New researches

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Diversity on Route 66, TuneIn Explorer, Openverse, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, February 14, 2023

Diversity on Route 66, TuneIn Explorer, Openverse, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, February 14, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Northern Arizona University: NAU students illuminate diversity of Route 66 in online exhibit . “Cline Library Special Collections and Archives recently released Shades of Route 66: Celebrating Diversity along Historic Route 66 in the State of Arizona, an online exhibit that provides a glimpse into the under-documented history and stories of diversity along Route 66 in Arizona.”

BusinessWire: TuneIn Celebrates World Radio Day; Launches TuneIn Explorer, an Immersive Map Experience that Makes the Discovery and Exploration of Live Radio Stations from Around the Globe Easy and Fun (PRESS RELEASE). “From popular national and global radio stations to hometown favorites, listeners can navigate available radio programming by scrolling and panning in or out of the interactive world map to find a specific region — then select a station to start listening immediately. Filters allow listeners to customize their experience and focus on their favorite categories and genres, including news, talk, sports and music, or see stations broadcasting in top languages.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Creative Commons: Revisiting the Openverse: Finding Open Images and Audio. “Finding and using free and open works has never been easier: Just visit Openverse, enter some keywords, and pick your favorite from the results. You can also filter by content type, sources, aspect ratio, size, open license and public domain statuses, and more.”

TorrentFreak: Z-Library Returns on the Clearnet in Full Hydra-Mode. “The U.S. Government’s crackdown against Z-Library late last year aimed to wipe out the pirate library for good. The criminal prosecution caused disruption but didn’t bring the site completely to its knees. Z-Library continued to operate on the dark web and this weekend, reappeared on the clearnet, offering a ‘unique’ domain name to all users.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Philly Voice: Museum of the American Revolution to digitize document archive of Black and Native American soldiers. “The Museum of the American Revolution is working to digitize a collection of nearly 200 rare documents detailing the names of Black and Native American soldiers who served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Through a partnership with Ancestry, the popular genealogy website, the Patriots of Color archive will be fully digitized and made available online at no cost to the public, museum officials announced on Friday.”

Library of Congress: Library of Congress Digitization Strategy: 2023-2027. “Over the next five years, the Library will expand, optimize, and centralize its collections digitization program to significantly expand access to users across the country to rare, distinctive, and unique collection materials which can be made openly available online and use digitization as a core method for preservation reformatting of rights restricted collection materials. Below are the five guiding strategic objectives for this work.”

California Genealogical Society: USCIS (again) proposes enormous fee hikes: Public comment deadline is March 6. “The U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) has once again proposed substantial increases to the fees required to access historical records held by the USCIS Genealogy Program. This would raise the cost for access to millions of historic immigration records by hundreds of dollars, providing further barriers to researchers.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

WIRED: Pig Butchering Scams Are Evolving Fast . “Researchers found that to stay relevant and ensnare more victims in recent months, so-called pig butchering attacks are developing both more compelling narratives to draw targets in and more sophisticated tech to convince victims that there’s big money to be made.”

WTOL: Toledo Fire & Rescue says its Twitter account has been hacked . “The Toledo Fire & Rescue Department Twitter account has been hacked, the department said in a Facebook post Sunday. According to TFRD, the organization currently does not have any control over its Twitter account and posts. They said they reported the issue to Twitter and are awaiting a response.”

Ars Technica: ~11,000 sites have been infected with malware that’s good at avoiding detection. “Nearly 11,000 websites in recent months have been infected with a backdoor that redirects visitors to sites that rack up fraudulent views of ads provided by Google Adsense, researchers said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NewsWise: Cinema has helped ‘entrench’ gender inequality in AI. “Cinematic depictions of the scientists behind artificial intelligence over the last century are so heavily skewed towards men that a dangerous ‘cultural stereotype’ has been established – one that may contribute to the shortage of women now working in AI development.”

