated with the meaning of social relationships. Mobile phones social function is clear. People use them to maintain relationships and to feel connected and closer to friends and family members. We wanted to test if the mental representation of a mobile phone is indeed associated with the mental representation of social relationships. We thus conducted an experiment where we primed the concept of mobile phone and then measured if it activated, that is, made social relationship-related thoughts more accessible.

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Are you looking to maximize your use of Facebook Messenger within your digital marketing plan?

Whether you want to get more contacts, increase conversions or use automation to scale your growth, Facebook Messenger marketing tools can help - when used the right way.

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Google is set to begin deleting data from its beleaguered social network, Google+ in April, but before that happens, the Internet Archive and the ArchiveTeam say that they are working to preserve public posts on the platform before they vanish forever.

In a post on Reddit, the sites announced that they had begun their efforts to archive the posts using scripts to capture and back up the data in an effort to preserve it. The teams say that their efforts will only encompass posts that are currently available to the public: they won’t be able to back up posts that are marked private or deleted.

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There is a good reason people call Twitter the hell website.

Cynicism, egos, unprovoked hostility, unchecked propaganda, sexism, bigotry, and outright hate—Twitter is as full of it as virtually anywhere online, and worse, it is unbearably nonstop. The design of the place feels uniquely unhealthy due in large part to its speed and unrelenting stream. Opening up TweetDeck, the Twitter-owned client favored by maniacs like me thanks to its real-time updating feature, can seem like stepping into an oncoming tidal wave and getting swept out to sea. Before too long, you feel exhausted and ready to give up.

RSS Is Better than Twitter

With over 2.3 billion active users, Facebook has grown to become the biggest connective platform in history, and an essential part of many people's on and offline lives.

The influence of Facebook is inarguable - in fact, Facebook is so big that it's believed by some to have influenced the election of many world leaders through targeted ads and intricate campaigning. Whether you believe that or not will come down to your perspective, but no matter how you look at it, Facebook is a critical media platform, and one of the most significant tools of our time.

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There is no questioning the influence of social media in modern society, and our broader interactive process. But still, many businesses remain unsure whether it's right for them, whether they actually need to have a social media presence.

To be fair, it may not be for everyone - if, for example, you sell products aimed specifically at an older sector of the market, it could be that you would be wasting your time posting to a Facebook Page that no one's likely to read.

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Google has officially started the process of shutting down and deleting all consumer accounts on its Google+ social network platform, bringing an end to the company’s attempt to directly compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

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There is a good reason people call Twitter the hell website.

Cynicism, egos, unprovoked hostility, unchecked propaganda, sexism, bigotry, and outright hate—Twitter is as full of it as virtually anywhere online, and worse, its unbearably nonstop. The design of the place feels uniquely unhealthy due in large part to its speed and unrelenting stream. Opening up TweetDeck, the Twitter-owned client favored by maniacs like me thanks to its real-time updating feature, can seem like stepping into an oncoming tidal wave and getting swept out to sea. Before too long, you feel exhausted and ready to give up.

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The great promise of social media was that by giving voice to ordinary people all across the world, their collective experiences and expertise would help society reach a higher consciousness. Much as the web was bringing together the world of knowledge, social media would bring together our diverse perspectives and especially the vast wealth of uncodified human knowledge. The reality, as we all know, has been quite the opposite: a toxic cesspool of hate and stupidity, where the loudest and most obnoxious one wins and enlightened insight is overwhelmed by emotional sarcasm and toxicity. Is there any hope for a social future?

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As it prepares to go public under the ticker PINS after filing its S-1 to the Securities Exchange Commission today (March 22), Pinterest said it would rather not be seen as a place like Facebook or Twitter.

The cold shoulder makes sense: Sites that algorithmically serve up content—Facebook, YouTube, Google, Instagram, and Twitter—remain under fire for their inability to moderate the environments on their own platforms.

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With an undoubtedly scrappy beginning, content is now a serious player in a variety of brand communications, ranging from demand generation to PR, and on to sales enablement. Especially as search becomes more competitive, it’s important to look beyond a single point of activation in order to make the most of your content. Integrating social media publishing with your larger content marketing vision can help you do that, engaging your audience and maximizing your content marketing ROI.

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On Monday, Facebook's chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, tested my ability to tell the difference between broccoli and marijuana.

He showed me two pictures of green blobs and asked if they depicted the cruciferous vegetable or the mind-altering plant. I guessed both were cannabis; I was wrong. One, apparently, was an image of tempura broccoli.

Unlike me, Facebooks content-filtering artificial intelligence technology can now determine which image is of food, and which is of marijuana, according to Schroepfer.

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The way young people use social networks is changing rapidly, partly in response to networks that threaten to take over their lives, that they see as fake, the opposite of social. A while back, it looked like they were abandoning Facebook because it had been taken over by the old folks, but it now turns out they’re just leaving anyway, and not just Facebook, but the whole social media concept.

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Sa Re Ga Ma Pa made me sit up. Crass commercialisation, ignorance, jingoism. You name it. It had it all.

One of our readers tells us why Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's film touched her deeply.

'What happens when you have 100 prizes to offer, and just about 10 contenders?'

In choosing Crash, the Academy members showed their conservative, non-controversial side.

The Academy has done it again -- opted for the safe choices, leaving the truly deserving out in the cold.

Stauffer, Devin, 1970- author

Abeyagoonasekera, Asanga, author

Bello, Walden F., author

Australia. Parliament. Senate. Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee, author, issuing body

Australia. Parliament. Delegation to the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly General Assembly

Australia. Parliament. Senate. Environment and Communications References Committee, author, issuing body

Australia. Parliament. Senate. Procedure Committee, author, issuing body

Australia. Parliament. Senate. Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee, author, issuing body

Australia

Australia

Australian National Audit Office, author

Australia. Parliament. Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit, author, issuing body

Australia. Parliament. House of Representatives. Standing Committee of Privileges and Members' Interests, author

Australia. Parliament. House of Representatives. Standing Committee on Appropriations and Administration, author, issuing body