Wednesday, December 28, 2022

BooksForTopics, Google Advertising, Earthquake Alerts, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, December 28, 2022

BooksForTopics, Google Advertising, Earthquake Alerts, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, December 28, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Bookseller: BooksForTopics relaunches children’s book listing website. “BooksForTopics has relaunched its website which features children’s booklists sorted by age or topic. The BooksForTopics website is popular among primary schools, providing booklists covering the National Curriculum and reading-for-pleasure recommendations — with everything from diverse and inclusive reading lists and books for reluctant readers to key curriculum topics and year group reading lists.” I believe the site is UK-based.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Marijuana Moment: Google Ends Ban On Advertising Certain Hemp And CBD Products In Parts Of U.S.. “Google will no longer ban the advertising of certain hemp and CBD products in select parts of the U.S. starting next month. The internet giant announced last week that it would be updating its ‘Dangerous Products and Services and Healthcare and Medicines’ to permit the cannabis advertising in California, Colorado and Puerto Rico.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: The 7 Best Apps for Earthquake Alerts and Tracking on iPhone. “Some of these apps allow you to keep track of earthquakes worldwide, whereas others can actually warn you with alerts if they detect any dangerous seismic activity around you. So, here are seven of the best iPhone apps you can install for earthquake alerts and tracking.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

ProPublica: Porn, Piracy, Fraud: What Lurks Inside Google’s Black Box Ad Empire. “Google’s embrace of publisher confidentiality means roughly 1 million publishers can remain anonymous to companies and individuals who buy ads on its network to reach customers. This opens the door to a range of abuses and schemes that steal potentially billions of dollars a year and put lives and livelihoods at risk due to dangerous disinformation, fraud and scams.”

Bloomberg: A Look at the Gold Rush to Become the New Twitter. “Amid the dysfunction comes an increasing number of alternatives vying to lure Twitterati. Some were created out of the ashes of Twitter, while many are getting a fresh start after languishing in the shadows for years. Here’s a look at the alternatives for those seeking a Plan B, and how they stack up against the Blue Bird.”

The Verge: Please don’t film me in 2023. “In a clip that’s been viewed more than 20 million times, two friends sit on a New York City stoop, observing — and recording — the people walking by. One person appears to bend down to hide from a passing emergency vehicle, looking genuinely concerned. Another stands near-motionless for a time, seemingly unable to move. It’s unclear if they’re having a medical issue, but the clip is presented as amusing. The intention is to stitch together a tapestry of things the creator considers odd. Instead, it ends up feeling like an unnecessary intrusion into a stranger’s walk home.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Guardian: Cabinet minister’s Twitter account hacked to promote cryptocurrencies. “The Twitter account of the British education secretary appears to have been hacked. The profile picture was changed to one showing Elon Musk and several tweets were posted promoting a cryptocurrency event.”

WIRED: Elon Musk and the Dangers of Censoring Real-Time Flight Trackers. “Aircraft operators are required to report detailed information on their flight path to various national regulators, including the Federal Aviation Administration. That data is generally a matter of public record and is published to various websites popular amongst airline enthusiasts.”

New York Times: For Sale on eBay: A Military Database of Fingerprints and Iris Scans. “The shoebox-shaped device, designed to capture fingerprints and perform iris scans, was listed on eBay for $149.95. A German security researcher, Matthias Marx, successfully offered $68, and when it arrived at his home in Hamburg in August, the rugged, hand-held machine contained more than what was promised in the listing. The device’s memory card held the names, nationalities, photographs, fingerprints and iris scans of 2,632 people.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Mirage News: Social media and eating disorders: dangerous two-way street. “The influence of social media on the risk and development of eating disorders is well-documented – but does this go both ways? A new research paper from the University of the Sunshine Coast’s Thompson Institute is examining that relationship in reverse, with a new question: How are eating disorders affecting the way people interact with social media?”

McGill University: What AI-generated COVID news tells us that journalists don’t. “AI can help identify biases in news reporting that we wouldn’t otherwise see. Researchers from McGill University got a computer program to generate news coverage of COVID-19 using headlines from CBC articles as prompts. They then compared the simulated news coverage to the actual reporting at the time and found that CBC coverage was less focused on the medical emergency and more positively focused on personalities and geo-politics.”

