New researches

Thursday, July 21, 2022

Exploring Chronicling America Newspapers, Google Drive, Vintage Computer Games, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, July 21, 2022

Exploring Chronicling America Newspapers, Google Drive, Vintage Computer Games, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, July 21, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Library of Congress: New Interactive Map and Timeline Added to Chronicling America. “The new ‘Exploring Chronicling America Newspapers’ application dynamically maps publication locations of over 3,000 digitized newspapers currently available in the Chronicling America online collection. Users can also interact with a timeline of publication dates for digitized newspapers available in Chronicling America, currently covering years between 1777-1963. ”

USEFUL STUFF

PC Magazine: 18 Google Drive Tips You Can’t Afford to Miss . “Where you may find Google Drive lacking, though, is in that 15GB, which can fill up fast because a number of other services share that space, including Google Photos and Gmail…. So those are the basics of Google Drive, but what you need are the secrets—the tips and tricks that will drive your use of Drive to another level.”

MakeUseOf: 5 Sites Where You Can Download Old PC Games for Free. “Modern gamers have an unrivaled bounty of free games. Many of the most popular online games use the free-to-play model to entice users. There are free games on Steam, in your browser, and on your smartphone. However, you don’t always want the latest AAA title or free battle royale. You want to scratch the nostalgia itch. Luckily, there are a host of websites dedicated to precisely this: the love and preservation of old games. Here are the best sites where you can download old PC games for free.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

UCLA: Asian American Studies Center to create free resource for high school teachers. “The UCLA Asian American Studies Center has received $10 million in state funding that will propel the development of a free multimedia learning experience that will equip teachers across the country with materials that can fill a curricular gap about the experiences of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.”

Rest of World: Overrun by influencers, historic sites are banning TikTok creators in Nepal. “They come in hordes, strike funny poses, dance to loud music, trample over crops, and often stir up unmanageable crowds that cause traffic jams. TikTok creators in Nepal have earned a reputation for disrespecting religious and historic places in their quest to create viral videos, and are now facing a backlash.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Associated Press: Researchers: Chinese-made GPS tracker highly vulnerable. “A popular Chinese-made automotive GPS tracker used in 169 countries has severe software vulnerabilities, posing a potential danger to highway safety, national security and supply chains, cybersecurity researchers have found.”

Bleeping Computer: Hackers steal 50,000 credit cards from 300 U.S. restaurants. “Payment card details from customers of more than 300 restaurants have been stolen in two web-skimming campaigns targeting three online ordering platforms.”

CNN: She warned other women on TikTok about her ex-boyfriend. Then she received a cease-and-desist. “While women aren’t alone in using online forums to post about connections from dating apps, a Pew Research Center study found that young women are much more likely than their male counterparts to report having their safety threatened when online dating, whether that be receiving unwanted communications or unsolicited sexual images, or being berated.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNET: AI Helps the Powerful but Harms the Vulnerable, Mozilla Warns. “AI is great for rich and powerful people and for tech giants trying to boost profits. Otherwise, artificial intelligence and the automation it enables can be harmful, nonprofit Mozilla concluded in a report published Monday.”

The Nation: You Can’t Buy These Books. “In reality, the publishers’ attack on the Internet Archive is a Trojan horse for a very different, and radical, idea: that e-books are fundamentally—legally—different from paper books. If accepted, their argument would remove e-books from the many statutory protections upon which library rights positively depend. That outcome would leave libraries vulnerable to the draconian licensing deals under which e-books are increasingly offered. And libraries would have to pay and pay, in the absence of digital books that can be permanently bought and owned outright.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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July 22, 2022 at 12:34AM
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New Hampshire Geodata Portal, Scotland Commercial Fishing Photography, Google’s Quantum Virtual Machine, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, July 21, 2022

New Hampshire Geodata Portal, Scotland Commercial Fishing Photography, Google’s Quantum Virtual Machine, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, July 21, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University of New Hampshire: Maps Made Easier. “The New Hampshire Geodata Portal, hosted by New Hampshire Geographically Referenced Analysis and Information Transfer System (NH GRANIT), provides a more modernized data distribution system than its previous version. With data ranging from public lands and topographic lines, to the pavement condition of roads and location of eelgrass meadows in Great Bay, the website will be a boon for a wide cross-section of humanity; surveyors, foresters, real estate agents, engineering companies, utility companies, and state natural resource and transportation agencies will find beneficial information in an easier-to-access format.”

