The privacy-first smartphone, Blackphone (Jon Callas, London, Jul 2014), is being enhanced with, on the one hand, the ability to erect a wall between personal and professional uses with Graphite Software's Spaces and, on the other hand, the launching of its own app store that promises to include only apps that meet the phone company's strong no-snooping standards.

In an article entitled "Google Can Now Describe Your Cat Photos,” our own David Bader of Georgia Tech is quoted (albeit without quotation marks) in the Wall Street Journal’s Digits column this week. The new technology could lead to big improvements in the accuracy of Google’s image-search results, which today often rely on  text found near a photo on a web page. One day it might help people search vast libraries of untagged photos or videos stored on smartphones, says David Bader, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech. A startup called Viblio is using similar research out of Simon Fraser University to automatically categorize videos.

We simply love Brewster Kahle's (Seattle, Sep 2001, and San Francisco, Feb 2005) Internet Archive. In addition to being a treasure trove of books, music, movies, television news (2009-present), historic and open-source software, and, oh, making it possible to dial up any website as it looked on any particular day with the Wayback Machine, with the Internet Arcade, the Archive now makes it possible to play 900 old-school arcade games in your browser. http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/internet-arcade-puts-900-free-coin-op-games-in-your-browser/ . Moreover, the Archive's facility in San Francisco is hosting Aaron Swartz Day (Rome, Jul 2008) on Saturday, Nov 8, on what would have been Swartz's 28th birthday; the theme is "Setting the Record Straight."

One of our members wanted to remind each of you that Irish coffee was actually refined and perfected in San Francisco -