Creative Commons: Patrick J. McGovern Foundation Funds New CC Initiative to Open Large Climate Datasets . “Today, Creative Commons (CC) is excited to announce one million US dollars in new programmatic support from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation (PJMF) to help open large climate datasets. The twelve-month grant will enable CC to conduct key climate data landscape analyses and expand our work, bringing people together to create policy and practices to open data that advances climate research and innovation.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 28, 2022 at 06:32PM
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Tuesday, December 27, 2022

FediScope, YouTube, Linux Mint, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 27, 2022

FediScope, YouTube, Linux Mint, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 27, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Spotted on Mastodon: FediScope. “FediScope lets you find fediverse accounts for people in a field using Wikidata. You can then compile a custom CSV and import it into Mastodon.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Tubefilter: The amount of classical music in YouTube videos is up 90% year-over-year. “Though electronica, pop, hip hop, and alternative are still the most-common genres chosen by Epidemic Sound users, one of the oldest forms of music on record made a huge comeback in 2022. Classical music downloads rose 64% year-over-year on the Epidemic Sound platform, and those tracks appeared in videos around the world. In 13 of the 15 content categories tracked by Epidemic Sound, classical was the fastest-growing soundtrack choice of 2022.”

9to5 Linux: Linux Mint 21.1 “Vera” Is Now Available for Download. “The highly anticipated Linux Mint 21.1 ‘Vera’ release has started appearing today on various of the official download mirrors of the Ubuntu-based distribution, which means that an official release announcement is upon us.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: Podcasting could be in for a rocky 2023. “It feels like 2022 was the year when podcasting came back to earth. After years of go-go growth, podcast hits going mainstream, major corporate investment, and hype about the market to come ($4 billion by 2024!!), optimism about the industry hit the wall of an uncertain economy. M&A took a breather, advertising got tighter, and companies started laying off audio employees after years of frenzied hiring. What does 2023 have in store?”

11 Alive: Students work to preserve Atlanta’s Krog Street Tunnel. “— Wedged between Wylie Street and Dekalb Avenue, the Krog Street Tunnel stands. More than 100 years old, the tunnel is a permanent passage between Inman Park and Cabbagetown. But as Curt Jackson knows, what’s inside the tunnel is ever changing…. That’s why the PhD student spends every Saturday at the tunnel, camera in hand along with a team of Georgia State University students.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Los Angeles Times: Who’s protecting social media’s child stars? Inside the explosive lawsuit against one YouTuber’s empire. “The lawsuit offers an unsettling glimpse into a largely unregulated world of social media, where children spend long hours cranking out videos and branded content. Kids can make millions of dollars and become online celebrities, but because the content is made in the privacy of their own homes, child labor laws — which do apply to social media influencers — are not consistently enforced.”

Financial Times: Cyber attacks set to become ‘uninsurable’, says Zurich chief. “The chief executive of one of Europe’s biggest insurance companies has warned that cyber attacks, rather than natural catastrophes, will become ‘uninsurable’ as the disruption from hacks continues to grow.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: AI Is Now Essential National Infrastructure. “Soon, a comprehensive digital infrastructure—which includes national computing power, a distributed cloud, and an interoperable set of applications and machine-readable legislation—will be as important to a country as roads, rail, and public water supply. In 2023, more and more countries will accelerate the building of such nationwide digital architectures, allowing them to deliver more AI-powered responsive services that cater to the individual and help the population at large.”

The Daily Star (Bangladesh): World Cup revealed our media’s vulnerability to fake news. “In the first two weeks since the World Cup kicked off in Qatar, fact-checkers in Bangladesh debunked at least 10 different fake or misleading news stories, eight of which are related to the football tournament, in top newspapers and TV channels…. Why is our media so vulnerable?”