Bloomberg: Memes, tweets, snark are the FDA’s new public health weapons. “Since [Dr. Robert] Califf took over a year ago, the FDA has set its sights on social-media disinformation as a public-health scourge. The agency’s efforts started with some savvy responses to pandemic misinformation cropping up on Twitter. Now a crew of agency employees creates memes and other content and feeds them into the internet to defend science.” Good morning, Internet…

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February 14, 2023 at 06:31PM
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Monday, February 13, 2023

The Prodigy, Hayti, Gonzalez v. Google, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 13, 2023

The Prodigy, Hayti, Gonzalez v. Google, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 13, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

We Rave You: New website launches with live and rare unreleased music from The Prodigy. “… a new website has been published that documents the group’s career while presenting a massive collection of audio and information for consumption. The new website, The Prodigy: All Souvenirs Are Here! site is an encyclopedia of sorts that offers a deep dive into the electronic group from England.”

New-to-me, via the Daily Tar Heel: Hayti. It’s an app. From the front page: “Cary Wheelous is a tech entrepreneur that launched Hayti to aggregate news and information from black voices that need to be heard on a global scale.” According to the Daily Tar Heel article, a podcast section is being planned as well.

EVENTS

Brookings Institution: Gonzalez v. Google and the fate of Section 230. “Join Governance Studies at Brookings on February 14 for an expert panel discussion on Gonzalez and Taamneh. To what extent do, and should, platforms bear legal responsibility for the content that appears on their systems? Is it possible to carve out an exception in Section 230’s protections for algorithmic recommendations without upending the modern internet?”

USEFUL STUFF

Gizmodo: Here’s All the Cool Stuff You Can Do With Google Earth . “Google Earth feels like a mixture between a mapping application and an educational tool, letting you pull off some really neat things with a render of the globe. What can you do with Google’s 3D world exploration tool, I hear you ask? Well, let’s explain.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

UC San Diego: UC San Diego Library Receives Grant to Digitize Archive for New Poetry Collection. “Audiovisual items within the UC San Diego Library’s Archive for New Poetry (ANP) collection will be digitized and preserved thanks to a $250,000 grant awarded to the organization by the Mellon Foundation. Through this project, the team plans to digitize approximately 2,500 sound recordings and 200 films and videos in the ANP.”

WIRED: News Publishers Are Wary of the Bing Chatbot’s Media Diet. “When WIRED asked the Bing chatbot about the best dog beds according to The New York Times product review site Wirecutter, which is behind a metered paywall, it quickly reeled off the publication’s top three picks, with brief descriptions for each. ‘This bed is cozy, durable, easy to wash, and comes in various sizes and colors,’ it said of one. Citations at the end of the bot’s response credited Wirecutter’s reviews but also a series of websites that appeared to use Wirecutter’s name to attract searches and cash in on affiliate links.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: This Tool Could Protect Artists From A.I.-Generated Art That Steals Their Style. “Say, for example, that [artist Karla] Ortiz wants to post new work online, but doesn’t want it fed to A.I. to steal it. She can upload a digital version of her work to Glaze and choose an art type different from her own, say abstract. The tool then makes changes to Ms. Ortiz’s art at the pixel-level that Stable Diffusion would associate with, for example, the splattered paint blobs of Jackson Pollock.”

The Register: Japan joins ranks of nations plotting smackdown for Apple, Google. “Japan’s competition regulator has recommended big changes to local laws to reform the ‘oligopoly’ it’s assessed Google and Apple enjoy in the markets for mobile operating systems and the apps that run on them.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Illinois News Bureau: Geography, language dictate social media and popular website usage, study finds. “In a new study, College of Media professors Margaret Yee Man Ng and Harsh Taneja show that many of the same social media platforms and websites are popular around the world, but how people use them remains vastly different based on their languages and geography.”

