New researches

Monday, December 5, 2022

Oil Refinery Air Pollution, Plastic Litter, Google, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, December 5, 2022

Oil Refinery Air Pollution, Plastic Litter, Google, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, December 5, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Spotted via my Google Alerts: Refinery Air Watch. From the home page: “This site collects fenceline air monitoring data from oil refineries and makes it available for you to download. You can find here two-week sampling data from all U.S. oil refineries, and continuous monitoring data from California refineries.”

New-to-me: an online museum of plastic litter. “Archeoplastica aims to increase public awareness of plastic pollution on beaches and oceans. Set up in 2018, it showcases a significant amount of plastic waste from 30 to 60 years ago which has been found on beaches. The items have been picked up and presented here in an online museum alongside other exhibitions.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Gizmodo: Google Is Launching Yet Another Way to Stuff Websites With Ads. “If you’re anything like me, you spend your time online casting your eyes across the screen, desperately hoping for another way to turn your attention into advertising revenue. At last, there’s some good news on that front, thanks to our hardworking friends in the tech industry. Starting December 23rd, Google is launching a new ad format called ‘side rails’ that will show up on the sides of webpages and keep you company as you scroll.”

Wall Street Journal: FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Says He Can’t Account for Billions Sent to Alameda . “FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried said he couldn’t explain what happened to billions of dollars that customers of his failed cryptocurrency exchange sent to the bank accounts of his trading firm, Alameda Research. And he said he couldn’t rule out the possibility that money deposited by FTX customers who were told their money was theirs alone was in fact lent to Alameda.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 5 Ways to Turn a Video Into a GIF . “While some devices and operating systems come with software that can automatically convert a video to a GIF, there are a few online tools you might consider using. Keep reading to learn about five tools that can get the job done right.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: A Paris Museum Has 18,000 Skulls. It’s Reluctant to Say Whose.. “While France has led the way in Europe in investigating and returning colonial-era collections of artifacts — cultural objects, made by human hands — it has lagged behind its neighbors when it comes to remains.”

The Local Germany: German archive acquires trove of works by poet Rilke. “A huge collection of letters and manuscripts by modernist poet Rainer Maria Rilke has been handed over to the public German Literature Archive (DLA), the archive said Thursday.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

IANS: Google Terminates Thousand Of Youtube Channels In China, Russia, Brazil. “Google has purged thousands of YouTube channels in China, Russia and Brazil as part of its investigation into coordinated influence operations. The tech giant terminated 5,197 YouTube channels and 17 Blogger blogs as part of its ongoing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China.”

Stuff New Zealand: Government to force Google and Facebook to pay for using NZ news. “The Government will follow Australia and Canada in proposing a law that will require internet giants Google and Meta to pay for the local news they use, with estimates of about $30 million to $50m flowing to New Zealand media.”

Route Fifty: A Governor Imposes a TikTok Ban for State Government. “South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem signed an executive order Tuesday banning TikTok from state devices, citing concerns about the Chinese-owned app’s data-collection practices.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Vanderbilt University: AI-powered cruise control system may pave the way to fuel efficiency and traffic relief. “A single AI-equipped vehicle could influence the speed and driving behavior of up to 20 surrounding cars, causing a kind of positive ripple effect in day-to-day traffic. The CIRCLES Consortium will spend the next several months analyzing data collected on the AI-equipped vehicles and their impact on the flow of traffic over the duration of the experiment.”

PsyPost: Listening to podcasts may help satisfy our psychological need for social connection, study finds . “Podcast listening may help people fulfill their social needs, according to recent findings published in PLOS One. The study found that people who listened to more podcasts per month reported a greater presence of meaning in life and those who formed parasocial relationships with hosts reported a greater sense of relatedness.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 5, 2022 at 06:25PM
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Sunday, December 4, 2022

RealityScan, Virtual New Year’s Eve, Brave, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 4, 2022

RealityScan, Virtual New Year’s Eve, Brave, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 4, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Verge: Epic’s free app that turns real-life items into 3D models is available now on iOS. “Epic Games’ RealityScan app, which lets you scan real-life objects and turn them into 3D models for video games or other projects, is now officially available on iOS as a free download after an initial limited beta launch in April.”