The Scotsman: Photographic archive captures rich heritage of Scottish fishing communities. “From snapshots of a gnarled fishing crew standing over a landed shark in Berwick upon Tweed in 1897, to a joyous portrait of fishwives living it up on holiday in post-war Paris, they form part of a vital archive charting changing social and political currents.”

Google Blog: Our new Quantum Virtual Machine will accelerate research and help people learn quantum computing. “At Google Quantum AI, we have a long history of making tools we build for our own research available to the public free of cost. Today we are adding the Quantum Virtual Machine to the list. The Quantum Virtual Machine (QVM) emulates the experience and results of programming one of the quantum computers in our lab, from circuit validation to processor infidelity.”

Daily Dot: Unfair Instagram moderation of women’s bodies highlighted in a new exhibit. “Getting your content—or worse—your profile removed from a social media platform without explanation or recourse is an alienating feeling that a growing number of people are experiencing. To reflect what it can mean for people’s community, mental health, and even livelihood, London-based creative agency RANKIN launched a project meant to re-platform hundreds of people whose content had been removed from spaces like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

VentureBeat: Twitch launches closed beta of its new Charity livestream tool. “Twitch announced it has launched the closed beta of its latest product: Twitch Charity. Through this new tool, creators can more easily run a charity fundraiser through Twitch’s platform. According to Twitch, this will simplify the process for the streamer for future charity streams.”

CNET: Google Begins Publicly Testing Its AR Glasses. “Google’s glasses are AR of a sort, relying on audio assistance that can use built-in cameras to recognize objects in an environment through AI, similar to how Google Lens can recognize objects and text with phone cameras. The glasses will not, however, be able to take photos or videos.”

Fast Company: Fad or frenzy, BeReal is having a real moment right now. “Online chatter about BeReal has been mixed, with some praising the app as a quaint throwback to the early internet and others claiming it doesn’t quite live up to its promise of authenticity. However, since it appears to be a hit with younger users, BeReal will inevitably stoke the curiosity of everyone else.” RB Firehose notes that I indexed a mention of BeReal in March, but the article isn’t accessible anymore, so let me point you at this WIRED overview from April.

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Verge: Internal documents show Facebook and Google discussing platform strategies. “New internal documents released Tuesday detail how three of Big Tech’s most prominent companies favored their own products as a means of stamping out competition. Their release comes as lawmakers push to approve stronger antitrust legislation by the end of the year.”

CNBC: Google will let Android developers use rival payments systems in Europe. “Google will let nongaming app developers use rival payments systems on its Android operating system for some European users, the company announced Tuesday. It’s a change that the company has resisted in the past and so far is not extending beyond Europe.”

TechCrunch: New documents reveal ‘huge’ scale of US government’s cell phone location data tracking. “It’s no secret that U.S. government agencies have been obtaining and using location data collected by Americans’ smartphones. In early 2020, a Wall Street Journal report revealed that both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bought access to millions of smartphone users’ location data to track undocumented immigrants and suspected tax dodgers. However, new documents obtained by the ACLU through an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit now reveal the extent of this warrantless data collection.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CBC: Researcher hopes trove of rare residential school photos can help identify missing children. “About 1,000 black-and-white photos from the early days of Canada’s residential school system have been discovered in the archives of a Roman Catholic order in Rome…. The [National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation] is hoping to identify as many of the children in the photos as possible by digitizing the images and sharing them with Indigenous communities.”

Nature: How to shrink AI’s ballooning carbon footprint. “As machine-learning experiments get more sophisticated, their carbon footprints are ballooning. Now, researchers have calculated the carbon cost of training a range of models at cloud-computing data centres in various locations1. Their findings could help researchers to reduce the emissions created by work that relies on artificial intelligence (AI).” Good morning, Internet…

July 21, 2022 at 05:32PM
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Wednesday, July 20, 2022

Rodolfo ‘Rudy’ Lozano, The Gilberd School, Google Wallet, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, July 20, 2022

Rodolfo ‘Rudy’ Lozano, The Gilberd School, Google Wallet, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, July 20, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

University of Illinois Chicago: Rodolfo ‘Rudy’ Lozano digital exhibit available online. “In anticipation of July 29 marking Rodolfo ‘Rudy’ Lozano Day in Cook County, the University of Illinois Chicago Library is announcing that a digital exhibit celebrating the Pilsen activist, labor organizer and UIC alumnus is available to the public.”