AFP: Iraqi conservators strive to preserve ancient manuscripts. “In a country that bears the scars of decades of conflict and has seen antiquities and cultural heritage regularly plundered, the House of Manuscripts’ collection has managed to survive. It was safely stashed away in the Baghdad suburbs, while the national museum was ransacked in the turmoil following the 2003 US-led invasion…. The collection, now ensconced in the national museum in the capital Baghdad, includes books, parchments and calligraphy boards, some of them damaged by humidity, pests and centuries of use.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 28, 2022 at 01:44AM
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AI-Powered Audio Processing, Google, Mastodon, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, December 27, 2022

AI-Powered Audio Processing, Google, Mastodon, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, December 27, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Ars Technica: Make your noisy recording sound like pro audio with Adobe’s free AI tool. “Recently, Adobe released a free AI-powered audio processing tool that can enhance some poor-quality voice recordings by removing background noise and making the voice sound stronger. When it works, the result sounds like a recording made in a professional sound booth with a high-quality microphone.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Roundtable: Calmer Christmas Weekend For The Google Search Results. “It seemed a lot calmer this past weekend, Christmas weekend, than we had it a while in the world of Google search volatility. This is a good thing since we really want to see the two Google ranking algorithm updates wind down before year-end.”

USEFUL STUFF

Graham Macphee: Using Mastodon to power my blog comments. “Since my article earlier this year about integrating my blog’s comments with Twitter, I’ve now switched to power my blog comments with discussions happening on Mastodon.”

WIRED: What Music Did You Stream in 2022? Here’s How to Find Your Recaps. “THE END OF the year traditionally brings with it a flurry of recaps and year-in-reviews from music streaming services. After all, whichever service you use, it’s been carefully logging all your listening habits over the past 12 months. Not only does that mean apps can serve up music you like and might like, they’re also able to tell you, in forensic detail, the tunes that you played over the year. However, each streaming service approaches this end-of-year summary slightly differently.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Wall Street Journal: YouTube Stars Cash In Video Rights for Millions of Dollars. “Justin Watkins for more than a decade has made YouTube videos of himself playing and commenting on games such as Roblox, for an audience of mostly young children. His YouTube channel called Thinknoodles is a hit, with millions of subscribers, but he was surprised by the pitch he received from a startup: Would he accept more than $2 million in exchange for the advertising revenues from his thousands of old videos?”

News24: Tutu infinity and beyond: Mourning period ends, but Arch’s legacy to live on in ‘Heirloom Project’. “The [Archbishop Tutu IP Trust and the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation] plan to move forward in protecting his work and legacy through a new global digital journey called the Heirloom Project. It will be a single-site, accessible and usable global digital archive called ‘The Heirloom Project’, which will eulogise Tutu in collaboration with South African and international universities associated with him.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bank Info Security: Hacker Claims to Have Scraped 400M Twitter User Records. “A member of a criminal data breach forum claims to have obtained the emails and phone numbers of 400 million Twitter users in a posting that urges social media CEO Elon Musk to buy the data set for an unspecified price.”

Reuters: Chinese academic database fined by antitrust watchdog. “China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) has fined China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) 87.6 million yuan ($12.6 million) for abusing a ‘dominant market position’, the watchdog said on its website on Monday.”

Los Angeles Times: Emails reveal Sam Bankman-Fried’s courtship of federal regulators. “Before his mid-December arrest, cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried repeatedly claimed that he was a responsible business leader who sought more regulation of cryptocurrency and wanted his industry to be part of the mainstream financial system. But now that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Justice Department are prosecuting the 30-year-old for fraud, the extensive professional relationships he cultivated with current and former federal regulators risk embarrassment for all involved.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NiemanLab: The AI content flood . “Here are just three examples: automatically post ChatGPT-powered summaries of news stories moments after they’re published by major news brands, divided by region. Or pick a topic like cooking, and use ChatGPT to populate a recipe site from scratch. Or pick a city, and have the AI argue in favor or against a political position in context of the local community.” There is already so much shallow, low-effort stuff online that I’m discouraged from the get.

The Register: Study finds AI assistants help developers produce code that’s more likely to be buggy. “Computer scientists from Stanford University have found that programmers who accept help from AI tools like Github Copilot produce less secure code than those who fly solo.” I have used ChatGPT for things like generating JavaScript code snippets. It will cheerfully and confidently produce code that is so wrong even I can look at it and know it’s not right.