EVENTS

Smithsonian: National Museum of African American History and Culture Examines the Impact of Race in December Public Programming. “The museum will hold its annual Freedom’s Eve program, providing a look into how enslaved African Americans celebrated New Year’s Eve in the past and how the African American community uses food to help bring good fortune into the new year. The two-part program will include curated in-person activities to help plan goals for the new year and conclude with a virtual concert featuring piano prodigy Matthew Whitaker.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PC Magazine: Brave’s Search Engine Starts Offering ‘Privacy-Preserving Ads’. “Last year, Brave Software launched its own privacy-focused search engine. But now the same engine is getting a notorious feature known for data-tracking: Online ads. On Thursday, the company began testing ads in Brave Search. However, Brave Software says its own approach will refrain from profiling or tracking user’s activity to power targeted ads.”

Reuters: Exclusive: Twitter exec says moving fast on moderation, as harmful content surges. “Elon Musk’s Twitter is leaning heavily on automation to moderate content, doing away with certain manual reviews and favoring restrictions on distribution rather than removing certain speech outright, its new head of trust and safety told Reuters.”

USEFUL STUFF

Robert Riemann: Mastodon Privacy Policy Generator. “Most private-sector instances run the identical code of Mastodon and don’t encourage any specific use beyond the generic user-controlled micro-blogging. In that case, I recommend you to use this Mastodon data protection notice generator to create a first draft and add, if necessary, anything that is missing.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Financial Times: Crypto fraud jumps by a third in UK. “Financial losses involving crypto reported to Action Fraud from October 2021 to September 2022 were £226mn — a 32 per cent increase on the same period a year earlier. The number of reported incidents rose 16 per cent to 10,030.”

Washington Post: Inside Sam Bankman-Fried’s courtship of a Washington regulator. “Before his undoing this month, crypto magnate Sam Bankman-Fried aggressively pursued powerful allies in Washington. None was more important than Rostin Behnam. The chief of the federal agency that oversees commodities markets, Behnam holds a strategic perch among the nation’s financial regulators. And the 44-year-old Washington bureaucrat was indispensable in the boyish billionaire’s ambitious plans to reshape U.S. crypto regulation.”

TechCrunch: Twitter alternative Hive shuts down its app to fix critical security issues. “The team at the newly popular Twitter alternative Hive is in over its head. The company has now taken the fairly radical step of fully shutting down its servers for a couple of days in response to concerns raised by security researchers who discovered a number of critical vulnerabilities on Hive, several of which they say remain unfixed.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find . “Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day. Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day. And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the two weeks after Mr. Musk acquired the site.”

Wall Street Journal: Data Scientists Grapple With How to Ask, ‘What’s Your Gender?’. “Adults under age 30 are especially likely to say they’re transgender—as high as 3-5% in recent surveys from Gallup Inc. and the Pew Research Center. But with many surveys only giving the options of male or female, such individuals might answer incorrectly, or not at all. That means the data might be inaccurate, and those individuals’ needs go underserved.” Good afternoon, Internet…

December 5, 2022 at 01:01AM
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Climate Change France, ChatGPT, Flickr, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, December 4, 2022

Climate Change France, ChatGPT, Flickr, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, December 4, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Connexion France: How will weather be in my French town in 2050? New tool helps find out. “Global warming is and will be the cause of major upheavals throughout France in the decades to come, affecting everything from agriculture to health to tourism. The risks will not be the same from one commune in France to another. To find out what climate changes cities will have to adapt to in 2050, Météo-France has recently launched a tool called ‘Climadiag commune’.”

Ars Technica: OpenAI invites everyone to test new AI-powered chatbot—with amusing results. “On Wednesday, OpenAI announced ChatGPT, a dialogue-based AI chat interface for its GPT-3 family of large language models. It’s currently free to use with an OpenAI account during a testing phase. Unlike the GPT-3 model found in OpenAI’s Playground and API, ChatGPT provides a user-friendly conversational interface and is designed to strongly limit potentially harmful output.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Flickr Blog: NOW OPEN – Your Best Shot 2022. “It’s that time of year again! Submissions to Your Best Shot 2022 are now open in the contest group and will be open through January 4.”

New York Times: Twitter Keeps Missing Its Advertising Targets as Woes Mount. “Some brands are committing only to promotions for events, like the Super Bowl, with heavy discounts or clauses that allow them to back out for any reason, according to internal documents and three people familiar with the efforts. Automakers are among the most concerned advertisers, with General Motors raising questions about whether Twitter’s data would be shared with Mr. Musk’s car company, Tesla, three people said.”