Essex County Standard: The Gilberd School unlocks archive with material from 1950s and 60s. “PAST pupils can now access newly scanned school bulletins and photos from more than 50 years ago. Several important documents and photos detailing the Gilberd School’s history from the 1950s and 1960s are now available for the public to view for the first time.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ars Technica: Google Wallet rolls out to users, will live alongside Google Pay in the US. “Today is apparently the launch day for Google Wallet—Google’s fourth rebrand of its payment system. Users on Reddit report the app has rolled out to them, and a version has popped up on APKMirror if you want to sideload. Google also launched a ton of support pages today relating to Wallet.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 12 Resourceful OSINT Tools You Should Know. “Carrying out open-source intelligence manually is no doubt a Herculean task. There are just too many records and data to go through. Thankfully, many tools have been created to automate and speed up the OSINT process. With these tools, you can get a lot of information about a particular organization and person in seconds.” Interesting mix. Annotation is a little thin so be prepared to explore.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Mashable: ‘Heardle Decades’ lets you guess all the ’80s and ’90s bangers . “Heardle Decades takes the song-guessing Wordle variant to make individual music guessing games based on songs from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. It’s not an official Heardle offshoot, so has nothing to do with Heardle’s new owner, Spotify, but it plugs into the streaming site.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: Dozens of Thai activists and supporters hacked by NSO Group’s Pegasus. “More than 30 Thai activists and supporters have been hacked with NSO Group’s potent Pegasus spyware, civil society groups said late Sunday, in the first countrywide campaign brought to light because Apple warned targeted iPhone users.”

Engadget: US Congress calls for the FTC to regulate how VPN companies operate. “US Democrats have urged the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) to crack down on deceptive practices in the Virtual Private Network (VPN) industry, The Verge has reported. In an open letter, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) cited research indicating that three-quarters of the most popular VPNs ‘misrepresented their products,’ leading consumers to a false sense of security.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: AI Art Is Challenging the Boundaries of Curation. “The coming-of-age of AI art raises a number of interesting questions, some of which—such as whether AI art is really art, and if so, to what extent it is really made by AI—are not particularly original.”

New Jersey Institute of Technology: Use of Twitter Helped Taliban Regain Control in Afghanistan, Researchers Find. “Twitter was a strategic tool for Taliban operations in overthrowing the Afghanistan leadership during the country’s civil war, and some accounts associated with the oppressive group triggered the company’s algorithms to promote ads for well-known Western brands, researchers from New Jersey Institute of Technology, Princeton University and University of Regina found.”

Northwestern Now: Government-funded scientific research reflects public interest, Northwestern study finds . “Around the world, governments fund scientific research with taxpayer money as a public good. But how well does science serve the public interest in practice? A new study led by Northwestern University researchers finds that public funding is well-aligned with public use, and that the public tends to value research that scientists also see as impactful within their fields.” Good afternoon, Internet…

July 21, 2022 at 12:23AM
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StoryCorps, Inflation Resources, BBC Rewind, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, July 20, 2022

StoryCorps, Inflation Resources, BBC Rewind, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, July 20, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

StoryCorps: Press Release: New StoryCorps Mobile App Launches July 18. “StoryCorps, the nonprofit organization dedicated to recording, preserving, and sharing humanity’s stories, today launches a new free mobile app, available in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. From one device, the StoryCorps App allows anyone, anywhere, to conveniently prepare for and record a high-quality interview for preservation in the online StoryCorps archive and eventually at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.”

Utah State University: New USU Extension Website Offers Inflation Resources. “Website topics include budgeting for emergencies, combating panic buying during inflation, teaching children about money management, positive conversations about money, and other topics.”