University of Texas at Austin: Algorithms That Adjust for Worker Race, Gender Still Show Biases. “Even after algorithms are adjusted for overt hiring discrimination, they may show a subtler kind: preferring workers who mirror dominant groups, according to a new study from researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.” Good afternoon, Internet…

February 14, 2023 at 01:27AM
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UK Military Veterans, New Zealand Landlords, Google, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, February 13, 2023

UK Military Veterans, New Zealand Landlords, Google, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, February 13, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

UK Authority: Veterans Data Dashboard live. “The Office for Veterans’ Affairs (OVA) has launched a Veterans Data Dashboard with information on ex-armed forces personnel. It brings together data from different public bodies for the first time, provides scope for veterans and the public to learn about the community, and information on support services. Functions include the ability to scroll through data on issues such as population, housing, mental health and employment.”

Stuff New Zealand: New website revealing how many properties landlords own is under investigation. “While the website… which launched on Wednesday, was using publicly available information, a number of concerns had been raised about it, and some landlords were concerned it would stir up resentment. On Friday, the New Zealand Privacy Foundation said it breached the law and ethics around privacy, and LINZ announced it was looking into the website.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Associated Press: Google to expand misinformation “prebunking” in Europe. “After seeing promising results in Eastern Europe, Google will initiate a new campaign in Germany that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation. The tech giant plans to release a series of short videos highlighting the techniques common to many misleading claims.” Now do Nigeria!

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Mashable: What is subtle merch? Cracking the coded messages of fandom that are all over TikTok . “Far from the mass-produced concert tee or branded figurine, ‘subtle merch’ or your fave ‘coded’ items are deeply personal to fans, often homemade, and signal a fan’s knowledge or insider status within a given fandom.”

Times of Israel: Bosnia’s Jewish community putting together an archive for an eventual museum. “As their numbers dwindle, Bosnia’s Jewish community is creating an archive of Balkan Jewish history, including documents, photographs, artifacts, and genealogies to preserve the Bosnian Jewish story.”

Gizmodo: ‘Inaccurate Calculation’ Leaves Laid Off Google Employees Confused About Severance Package. “Google miscalculated the number of stocks laid-off employees were told they would receive as part of a severance package last month. The company laid off 12,000 employees, marking the largest round of layoffs since Google’s inception.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Carey Lening: Legal Summary Magic: I Used GPT3 & Python to Simplify Dense Cases. “This post explores a little experiment using OpenAI’s GPT3, Google Collab, Python and this interesting hack to summarize CJEU cases. And it wasn’t a total failure!”

Ars Technica: Hackers are selling a service that bypasses ChatGPT restrictions on malware. “Hackers have devised a way to bypass ChatGPT’s restrictions and are using it to sell services that allow people to create malware and phishing emails, researchers said on Wednesday.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NewsWise: ETRI, releasing multilingual speech recognition with 24 languages. “The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute(ETRI) has developed a multilingual speech recognition technology that understand 24 languages including Korean, English, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Russian and south Asian language.”

Tubefilter: An annual study of kids’ habits found that they average 107 minutes per day on TikTok. “If the U.S. government follows through on its proposal to ban TikTok, it will have a lot of angry teens on its hands. A recent survey published by parental control service Qustodio suggests that young consumers are spending more time on TikTok than ever before. According to the report, the average TikTok user between the ages of 4 and 18 spent 107 minutes per day on the app in 2022.”

New York Times: Americans Flunked This Test on Online Privacy. “Many consumers want control over their personal details. But few understand how online tracking works, says a new report from the University of Pennsylvania.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Route Fifty: Ranking the Best and Worst City Flags. “For the first time in nearly 20 years, a group of flag enthusiasts has released survey results grading the municipal banners, many of which have undergone recent redesigns.” Good morning, Internet…

February 13, 2023 at 06:26PM
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Sunday, February 12, 2023

Opera Browser, Twitter, Book Recommendations, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 12, 2023

Opera Browser, Twitter, Book Recommendations, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 12, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Opera’s building ChatGPT into its sidebar. “Opera’s adding a ChatGPT-powered tool to its sidebar that generates brief summaries of webpages and articles. The feature, called ‘shorten,’ is part of the company’s broader plans to integrate AI tools into its browser, similar to what Microsoft’s doing with Edge.” Hey, look, a common-sense use case!