Jezebel: Google Isn’t Deleting Users’ Abortion-Related Data, Despite Post-Roe Promise. “Accountable Tech’s research, shared with the Guardian, suggests that if Google doesn’t precisely detect that a user went inside an abortion clinic, and was just in the area of one, their location data isn’t deleted.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Hollywood Reporter: Film Academy Foundation Union Voluntarily Recognized. “Around 90 workers — including archivists, film preservationists, librarians and curators working across the Academy Film Archive, Margaret Herrick Library, Science and Technology Council and in various Academy programs — are joining the Vernon-based AFSCME [American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees] Council, which also recently saw success in organizing the Academy Museum.”

PC Magazine: What’s a ‘Granfluencer’? Older Social-Media Stars Are Thriving. “The term ‘influencer’ conjures images of young people, replete with ring lights and smartphone cameras, spending hours at home or out on the nearest sidewalk or boardwalk, attempting to capture a viral dance move or lip-sync the latest sampled catchphrase. Emphasis on ‘young’—but that isn’t always the case.”

Bloomberg: Twitter’s Credit Rating Withdrawn by S&P on Lack of Information. “Twitter Inc.’s credit grade was withdrawn by S&P Global Ratings, which said it lacked sufficient information to continue covering the Elon Musk-owned social media company.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: London gold body creates database of Russian bullion bars. “The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) is creating a database of Russian gold bars held by banks in London to help prevent sanctions evasion by Russian companies or the Russian central bank, the industry group said.”

Associated Press: FBI director raises national security concerns about TikTok. “FBI Director Chris Wray is raising national security concerns about TikTok, warning Friday that control of the popular video sharing app is in the hands of a Chinese government ‘that doesn’t share our values.'”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Phys .org: Artificial neural networks learn better when they spend time not learning at all. “Artificial neural networks leverage the architecture of the human brain to improve numerous technologies and systems, from basic science and medicine to finance and social media. In some ways, they have achieved superhuman performance, such as computational speed, but they fail in one key aspect: When artificial neural networks learn sequentially, new information overwrites previous information, a phenomenon called catastrophic forgetting.”

The Conversation: Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter has placed its user-generated archives in danger. “Future historians may be able to learn about these things through media coverage of Twitter, but the ability to access the tweets themselves will be invaluable for historical research. This is doubly true for the spread of information during breaking events, when the platform itself became the main primary source for observers and participants. Given the centrality of this source, it is hard to believe that it could all disappear. Could it?” Good morning, Internet…

December 4, 2022 at 06:31PM
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Saturday, December 3, 2022

24-Hour Streaming Jazz, Adobe PostScript Source Code, Parler, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 3, 2022

24-Hour Streaming Jazz, Adobe PostScript Source Code, Parler, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 3, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

TVNewsCheck: WUSF Tampa Launches 24-hour Live Jazz Streaming Service. “Vastly expanding its online jazz offerings, WUSF Public Media is unveiling an on-demand jazz music streaming service at Arts Axis Florida with a wide range of recordings, podcasts and concert videos of jazz musicians from Tampa Bay and beyond — available on mobile, desktop, tablet and more, for free, anytime, anywhere.”

EIN News: Computer History Museum Makes Adobe PostScript’s Source Code Available to the Public as a Part of Its Art of Code Series (PRESS RELEASE). “The Computer History Museum (CHM), the leading museum exploring the history of computing and its impact on the human experience, today announced the public release and long-term preservation of Adobe’s PostScript source code as part of its Art of Code series.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Axios: Ye is no longer buying Parler. “The announcement from Parler, which has become a haven for conservatives, came hours after Ye spewed a torrent of antisemitic remarks during an interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.”

TechCrunch: Google’s Reading Mode app helps visually impaired people read long-form content. “Along with its Android update for December, Google has launched a new app called Reading Mode today. It helps people with visual imparities and dyslexia read the content on the screen — especially articles.”

USEFUL STUFF

Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Make a Mastodon Account and Join the Fediverse. “This post is part of a series on Mastodon and the fediverse. We also have a post on understanding the fediverse, privacy and security on Mastodon, and why the fediverse will be great—if we don’t screw it up, and more are on the way.” A deep, thoroughly-screenshotted dive on how to join Mastodon, with an emphasis on personal privacy and security.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Bloomberg: Google Urged by US Lawmakers to Fix Misleading Abortion Ads. “Alphabet Inc.’s Google introduced a policy in 2019 that requires those advertising alongside search queries related to abortion to be certified based on whether they provide the procedure. In a letter addressed to Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai, Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, and Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, expressed concern that the search giant does not consistently apply those rules, which can lead users to crisis pregnancy centers — non-medical organizations that encourage visitors to keep their pregnancies.”