Radio Times: BBC Rewind shares thousands of hours of archive content for centenary. “BBC Rewind, which has been established to mark 100 years of the BBC, is now the home of ‘tens of thousands of audio-visual recordings’, reflecting the life and events of the UK throughout the decades, making it the largest release of digital archive content in BBC history. Over 30,000 pieces of uncovered content will be publicly available on the website, with the oldest footage dating back to the 1940s.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 8 Web-Based Teleprompter Tools for Seamless Reading. “Whether you’re speaking in a live session or recording a video, it makes little sense to memorize your script. Especially when several teleprompter tools are available online that work perfectly within your browser. Using these tools, you can keep eye contact with the camera without having to memorize your lines. So, here are the eight online teleprompter tools for seamless reading and recording.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Rolling Stone: Exclusive: Fake Accounts Fueled the ‘Snyder Cut’ Online Army. “For a time, rival studios and digital marketing executives were intrigued by the SnyderVerse fan mobilization, wondering how they, too, might better harness the power of social media. But soon many came to question what appeared to be suspect activity: Hashtags like #ReleaseTheSnyderCut saturated social media beginning in late 2019, racking up hundreds of thousands of tweets a day to pressure Warner Bros. to release the director’s version of the film.”

WIRED: TikTok Starts Layoffs in Company-Wide Restructuring. “The restructuring announced internally today includes layoffs and the closing of some vacant roles, one staff member said, and affects TikTok’s businesses in the US, EU, and UK. Plans to expand some teams inside the company have been put on hold.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: Congressional Democrats Ready Net Neutrality Bill. “Democrats on Capitol Hill are crafting legislation that could restore net neutrality and the Federal Communications Commission’s authority to regulate broadband, according to a report published Monday by The Washington Post.”

TechCrunch: Amazon sues admins from 10,000 Facebook groups over fake reviews. “Amazon filed a lawsuit Monday against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups that coordinate cash or goods for buyers willing to post bogus product reviews. The global groups served to recruit would-be fake reviewers and operated in Amazon’s online storefronts in the U.S., the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Japan and Italy.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Fast Company: The secretly powerful little app that you could write an entire book in. “I started writing a novel one evening a week when my oldest child was a baby. I’ve just completed a big rewrite and finally feel ready to take the next steps toward getting my story out into the world….. My lifeline: Google Keep, a simple note-taking app. For anyone else writing a book in the few minutes scattered throughout your day, here’s how I did it—and how you can, too.”

Georgia Tech: Georgia Tech to Help Expand Research at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. “Georgia Tech’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) was recently awarded a $995,550 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to enable network and research enhancements for nearby historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The NSF grant will fund at 100 percent a two-year project titled Promoting Research and Education at Small Colleges in the Atlanta University Center and at Tuskegee University Through Network Architecture Enhancements.”

Florida International University: Improving science literacy means changing science education. “A large body of research shows that traditional science education, for both science majors and non-majors, doesn’t do a good job of teaching science students how to apply their scientific knowledge and explain things that they may not have learned about directly. With that in mind, we developed a series of cross-disciplinary activities guided by a framework called ‘three-dimensional learning.'”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Princeton University: Scientific field research and the arts come together in a Princeton course using motion-capture cameras to record campus wildlife. “The visual arts/environmental studies course was taught by Jeff Whetstone, professor of visual arts and director of the Program in Visual Arts. Students watched nature in person and learned techniques of wildlife surveillance photography, using remote still and video cameras to observe animal populations and their behavior. They then used this ‘found’ content from their ecological field research to create works of art with a focus on what can be discovered by looking closely at the wildlife around us.” Good morning, Internet…

July 20, 2022 at 05:29PM
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Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Boston Archaeology, YouTube Advertising, BookTok, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, July 19, 2022

Boston Archaeology, YouTube Advertising, BookTok, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, July 19, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

City of Boston: Boston Archaeology Program Announces Completion Of NEH-funded Digital Archaeology Project. “In March 2019, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the City of Boston Archaeology Program a $350,000 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant to re-process, re-catalog, digitally photograph and place online in a database the complete archaeological assemblages excavated from five important Boston historical sites…. With this project, the collections are fully documented and anyone from anywhere in the world can see these collections online or study them in person at the City Archaeology Program.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Land: Google allows Election Ads on YouTube and updates its Political Content Policy. “Next month the Google Ads Political Content Policy will be updated and advertisers will be required to further clarify the ‘Paid for by’ disclosure directly in the ad.”