PsyPost: Study finds parasocial relationships on YouTube can help reduce prejudice towards people with mental health issues. “After watching a video meant for participants to build a relationship with the video creator and a video where the creator talked about his/her mental health issues, experimental groups scored lower on explicit prejudice assessments compared to controls who only watched the relationship-building video. Implicit prejudice levels were not affected. The study was published in Scientific Reports.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 27, 2022 at 06:32PM
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Monday, December 26, 2022

Twitter, Symbol Meanings, Google Pinpoint, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 26, 2022

Twitter, Symbol Meanings, Google Pinpoint, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 26, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Twitter says paying Blue subscribers now get ‘prioritized rankings in conversations’. “Twitter has updated its list of features for Twitter Blue, saying subscribers paying for the $8-a-month service will now get ‘prioritized rankings in conversations’ and the ability to upload videos up to 60 minutes in length.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 6 Ways to Find Symbols and Look Up Symbol Meanings . “While surfing the internet (as well as in the offline world), we come across a lot of symbols. Some of them are common, but for others, you’ve probably wondered what a particular symbol means more than once. Thankfully, the internet has many symbol identifier resources to help. We’ll show you how to find out a symbol’s meaning using a variety of methods.”

Online Journalism Blog: Making video and audio interviews searchable: how Pinpoint helped with one investigation. “MA Data Journalism student Tony Jarne spent eight months investigating exempt accommodation, collecting hundreds of documents, audio and video recordings along the way. To manage all this information, he turned to Google’s free tool Pinpoint. In a special guest post for OJB, he explains how it should be an essential part of any journalist’s toolkit.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Mashable: ‘My 2022 eras’ trend is perfect TikTok ephemera. “Soundtracked to a sped-up version of ‘Celebration’ by Azealia Banks, the ‘my 2022 eras’ trend consists of users posting a series of photos that encapsulate their year. Each image is captioned with the “era” is represents. So far, over 340,000 videos have been posted using the song. On the internet, the term era describes a period of one’s life. For example, when someone says “I’m in my girl-boss era,” what they mean is that, right now, they’re ambitious and independent.”

The Independent: Judith Kerr archive acquired by Newcastle’s National Centre for Children’s Books. “Kerr, who died in 2019 at the age of 95, wrote and illustrated a number of much-loved children’s books including The Tiger Who Came To Tea, the Mog series and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit…. The archive includes artwork and papers for 32 books, loose studio artwork, notebooks and a diary from 1948.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: Faxes and floppy disks: Japan’s bureaucracy needs an upgrade. “For a country where emoji were invented, Japan’s bureaucracy remains steadfastly analog. Official documents are often submitted via fax (a machine that sends messages over the phone line) or floppy disk (a precursor to the USB drive). In fact, thousands of government regulations insist on the use of such 20th-century stalwarts.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NiemanLab: This is the year of the RSS reader. (Really!). “It is at this point that the most organized people in late capitalism will rise up about a very small matter and demand something better: An RSS for the people, open source, easily used, and not some weird niche version for podcasts or that uses AI.”

Route Fifty: Machine Learning Digs Into States’ Archives. “Amid growing backlogs of archival data, states are turning to software tools to streamline records management.”

Hindustan Times: C-DAC Pune to develop ‘virtual walk through’ for Raigad fort. “In a bid to provide a virtual tour of the historic Raigad fort, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune has begun work in collaboration with the state government to digitise the iconic landmark in Maratha history. … This will be the first virtual tour of any of Maharashtra’s forts, utilising cutting-edge technology to provide the public with a one-of-a-kind experience without having to visit the fort.” You can read more about the forts of Maharashtra here.

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

ZDNet: This 3D printing system converts waste sawdust into stunning wooden lamps and guitars. “In the build box, an inkjet print head drops a water-based binder onto the surface of the sawdust and the two substances meld into each other. The printhead simultaneously injects a water-based ink that mimics practically any wood grain you would want, including rosewood, zebrano, ebony and mahogany, among others. Deposits of the binder and injection of the ink is done layer by layer, as per the contours of the rendering dictated by the 3D software.” Good afternoon, Internet..