Mercer University: COPA receives Georgia Humanities grant for work to document African American history in Coastal Georgia. “Mercer University’s College of Professional Advancement recently received a $2,500 grant from Georgia Humanities for its latest work in a nearly decade-long research-based, service-learning project to document African American history in Coastal Georgia.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNET: The Robocall Punishment Just Got a Lot Harsher. “Robocalls continue to be a massive problem for anyone with a cellphone, but the FCC has been more aggressive about combatting the issue over the last few years. This marks the first time a service provider has felt the penalty after the agency mandated that all carriers implement a robocall-fighting system called Stir/Shaken that authenticates callers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Rolling Stone: Musk’s Beloved Twitter Polls Are Bot-Driven Bullsh!t, Ex-Employees Say. “Musk’s claims of recent user growth may be flawed for the same bot-plagued reasons, former staffers say. Under his leadership, Twitter recently told advertisers that monetizable daily active users have grown 20 percent and Musk himself tweeted that ‘Twitter usage is at an all-time high.’ But it’s not clear how much of that claimed growth is authentic. ”

Psychology Today: Is Social Media a New Religion?. “Is social media itself a new religion? Or is it simply a set of circumstances through which users find and follow factions that are ostensibly secular but operate like cults, denominations, or sects? Before we ponder the specifics, behold our devotion.” Good afternoon, Internet…

December 4, 2022 at 01:03AM
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Rural Oklahoma Properties, LinkedIn, Twitter, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, December 3, 2022

Rural Oklahoma Properties, LinkedIn, Twitter, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, December 3, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Daily Yonder: Want to Move to Rural Oklahoma? An Online Database Has Property Listings. “People looking to live in rural parts of Oklahoma may have an easier time finding space thanks to a database listing available lots. The new database is a collaborative effort between the Oklahoma Municipal League (OML) and the Oklahoma Home Builders Association (OkHBA).” Very new, with limited listings.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Land: LinkedIn just released 3 new features for pages. “LinkedIn just announced three new features for brands to promote products, monitor trends, and do more with newsletters. Let’s jump in.”

Business Insider: About 1,400 Twitter workers have joined Blind since Elon Musk took over. “Twitter employees have been flocking to Blind, the anonymous professional network, since Elon Musk took control of the social media platform. In the past month more than 1,400 Twitter employees signed up to Blind, its co-founder Kyum Kim told Insider. About 95% of Twitter’s remaining workers are now on Blind, he said.”

TechCrunch: Elon Musk suspends Kanye West’s account for breaking Twitter rules. “Elon Musk has suspended Kanye West’s (aka Ye) Twitter account after the latter posted antisemitic tweets and violated the platform’s rules. In a reply to Mega founder Kim Dotcom, Musk clarified that Ye’s account was suspended for ‘incitement to violence’ and not because of the music artist posting an ‘unflattering’ picture of the Tesla CEO.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Motherboard: Military Sim Developer Tired of Its Game Being Used to Fake War Footage. “Bohemia Interactive, the Czech Republic based developer of the military simulator game Arma 3, has published a blog and a video it hopes will help it with a unique problem. Footage from the video game known for its realism has gone viral several times since the game’s release in 2013 as people have tried to pass off clips of the military simulation as footage of real war.”

Iran International: Google Maps Gives Tehran Streets Pre-Revolution Names. “Although individual users cannot change city, town, village and street names on the maps, names can be altered using Google’s feedback feature of the maps if a large group of users report the names are wrong and suggest alternative. Google maps may have become a new battleground where the opposition demanding regime change and the authorities and their supporters fight over street and even city names.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: How a Jewish Group’s Online Surveillance Uncovered a Synagogue Plot. “Early signs of a threat to shoot up a Manhattan synagogue were detected on [a] Friday morning not by law enforcement officials but by an online security analyst working in a Manhattan office building.”

The Register: Almost 300 predatory loan apps found in Google and Apple stores . “Almost 300 apps, downloaded by around 15 million users, have been pulled from the Google Play and Apple App stores over claims they promised quick loans at reasonable rates but then used extortion and other predatory schemes against borrowers.”