Mashable: #BookTok rejoice: TikTok launches official Book Club . “In the cluttered world of TikTok, #BookTok emerged as a favorite long ago: a cozy, sprawling community with a hashtag that has over 64.3 billion views and counting. The social media giant is well aware of this popularity, seizing upon that long-embedded love for literature with by launching an official book club on the platform. The TikTok Book Club will be open to everyone, much like #BookTok is, but with an organized structure.”

WIRED: Twitter Has Entered the Elon Musk Twilight Zone . “Manu Cornet joined Twitter last year after 14 years at Google, where he used his hobby of drawing cartoons to poke fun at his employer’s culture and scandals. His latest three-panel drawing depicts an anthropomorphized version of Twitter’s bird logo delivering a monologue. ‘Your strategy is a model of hypocrisy and bad faith,’ it says, seemingly addressing Musk. ‘You’ve trashed me, disrupted my operations, and destroyed shareholder value.’ The angry bird then pivots to a plaintive question: ‘Will you now finally agree to adopt me?’ Cornet’s cartoon gets to the heart of the illogical situation that has ensnared Twitter.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Vice: MetaMask Co-Founders: ‘We Can’t Stop People From Making Ponzis on Blockchains’. “With tens of millions of users, the digital wallet system has become the main access point to Ethereum, the blockchain that has given rise to stablecoins like Tether, play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity, metaverses like Decentraland, and NFT projects like the Bored Ape Yacht Club. But after a precipitous crypto crash that has affected projects and people alike, the co-founders of MetaMask are now warning that the crypto ecosystem they helped create is currently an unsafe casino prone to Ponzi-like operations and exploitation.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CBS News: Report finds online campaign of “widespread targeted harassment” against supporters of Amber Heard. “[Ella] Dawson was one of many Heard supporters on the receiving end of an organized campaign of ‘widespread targeted harassment,’ according to a report published Monday by the research firm Bot Sentinel. The firm analyzed more than 14,000 tweets that included at least one of four viral anti-Heard hashtags seeking to characterize Heard as a liar or an abuser, and found that nearly 1 in 4 accounts tied to the tweets, 24.4%, were created in the last seven months.”

HackRead: Hackers can spoof commit metadata to create false GitHub repositories. “Checkmarx security researchers have warned about an emerging new supply chain attack tactic involving spoofed metadata commits to present malicious GitHub repositories as legit.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

BBC: Microsoft launches simulator to train drone AI systems. “Microsoft has launched a platform to train the artificial intelligence (AI) systems of autonomous aircraft. Project AirSim is, in effect, a flight simulator for drones, which companies can use to train and develop software controlling them.”

IEEE Spectrum: Does MetaHuman’s Digital Clone Cross the Uncanny Valley?. “Creating your virtual clone isn’t as difficult as you’d think. Epic Games recently introduced Mesh to MetaHuman, a framework for creating photorealistic human characters. It lets creators sculpt an imported mesh to create a convincing character in less than an hour.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

News@Northeastern: Can Listening To The Beatles Improve Your Memory? New Research Says Music Just Might Stir The Brain. “Published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, Loui found that for older adults who listened to some of their favorite music, including The Beatles, connectivity in the brain increased. Specifically, [Psyche] Loui—and her multi-disciplinary team of music therapists, neurologists and geriatric psychiatrists—discovered that music bridged the gap between the brain’s auditory system and reward system, the area that governs motivation.” Good afternoon, Internet…

July 20, 2022 at 12:35AM
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Cultural Heritage at Risk, Fanny Lechevalier Lafon Art, Medical Supply Fundraising, More: Ukraine Update, July 19, 2022

Cultural Heritage at Risk, Fanny Lechevalier Lafon Art, Medical Supply Fundraising, More: Ukraine Update, July 19, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

International Council of Museums: ICOM is Preparing an Emergency ICOM Red List of Cultural Heritage at Risk for Ukraine. “ICOM, in close cooperation with its National Committee in Ukraine, is preparing an Emergency Red List of Cultural Objects at Risk for Ukraine to combat illicit traffic following the invasion.”