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December 27, 2022 at 01:47AM
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Prison Banned Books, Wolfram Language, Twitter, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, December 26, 2022

Prison Banned Books, Wolfram Language, Twitter, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, December 26, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Marshall Project: The Books Banned in Your State’s Prisons. “Over the past year, reporters for The Marshall Project asked every state prison system for book policies and lists of banned publications. About half of the states said they kept such lists, which contained more than 50,000 titles. We’ve created a searchable database so you can see for yourself which books prisons don’t want incarcerated people to read.”

Wolfram Blog: New Interactive Course Teaches Useful Tips from an Expert Programmer. “Wolfram Language has a wealth of built-in functions that require little or no programming, but there are special cases that require additional skill and knowledge to get the code to do things that go beyond those built-in capabilities. Wolfram U is pleased to announce a new free interactive course by veteran Wolfram programmer and instructor Dave Withoff that offers a collection of useful tips and instruction for intermediate-level programmers.” The link also includes a recommendation for a beginner course if you’re not an intermediate programmer.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mashable: New Twitter feature lets you watch Tesla stock crater. “The company recently partnered with trading analysis platform TradingView to display price charts in search results for cryptocurrencies, stocks, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The feature works best if you use $cashtags, which are similar to hashtags, only instead of the ‘#’ symbol in front of a keyword, you use the ‘$’ symbol in front of a ticker.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: How to Download Reddit Videos. “Reddit now lets you download videos directly from the app. If you find this feature is not working for you, there are some workarounds you can take advantage of. This tutorial shows you how to download Reddit videos on your Android phone or PC.”

Search Engine Journal: How To Create A Survey Quickly In Google Forms And Microsoft Word. “I find surveys particularly helpful because they are affordable, easy to create, and offer information about customers you can’t find without directly talking to them. This article will outline the benefits of surveys for SEO, tips to create a killer survey that offers great insight, and how to quickly get started with one using Google Forms or Microsoft Forms.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

WIRED: TikTok’s Dream Worlds Thrived in a Nightmare Year. “While economic pressures have made reality a less and less appealing place to reside, numerous TikTok trends over the past year have offered a form of escape. Over 14 billion people have now watched videos about ‘shifting,’ a meditation-like practice where people believe they can ‘shift’ into other realities, often beloved fantasy locations such as Hogwarts.”

CNN: How virtual clothes could help solve fashion’s waste problem. “The textile and fashion industry creates roughly 92 million tons of waste annually, and digital fashion could have a role in reducing that figure…. For example, a designer could release an item of digital clothing in 10 colors in the metaverse, and use the sales data to inform which colors to use for the real-world version.”

New York Times: Times Past. “The end of the year is an opportunity to look back and reflect. So today we’re bringing you something in that spirit: an interview with Jennifer Parrucci, a senior taxonomist at The Times, about the interesting things she has found digging through the paper’s 171-year archives.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Radio New Zealand: Patient records from second psychiatric hospital caught up in Archives NZ breach. “Archives NZ apologised on Monday for a breach of Sunnyside psychiatric hospital records. Now a new OIA response shows patient records from Seaview psychiatric hospital, near Hokitika, were mistakenly put online, too. But Archives NZ said because no one accessed the Seaview records, it chose not to notify the public.”

Atlanta Business Journal: Atlanta homebuilding giant PulteGroup fires incoming COO for alleged Twitter bots. “The founding family of the Atlanta-based homebuilder (NYSE:PHM) filed a civil complaint against Brandon Jones for ‘interfering, stalking, harassing, and defaming the company’s founder, William J. Pulte, his grandson Bill Pulte, and his family,’ according to a news release Friday. The complaint alleges Jones, who was set to succeed executive vice president and chief operating officer John Chadwick on Jan. 1, creating fraudulent Twitter profiles.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Cardiff University: Adolescent wellbeing improved by online contact with close friends. “Frequent online communication with best friends and existing friendship groups is associated with better wellbeing in young people, new research by Cardiff University has found.”