Associated Press: Google appeals huge Android antitrust fine to EU’s top court. “The company said Thursday that it filed the appeal against the 4.125 billion euro ($4.3 billion) penalty ‘because there are areas that require legal clarification from the European Court of Justice,’ the EU’s top court.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Library of Congress: Do volunteer transcriptions improve search and discovery in loc.gov?. “How do people use crowdsourced transcriptions? Do they drive increased traffic and engagement to our digital collections? What kinds of activity do transcriptions of handwritten documents facilitate? These are some of the big questions that the By the People team is asking this year.”

Los Angeles Times: Column: Elon Musk is on a collision course with European regulators. He’s going to lose. “Speculation in Europe holds that the EU intends to make Twitter a test case for its content moderation rules, suggesting that it won’t back down if it expects its rules to have any credibility. He won’t have the flexibility he has in the U.S. to choose which regulations he wishes to honor. The EU should show other regulators, in the U.S. and abroad, that the way to curb Musk’s willfulness is to stand fast and make him pay for flouting their rules. That approach is long overdue.”

The Guardian: #ClimateScam: denialism claims flooding Twitter have scientists worried. “Twitter has proved a cherished forum for climate scientists to share research, as well as for activists seeking to rally action to halt oil pipelines or decry politicians’ failure to cut pollution. But many are now fleeing Twitter due to a surge in climate misinformation, spam and even threats that have upended their relationship with the platform.” Good morning, Internet…

December 3, 2022 at 06:32PM
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Friday, December 2, 2022

Minnesota Elder Care, Google Play, Twitter, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 2, 2022

Minnesota Elder Care, Google Play, Twitter, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 2, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

StarTribune: Searching for a senior home? A new tool helps Minnesotans screen out unsafe providers. “An elder advocacy group launched an online tool, called Elder Care IQ, that provides access to state inspection reports for 2,000 nursing homes, assisted-living facilities and home health agencies across Minnesota. The tool can help people identify providers that have a history of abuse and neglect of residents, as well as those that received a clean bill of health from state inspectors.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Blog: Google Play’s best apps and games of 2022. “The winners are in for Google Play’s Best of 2022 awards. Every year we recognize the best apps and games on Google Play and the developers who bring them to life. Their bold ideas and creativity help us reach people across all kinds of devices — from phones and watches to Chromebooks and tablets.”

Financial Times: EU and US turn up the heat on Elon Musk over Twitter. “The European Commission on Wednesday threatened Musk with a ban unless Twitter abides by strict content moderation rules, as US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen indicated that Washington was reviewing his purchase of the social network.”

TechCrunch: Twitter is going to show you more tweets from people you don’t follow. “As new Twitter owner Elon Musk tinkers around with the social network’s feature set, more algorithmic recommendations are apparently on the way.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Scotsman: Val McDermid backs Save Our Stories appeal launched to secure future of ‘fragile and brittle’ newspaper treasure trove. “The guardians of Scotland’s biggest newspaper archive have launched an appeal to secure the future of ‘fragile and brittle’ collections said to be at risk of being lost forever due to their declining condition.”

The Verge: Why the worst recipes imaginable are blowing up on TikTok. “[Eli] Betchik is one of TikTok’s premiere rage-bait chefs: influencers who make videos of gruesome and often disgusting recipes, which they then consume in front of a camera. Most creators in the space claim to be driven by curiosity rather than fame, but their reliance on outrage to fuel their online presence is undeniable.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: LastPass reveals another security breach. “LastPass CEO Karim Toubba has revealed that the password manager has been breached again. Toubba said the company detected an unusual activity within a third-party cloud storage service that it shares with its parent company GoTo, which was formerly known as LogMeIn.” I’m a longtime customer of LastPass, but I’m going to have to think about that.

The Verge: The scary truth about AI copyright is nobody knows what will happen next. “The last year has seen a boom in AI models that create art, music, and code by learning from others’ work. But as these tools become more prominent, unanswered legal questions could shape the future of the field.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Australian Financial Review: Australia’s crackdown on Google, Facebook ‘worked’ . “A government review into Australia’s media bargaining code, which extracted millions of dollars from the global tech giants, found the legislation corrected the ‘imbalance’ between news publishers and tech platforms. But media outlets such as The Conversation and SBS remain upset that Facebook has not entered into agreements with them.”