Boing Boing: French artist collages war photos from Ukraine into classical paintings. “Fanny Lechevalier Lafon is a French artist trained in classical painting techniques at the School of Fine Arts, Rennes. She also does digital collage. Feeling like she wanted to do something in response to the horrors of the Russian invasion of Ukraine she saw daily on French media, she decided to do what she does best: make art.” The first image in the article made me go “meh” but the other ones were much more striking, especially the William Banks Fortescue combination.

Enfield Independent: London hospitals launched website to help donate urgent supplies to Ukraine. “People are being invited to visit the new website and purchase items that will then be packaged and dispatched to the war-torn country. Medical supplies needed in Ukraine include ventilators, crutches, walking frames, respiratory masks, scrubs, bandages and wound kits.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

World Monuments Fund: WMF Announces New Projects to Protect Ukraine’s Cultural Heritage with Local and International Partners. “World Monuments Fund (WMF) today announced the launch of four new projects as part of its recently established Ukraine Heritage Response Fund to address the immediate, critical needs of heritage professionals in Ukraine and to lay the groundwork for the future rehabilitation and long-term recovery of cultural heritage in the country.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

New York Times: The War in Ukraine Is the True Culture War. “The appalling damage to theaters, libraries and religious sites (above all in Mariupol, the occupied city in Ukraine’s southeast) in these past four months alone broadens a horrendous tide of cultural destruction this century, in Syria, Iraq, Ethiopia, Mali, Armenia and Afghanistan. But the risks to Ukrainian culture are more than mere collateral damage.”

Washington Post: Ukraine wants social media to up its game against Russian propaganda. “Tech companies took aggressive steps to weed out misinformation and disinformation in the early days of the war, developing policies to limit Russian state media and supercharging their fact-checking teams. But as the Russians’ tactics are evolving, officials say the tech companies aren’t keeping pace.”

Jerusalem Post: Ukraine’s unexpected social media weapon: Patron the dog. “An unlikely fighter for Ukraine emerged on social media in the months since Russia’s invasion on February 24: Patron the dog. Patron was recently presented with Medal for Dedicated Services by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Russia fines Google $370 million for repeated content violations, regulator says. “Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google was fined 21.1 billion roubles ($373 million) on Monday by a Moscow court for a repeated failure to remove content Russia deems illegal, such as ‘fake news’ about the conflict in Ukraine, Russia’s communications regulator said.”

Financial Times: TikTok resists calls to preserve Ukraine content for war crime investigations . “TikTok is resisting calls to preserve and hand over access to its content for war crime investigations, as lawyers and activists warn that the Chinese-owned app is a major data challenge in prosecuting atrocities in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

Bloomberg: Russia Seeks to Punish Expats Who Criticize War on Social Media. “While the exact number of Russians charged in absentia is difficult to quantify, Moscow is already using the fake news law, passed in March, to stifle independent voices on social media platforms where many young people consume their news, according to Stanislav Seleznev, a lawyer at Net Freedoms Project. Besides [Michael] Nacke, Russia has charged several other expatriates who have criticized the war on social media.”

WIRED: Russian ‘Hacktivists’ Are Causing Trouble Far Beyond Ukraine . “In recent months Killnet has targeted a growing list of countries that have supported Ukraine but are not directly involved in the war. Attacks against websites in Germany, Italy, Romania, Norway, Lithuania, and the United States have all been linked to Killnet.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT Technology Review: Why business is booming for military AI startups . “NATO announced on June 30 that it is creating a $1 billion innovation fund that will invest in early-stage startups and venture capital funds developing ‘priority’ technologies such as artificial intelligence, big-data processing, and automation. Since the war started, the UK has launched a new AI strategy specifically for defense, and the Germans have earmarked just under half a billion for research and artificial intelligence within a $100 billion cash injection to the military.”

July 19, 2022 at 09:09PM
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Facebook Roundup, July 19, 2022

Facebook Roundup, July 19, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WIRED: Meta Was Restricting Abortion Content All Along. “…Meta denies changing its policies after the decision—and pro-choice activists say that the censorship has been going on for years. Activists who spoke to WIRED say they have seen the company’s AI moderation system tag abortion content, in many cases about abortion pills, as ‘sensitive,’ decrease its visibility, or remove it altogether.”