Stanford University: What to Expect in 2023 in AI. “This year’s biggest headline might have been generative AI, but what should we expect from the field in 2023? Four Stanford HAI faculty members describe what they expect the biggest advances, opportunities, and challenges will be for the coming year.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 26, 2022 at 06:28PM
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Sunday, December 25, 2022

Public Domain Game Jam, iPhone Hacks, Google, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 25, 2022

Public Domain Game Jam, iPhone Hacks, Google, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 25, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

EVENTS

Techdirt: Gaming Like It’s 1927: Get Ready For Our Next Public Domain Game Jam. “It’s that time of year! Ever since works in the US finally started entering the public domain again, we’ve been hosting an annual game jam for designers to create games based on the year’s newly copyright-free works. This year, it’s Gaming Like It’s 1927!”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: 45 of Lifehacker’s Favorite iPhone Hacks of 2022. “From iOS 16 to the iPhone 14, the iPhone had a big year. We started 2022 with iOS 15.2, which gave us features like Apple Music Voice and legacy contacts, and end the year appropriately with iOS 16.2, with Apple Music Sing and end-to-end encryption for iCloud backups. In between, we discovered a lot of hacks that make life with an iPhone even easier. Here are 45 of our favorites.” Slideshow.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNBC: Google tells employees more of them will be at risk for low performance ratings next year. “More Google employees will be at risk for low performance ratings and fewer are expected to reach high marks under a new performance review system that starts next year, according to internal communications obtained by CNBC.”

Washington Post: Twitter brings Elon Musk’s genius reputation crashing down to earth. “Some Twitter employees who worked with Musk are doubtful his management style will allow him to turn the company around. And some investors in Tesla, by far the biggest source of his wealth, have begun to see him as a liability. Musk’s distraction has prompted questions about leadership of SpaceX as well, though it is much less reliant on his active involvement. Meanwhile, Neuralink and Boring Co., two companies he founded, continue to lag on promises.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Cyberscoop: Insiders worry CISA is too distracted from critical cyber mission. “Republicans and Democrats praised the new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency… But four years in, CISA appears to be struggling with internal divisions over the direction of the agency, morale problems and growing concerns about leadership priorities.”

AI Business: AI-Generated Comic Book Could Lose Copyright Protection. “The Copyright Office (USPTO) granted protection to Kris Kashtanova for the comic book titled Zarya of the Dawn in September…. However, the USPTO has now informed Kashtanova that it has initiated a proceeding to revoke the protection, saying copyrightable works require human authorship.”

Wall Street Journal: SEC Heightening Scrutiny of Auditors’ Crypto Work. “The Securities and Exchange Commission is stepping up scrutiny of the work that audit firms are doing for cryptocurrency companies, concerned that investors may be getting a false sense of reassurance from the firms’ reports, a senior official at the regulator said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: Everyone Is Using Google Photos Wrong. “Uploading thousands of photos and never taking any steps to sort or manage them creates a series of privacy risks and is making it impossible to maintain your photo collection in the future. Now is the time to stop being an information hoarder, before it spirals out of control.”

Daily Beast: We Need a New Approach to Fighting Malevolent Forces Online. “Manifold threats are emerging across the information landscape on which we live, where we work and where we make fundamental political choices about who we are and what we stand for. These are threats made more challenging because so few fully understand them, because the government and the electorate are both so ill-equipped to address them, and because containing them will require us to make choices with profound philosophical consequences about the future of the social contract.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Los Angeles Times: A man’s holiday lights display helped land him a top job at Roku . “On a chilly December evening, 54-year-old engineer Mark Robins opened a laptop inside his son’s room to demonstrate the software he uses to control the 10,000 lights that adorn his house and yard. They illuminate an assortment of candy canes, gift-wrapped boxes and animals, including a flamingo, an owl, a reindeer and a small dog that resembles his elderly mutt, Oscar. A button at the front of the yard invites passersby to synchronize the lights to one of 25 Christmas, pop and rock tunes.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 26, 2022 at 01:26AM
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Apple Reviews (Fruit, not Tech), Meredith Bixby’s Marionettes, Twitter, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, December 25, 2022

Apple Reviews (Fruit, not Tech), Meredith Bixby’s Marionettes, Twitter, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, December 25, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me: a database of apple reviews. The fruit, not the tech. They absolutely savaged my favorite (Granny Smith) but to their credit they also slagged the SugarBee, an apple purchase I bitterly regretted a few weeks ago. From the About page: “Brian Frange is a comedian and writer who has been yelling about apples for years. He started yelling about apples professionally in 2016 while working on Comedy Central’s Not Safe with Nikki Glaser while serving as co-host on the Not Safe Podcast. Shortly after that he started the Tumblr apple review blog The Appleist and it became popular, I guess.” This man has a burning hatred for Red Delicious apples and this Web site is a fun read.