Berkeley News: Massive traffic experiment pits machine learning against ‘phantom’ jams. “Many traffic jams are caused by human behavior: a slight tap on the brakes can ripple through a line of cars, triggering a slowdown — or complete gridlock — for no apparent reason. But in a massive traffic experiment that occurred outside of Nashville last week, scientists tested whether introducing just a few AI-equipped vehicles to the road can help ease these ‘phantom’ jams and reduce fuel consumption for everyone. The answer seems to be yes.” Good afternoon, Internet…

December 3, 2022 at 01:08AM
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Cryptocurrency, Telegram, Optimizing GIFs, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, December 2, 2022

Cryptocurrency, Telegram, Optimizing GIFs, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, December 2, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Yahoo Finance: Kraken laying off 30% of workforce as FTX fallout continues to rock crypto industry. “Crypto exchange Kraken, the second largest in the U.S., is laying off 1,100 employees, or 30 percent of its workforce, its co-founder Jesse Powell said in a statement on Wednesday.”

CoinDesk: Telegram CEO Durov Plans to Build Crypto Wallets, Decentralized Exchange. “Bolstered by Fragment’s strong sales, [Pavel] Durov is setting Telegram on a course for deeper crypto buildouts. He said the company will build a decentralized exchange and non-custodial wallets that could reach millions of users. Telegram is already a go-to messaging app for many crypto traders, giving it a captive audience from the start.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 9 Best Tools to Optimize Animated GIFs. “Animated GIFs are interesting and all, but the time taken to load the are not. Because they consist of frames of animations, they are usually big in terms of file size. This means it is a pain to load web pages, especially if you have many of them. But the good news is, Animated GIFs can be optimized. In other words, their file size can be shrunk without compromising the image quality.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Ars Technica: Musk won’t relaunch Twitter Blue until he finds a way to avoid Apple fees. “Twitter CEO Elon Musk was planning to bring back Twitter Blue this week, but then he got frustrated with Apple, and now nobody knows when the subscription service will relaunch. But it seems Musk has decided that when Twitter Blue—initially exclusively offered to iPhone and iPad users—comes back, the service will likely not be available for purchase in the Apple App Store.”

New York Times: A Lasting Legacy of Covid: Far-Right Platforms Spreading Health Myths. “Not long after Randy Watt died of Covid-19, his daughter Danielle sat down at her computer, searching for clues as to why the smart and thoughtful man she knew had refused to get vaccinated. She pulled up Google, typed in a screen name he had used in the past and discovered a secret that stunned her.”

CNET: Interactive Google Doodle Game Celebrates Video Game Pioneer Jerry Lawson . “Known as the ‘father of the video game cartridge,’ Lawson led the team that would create a system that paved the way for several popular video game consoles.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NPR: Twitter’s chaos could make political violence worse outside of the U.S.. “Under the chaotic changes unleashed by Elon Musk, Twitter users in the U.S. are confronting problems that have long plagued the social network in other parts of the world – and which are at risk of getting even worse under its new billionaire owner, according to human rights and freedom of expression advocates.”

New Yorker: A Hacked Newsroom Brings a Spyware Maker to U.S. Court. “[Roman] Gressier is one of at least thirty-five journalists and civil-society members hacked with Pegasus in El Salvador between July, 2020, and November, 2021, according to the analysis by Citizen Lab, which was verified by Amnesty International. The hacking campaign comprised at least two hundred and sixty Pegasus attacks.”

City A.M.: Google sued by 130,000 firms over ad dominance. “Google has been sued in a claim by 130,000 firms that argue its advertising strategy has cost them billions of pounds in lost revenues. The competition claim valued at up to £13.6bn at the Competition Appeal Tribunal accuses Google and its parent firm Alphabet of abusing its dominant position in online advertising and ‘earning super-profits for itself at the expense of the tens of thousands of publishers of websites and mobiles apps in the UK’.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Gizmodo: Disney Made a Movie Quality AI Tool That Automatically Makes Actors Look Younger (or Older). “Further demonstrating the power of artificial intelligence when it comes to photorealistically altering footage, researchers from Disney have revealed a new aging/de-aging tool that can make an actor look convincingly older or younger, without the need for weeks of complex and expensive visual effects work.”

Harvard Gazette: How demagogues wield social media. “One of the many factors contributing to increased polarization and the global weakening of democracies over the past decade is how effective populist demagogues are at using social media, according to a cognitive scientist who studies online misinformation.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Boing Boing: Import your old Sim Cities into Minecraft. “Got some old Sim City 2000 cities lying around? Import them to Minecraft with Mine City 2000, an astonishingly precise converter made by jgosar.” Good morning, Internet…

December 2, 2022 at 06:28PM
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