Techdirt: Now That Rupert Murdoch Has Convinced Governments To Force Facebook To Pay For News, Facebook No Longer Wants Anything To Do With News. “This should surprise no one, but Joshua Benton, over at Nieman Lab, has a really fantastically well-reported article about how Facebook basically wants out of the news business entirely. It goes through multiple reasons why this is the case, but a big one is that Rupert Murdoch’s decade-long demands that Facebook and Google simply fork over some cash to news organizations (for sending them traffic) has finally had some modicum of success in Australia, and is now being considered elsewhere around the globe.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Verge: Meta warns employees of ‘serious times’ in internal memo listing key product bets. “Meta is warning of ‘serious times’ and preparing for a leaner second half of 2022, according to an internal memo circulated to employees this week. The note comes from chief product officer Chris Cox and outlines the company’s priorities and challenges to its business going forward.”

CNET: Meta’s Novi Service to Be Phased Out: What you need to know. “What little is left of Meta’s once-ambitous cryptocurrency project is limping to an end. A pilot program for Novi, a money-transfer service that uses a cryptocurrency wallet of the same name, will cease operating on September 1, according to a notice on its website. Novi operates only in Guatemala and the US.”

Gizmodo: Fired Employee Claims Facebook Created Secret Tool to Read Users’ Deleted Messages. “How ‘forgotten’ are your deleted internet posts anyway? That question has come under renewed scrutiny this week thanks to a new lawsuit filed by a fired Meta employee who claims the company set up a ‘protocol’ to pull up certain users’ deleted posts and hand them over to law enforcement. If the former employee’s claims ring true, the practice could call into question Meta’s previous communications about how it accesses certain user data.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: Meta sues a site cloner who allegedly scraped over 350,000 Instagram profiles. “Meta is taking legal action against two prolific data scrapers. On Tuesday, the company filed separate federal lawsuits against a company called Octopus and an individual named Ekrem Ateş. According to Meta, the former is the US subsidiary of a Chinese multinational tech firm that offers data scraping-for-hire services to individuals and companies.”

WIRED: How to Avoid the Worst Instagram Scams . “SINCE MARK ZUCKERBERG snapped up Instagram for a mere $1 billion in April 2012, the app has grown into a social media juggernaut and one of Meta’s biggest assets. More than a billion people use Instagram every month, with influencers relying on it as a key source of their income. Any online congregation of this size is naturally a target for hackers and scammers looking to take advantage of people and make a quick buck.”

New York Times: An Irish regulator puts Facebook data policies back in spotlight.. “A draft decision by Irish regulators on Thursday threatened to block Facebook and Instagram from moving data about European Union users to the United States, the latest round in a yearslong dispute about protecting the data of European citizens from American spying.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Flinders University: Instagram pressure rising. “Flinders University body image experts are urging all Instagram users to apply a more conscious ‘filter’ to monitor their health and fitness posts. The researchers say people who follow in the footsteps of high-profile social media influencers and upload regular #fitspo and #cleaneating Instagram posts may be placing increased pressure on girls and women, as the posts may exacerbate bad feelings about themselves and their bodies.”

The Verge: Meta open sources early-stage AI translation tool that works across 200 languages. “Social media conglomerate Meta has created a single AI model capable of translating across 200 different languages, including many not supported by current commercial tools. The company is open-sourcing the project in the hopes that others will build on its work.”

Engadget: Meta’s first human rights report defends the company’s misinformation strategy. “Meta has released its first yearly human rights report, and you might not be shocked by the angle the company is taking. As CNBC notes, the 83-page document outlines the Facebook parent’s handling of human rights issues during 2020 and 2021, with a strong focus on justifying the company’s strategies for combatting misinformation and harassment.”

News@Northeastern: Facebook Ad Algorithms May Be Harmful To Well-informed Democratic Society, Northeastern Research Scientist Tells European Parliament. “Northeastern University research scientist Piotr Sapiezynski recently told the European Parliament that Facebook’s ad delivery algorithms may be harmful both to political campaigns and to society at large. Sapiezynski testified during a hearing on draft legislation concerning transparency and targeting of political advertising in Brussels.”

July 19, 2022 at 06:54PM
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