By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services: VDACS Launches Centralized Webpage with New and Beginning Farmer Resources. “The Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS) has curated a centralized list of valuable Resources for New and Beginning Farmers. This new website is designed to provide new and beginning agricultural producers with a list of available public resources to assist them in planning and starting their operations. The list of resources includes financial information, farm planning, training programs, technical assistance, conservation information, farm safety, and farm stress.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
TechCrunch: Google Maps pushes updates to enhance user experience in India. “Google Tuesday introduced a range of new features and updates for its mapping service in India as it wraps up for the year and sets the base for the coming year. One of the latest in the series of new additions is Lens in Maps, which will be launching in 15 cities across India by January, starting with Android.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
New York Times: Live from the Jungle: Migrants Become Influencers on Social Media . “For more than a decade, cellphones have been indispensable tools for people fleeing their homelands, helping them research routes, find friends and loved ones, connect with smugglers and evade the authorities. Now, cellphones and social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and TikTok are drastically changing the equation once again, fueling the next evolution of global movement.” This is a gift link which should allow you to read the article without paywall.
AFP: Imran Khan deploys AI clone to campaign from behind bars in Pakistan. “Artificial intelligence allowed Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan to campaign from behind bars on Monday, with a voice clone of the opposition leader giving an impassioned speech on his behalf. Khan has been locked up since August and is being tried for leaking classified documents, allegations he says have been trumped up to stop him contesting general elections due in February.”
ZDNet: The rise and fall of Usenet: How the original social media platform came to be. “Long before Facebook existed, or even before the Internet, there was Usenet. Usenet was the first social network. Now, with Google Groups abandoning Usenet, this oldest of all social networks is doomed to disappear.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Hacker News: FBI Takes Down BlackCat Ransomware, Releases Free Decryption Tool. “The U.S. Justice Department (DoJ) has officially announced the disruption of the BlackCat ransomware operation and released a decryption tool that more than 500 affected victims can use to regain access to files locked by the malware.”
Washington Post: ‘Problematic pockets’: How Discord became a home for extremists. “Discord allows anonymous users to control large swaths of its online meeting rooms with little oversight. To detect bad behavior, the company relies on largely unpaid volunteer moderators and server administrators like [Jack] Teixeira to police activity, and on users themselves to report behavior that violates community guidelines.”
VICE: Police Arrest Alleged Leader of Horrific Child Sextortion Ring. “Authorities were led to Limkin by one of his alleged victims, according to the criminal complaint. The victim told authorities that they first encountered the man on Omeagle, an app that allows you to talk to random people online. [Kalana] Limkin allegedly showed the victim video of a 5-year-old being raped and brought her back to his Discord server.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
University of Southern California: ‘Digital divide’ narrowing in California, but many low-income residents remain underconnected. “A survey by USC researchers and the California Emerging Technology Fund indicates that 91% of state households have broadband, yet challenges persist for low-income K-12 families.”
Northeastern Global News: A new AI model can predict human lifespan, researchers say. They want to make sure it’s used for good. “Researchers hope the model, built on a massive Danish data set and the technology that powers large language models like ChatGPT, can kickstart a public conversation about the power of these tools and how they should and shouldn’t be used.”
The Verge: 2023 in social media: the case for the fediverse. “If we do this correctly — if the next phase of how we congregate and communicate online is built for humans and not advertisers — there won’t be a new titanic company to rival Meta or a platform with eye-poppingly huge numbers like Facebook. What we’ll get instead is something much bigger: an entirely new infrastructure for our online lives that no company or platform controls.”
OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: NASA’s Tech Demo Streams First Video From Deep Space via Laser. “NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment beamed an ultra-high definition streaming video on Dec. 11 from a record-setting 19 million miles away (31 million kilometers, or about 80 times the Earth-Moon distance). The milestone is part of a NASA technology demonstration aimed at streaming very high-bandwidth video and other data from deep space – enabling future human missions beyond Earth orbit.” Good morning, Internet…
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December 20, 2023 at 06:34PM
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