TechCrunch: Twitter Blue introduces 4,000-character tweets, says half ads coming soon. “Twitter announced the ability to post longer tweets for paid users Wednesday. So instead of being limited to 280 characters, Blue subscribers can post tweets that are up to 4,000 characters long. The same limit applies to quote tweets and replies. Twitter said that along with long tweets people can post media like images or videos.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: The 11 Best Sites for Finding What Books to Read Next . “There are plenty of sites you can use to look up books based on your personal taste, favorite authors and titles, or even based on a specific plot summary or character. Whether user-generated, based on recommendations, or using a book recommendation search engine, there are a variety of ways that these sites are going to answer the question: what should I read next?”

WIRED: How to Make Sure You’re Not Accidentally Sharing Your Location. “Here we’ll cover everything you need to consider when it comes to location tracking, and hopefully simplify it along the way. Whether you want to give out access to your current location or not, you should be in control of these settings, and not be caught unawares by additional options that you missed.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Northern Illinois University: NIU library digitizing Northern Star issues from 1899 to 1997. “Through the NIU Library, the Northern Star’s older issues, dating back to 1899 (the first year the Northern Star began printing), are being digitized and will be available for the public to read online later this year.”

Mashable: Snowflake helped Tor users thwart Russian censorship. Now the VPN is branching out as Snowstorm.. “For years, Tor has been a thorn in the side of censorious rulers looking to stop its citizens from freely accessing the internet, but the Russian and Iranian governments have learned its weaknesses and succeeded in blocking direct access to the Tor network at certain times. But unlike other services blocked by these governments, Tor has been deployed alongside the traffic-channeling tool Snowflake, enabling its network to function amid efforts at censorship.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Dutch News: Expats, foreign students – your photos are in a massive police database. “Passport photos which foreigners from outside the EU have to supply to the immigration service are automatically included in a massive police database without their knowledge, RTL Nieuws reported at the weekend. Hundreds of thousands of photographs of expats, students and family members from non-EU countries have been stored in the facial recognition data base, despite questions about its legality, RTL said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Washington Post: Opinion: Why this Google antitrust lawsuit has promise. “Yet unlike another DOJ case brought under the previous administration, the latest lawsuit doesn’t focus on the power the company holds over what we look for on the internet. Instead, it focuses on what we don’t go looking for and see anyway: advertisements. The argument is relatively straightforward: Google dominates this market by playing a key role in the technology at every point along the ‘ad stack.'”

PC World: Microsoft’s new AI Bing taught my son ethnic slurs, and I’m horrified. “Yes, it prefaced the response by noting that some ethnic nicknames were neutral or positive, and others were racist and harmful. But I expected one of two outcomes: Either Bing would provide socially acceptable characterizations of ethnic groups (Black, Latino) or simply decline to respond. Instead, it started listing pretty much every ethnic description it knew, both good and very, very bad.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Unseen Japan: Japan’s “Mermaid Mummy” Finally Identified via New Research. “The mummy is 30 centimeters long and has human features on its face. However, it also has scales running down its back…. Last year, a team of researchers began a mission to discover the mummy’s true identity. Scientists at Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts (倉敷芸術科学大) carefully subjected the artifact to X-rays and other examinations at the University’s animal research college.” Good afternoon, Internet…

February 13, 2023 at 01:07AM
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Soul Newspaper, Black Scholars on Black Lives, Notre Dame Window Restoration, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, February 12, 2023

Soul Newspaper, Black Scholars on Black Lives, Notre Dame Window Restoration, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, February 12, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New York Times: Soul Told Black Musicians’ Stories. Its Archives Are Going Digital.. “The newspaper, which started in 1966 with a focus on R&B, funk and disco, shut down in 1982. But one of its founders’ grandsons is devoted to finding it a new online audience.”