Michigan Live: Get up close with Saline’s Bixby marionettes in this new immersive online exhibit. “Marionettes handcrafted by Saline puppeteer Meredith Bixby delighted children across the country through shows based on stories like ‘Pinocchio,’ ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Treasure Island’ for more than 40 years…. During the past year, the group, CultureVerse, has employed cutting-edge 3D scanners to create ‘digital twins’ of a dozen of Bixby’s string-bound creations and recreate the interior of the gutted Saline Opera House, publishing their work in a virtual exhibit.” It’ll take a few minutes for the exhibit to load, but it’s worth it.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Guardian: Twitter restores suicide-prevention hotline feature after outcry. “Twitter has restored a feature that promoted suicide prevention hotlines and other safety resources to users looking up certain content, after coming under pressure from users and consumer safety groups.”

CNET: Search Engine You.com Launches ChatGPT-Style Chatbot, But Don’t Trust It Fully Yet. “The site works like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which went viral earlier this year for its unique and realistic responses from a computer program. But be careful about its answers.”

Bleeping Computer: DuckDuckGo now blocks Google sign-in pop-ups on all sites. “DuckDuckGo apps and extensions are now blocking Google Sign-in pop-ups on all its apps and browser extensions, removing what it perceives as an annoyance and a privacy risk for its users.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Business Insider: Twitter alternatives that got traction after Elon Musk takeover are suddenly seeing downloads plunge. Which has staying power and who is the next Clubhouse?. “Daily usage of Mastodon, Hive Social, and Counter Social are all up dramatically over the last two months. Meanwhile, at least half a dozen other Twitter-like platforms have recently been launched in beta or are set to be early next year, including Post.News, Spoutible, Mozilla.Social and Bluesky, founded by none other than Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey.”

Ars Technica: Meta and Alphabet lose dominance over US digital ads market. “The share of US ad revenues held by Facebook’s parent Meta and Google owner Alphabet is projected to fall by 2.5 percentage points to 48.4 percent this year, the first time the two groups will not hold a majority share of the market since 2014, according to research group Insider Intelligence.” Still too high.

Wall Street Journal: Elon Musk’s Finances Complicated by Declining Wealth, Twitter Pressures. “Historically, Mr. Musk has been a cash-poor billionaire, depending upon so-called margin loans—borrowing backed up by his shares—for his personal expenses and business investments while holding on to his Tesla shares and benefiting from their rising value. But Tesla’s market value has fallen by about $700 billion this year, sinking his personal wealth along the way.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: Fake job postings are stealing applicants’ money and identities. “Lisa Miner thought she had found the perfect new job: Earlier this year, the dialysis technician got an offer to be an app developer for CVS Health after passing a skills test administered by a purported recruiter who had reached out via a personal Gmail account. But the job wasn’t just fake — it was a ploy to steal her money.”

Engadget: Robocall company may receive the largest FCC fine ever. “The FCC has proposed a $299,997,000 fine against ‘the largest robocall firm’ it has ever investigated, the regulator announced. It would be the FCC’s largest fine ever, and targets a firm that made over 5 billion calls in three months, enough ‘to have called each person in the United States 15 times,’ it wrote.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Kyiv Post: OPINION: Twitter’s Lack of Action Sees Users Tumbling Down the Pro-Russia Rabbit Hole. “Though long overdue, it seems that Twitter is more frequently acting on reports of accounts that break its anti-hate policy – or at the very least has finally stopped ignoring such reports altogether. And yet, working against the aims of this important process, many high-profile accounts once banned for spreading dangerous disinformation are being restored – including those directing hate at Ukraine.”

Washington Post: Science Twitter Needs a New Home. “Twitter also helped create a venue for public accountability in science. People like Dutch microbiologist Elizabeth Bik used the forum to shed light on research improprieties in both academia and biotech companies. Even with its warts — and we all know there are many — those things are not only worth keeping alive, but important to maintaining a healthy scientific ecosystem.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 25, 2022 at 06:31PM
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