EVENTS

California State University Channel Islands: Broome Library presents Black educators across the nation for “Black Scholars on Black Lives” virtual presentations. “The ‘Black Scholars on Black Lives’ lecture series will be held periodically throughout the year, but there will be weekly lectures throughout the month of February in honor of Black History Month.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Deutsche Welle: Notre Dame windows undergo restoration in Cologne. “In April 2019, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burst into flames. Experts from Cologne Cathedral in Germany are helping restore damaged church windows. Time is short as France hopes to reopen Notre Dame next year.”

Bureau of Transportation Statistics: BTS Updates Datasets to National Transportation Atlas Database. “The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics today released its winter 2023 update to the National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD), a set of nationwide geographic databases of transportation facilities, networks, and associated infrastructure.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Wall Street Journal: ‘De-Influencers’ Want You to Think Twice Before Buying That Mascara. “After years of influencers pushing cosmetics, clothes, personal tech and supplements to the masses, a rising cohort is taking a different tack: telling people what not to buy. They’re calling it ‘de-influencing.’ The term is being popularized in videos by people whose experience runs the gamut: disappointed consumers, savvy beauty bloggers, doctors dispelling skin-care myths and former retail employees dishing on which products they saw returned most often.”

TechCrunch: Low-code database APITable is another Airtable challenger. “APITable is competing with a handful of rising startups, like Amsterdam’s Baserow and San Francisco-based NocoDB, to provide an open source, visual solution for creating smart, sleek-looking databases. Its name suggests a focus on system interoperability. In the future, users will be able to connect the low-code tool to platforms including Zapier, Slack, Google Workspace and red-hot ChatGPT using the APITable API, says the company’s co-founder and COO Gary Li in an interview.”

LAist: Civil Rights Pioneer Myrlie Evers-Williams Has Donated Her Archival Collection To Pomona College. “Myrlie Evers-Williams, a leader of the civil rights movement, has donated her archival collection to Pomona College, where she received her degree in sociology in 1968. Evers-Williams, 89, became known nationally following the 1963 assassination of her husband, NAACP official Medgar Evers, in the driveway of their Mississippi home.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Times Now (India): ‘Sorry, it can’t be done’, Supreme Court responds to Google’s plea. “The Supreme Court on Friday refused to entertain a plea by Google seeking modification of the court’s January 19 order, and asked the tech giant to raise its objections before the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT).”

Virginia Mercury: Virginia House rejects mandatory livestreaming bill as localities warn of six-figure costs. “Despite numerous changes in the bill meant to protect localities that, for whatever reason, can’t figure out how to put videos online without breaking the bank, the House of Delegates rejected the proposal this week on a 47-49 vote. Most Democrats voted for it. Most Republicans, including some who had previously voted for it in committee, opposed it. That indicates the bill’s defeat may have had as much to do with its controversial patron as the idea itself.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret. “The race to build high-performance, AI-powered search engines is likely to require a dramatic rise in computing power, and with it a massive increase in the amount of energy that tech companies require and the amount of carbon they emit.”

NewsWise: UTHealth Houston study: Caregivers trust social media more than physicians with CTE questions. “Those caring for people who are at an increased risk of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) are more likely to turn to social media for answers than physicians, according to research from UTHealth Houston.”

The Guardian: TechScape: Why Twitter ending free access to its APIs should be a ‘wake-up call’. “It’s yet another example of the perils of semi-public platforms being controlled by individuals. And an example of the impact that removing or revoking access to a relatively unrecognised backbone of the internet can have on everyday users.” Good morning, Internet…

February 12, 2023 at 06:28PM
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Saturday, February 11, 2023

Open Benches, GitHub, Hugging Face, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 11, 2023

Open Benches, GitHub, Hugging Face, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, February 11, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me: A worldwide map of memorial benches. Over 26,000 of them. From the About Page: “There are blue plaques to commemorate the famous and influential figures of the past. For everyone else, there are memorial benches. A quiet reminder of the people gone but not forgotten. A spot to rest your weary legs and give silent thanks to ‘Alice – who loved this park’.” This site also mentions a similar site for memorial plaques.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ZDNet: GitHub built a new search engine for code ‘from scratch’ in Rust. “The Rust programming language continues to grow in popularity and now developer platform GitHub has used it to build its new code-focused search engine, Blackbird. Instead of perusing forums for answers, GitHub wants users to use its search engine, which is currently in beta.”

Analytics India: Hugging Face’s New Search Makes Life Easier for Developers . “On Thursday, Mishig Davaadorj from Hugging Face, announced the launch of their full-text search engine… The search allows users to do a full-text search from over 200k models, datasets, and spaces. This includes all LLM models, graphs, and others hosted on the website.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: ‘My Watch Thinks I’m Dead’. “Winter has brought a decent amount of snowfall to the region’s ski resorts, and with it an avalanche of false emergency calls. Virtually all of them have been placed by Apple Watches or iPhone 14s under the mistaken impression that their owners have been debilitated in collisions.”

Gizmodo EU: The Violently Misogynistic Incel Community Is Rewriting Its Own History Through an Incel Wiki. “A Jan. 30 report from the extremism and disinformation-minded think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue titled ‘Spitting out the Blackpill’ digs into the incel community’s self-maintained wiki.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC Bay Area: City of Oakland Hit With Ransomware Attack. “Oakland was the victim of a ransomware attack that began Wednesday night, police and city officials said Friday. The city’s information technology department is working with law enforcement to determine the scope and severity of the attack.”

Bloomberg Law: Hermès Defeats MetaBirkins in the First NFT Trademark Trial (1). “Luxury brand Hermès International SA won its lawsuit against the digital artist behind ‘MetaBirkin’ nonfungible tokens after convincing a Manhattan federal jury that Mason Rothschild’s sale of the NFTs violated Hermès’ rights to the ‘Birkin’ trademark.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Ars Technica: Big Tech companies use cloud computing arms to pursue alliances with AI groups. “Big Tech companies are aggressively pursuing investments and alliances with artificial intelligence startups through their cloud computing arms, raising regulatory questions over their role as both suppliers and competitors in the battle to develop ‘generative AI.'”

Motherboard: ChatGPT Can Be Broken by Entering These Strange Words, And Nobody Is Sure Why. “Two researchers have discovered a cluster of strange keywords that will break ChatGPT, OpenAI’s convincing machine-learning chatbot, and nobody’s quite sure why. These keywords—or ‘tokens,’ which serve as ChatGPT’s base vocabulary—include Reddit usernames and at least one participant of a Twitch-based Pokémon game.”

The Guardian: ‘There is no standard’: investigation finds AI algorithms objectify women’s bodies. “AI tools rate photos of women as more sexually suggestive than those of men, especially if nipples, pregnant bellies or exercise is involved.” Considering Facebook’s longstanding history of incorrectly moderating anything vaguely resembling a breast, I can’t say I’m shocked. Good afternoon, Internet…

February 12, 2023 at 01:56AM
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Flex Index, The Surprising Middle Ages, Maasai Heritage, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, February 11, 2023

Flex Index, The Surprising Middle Ages, Maasai Heritage, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, February 11, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Discovered via a convoluted route it would take entirely too long to tell you about: the Flex Index. From the front page: “The world’s most robust source for full time, hybrid, and remote work requirements. 4,000 companies representing 100M employees.”

Utrecht University: The Middle Ages continue to surprise, this digital exhibition shows. “Knights in love, preaching foxes and fighting snails: medieval culture may seem familiar or odd in modern eyes, but it is always surprising. In the digital exhibition ‘The Surprising Middle Ages’ (‘De verrassende middeleeuwen’), over fifty researchers from the Netherlands and abroad show what surprises the period between about 500 and 1500 still offers today.” The exhibit is in Dutch but translated okay when I put the URL in Google Translate.

Pulse Kenya: Google launches online archive on Maasai Heritage. “Curated by the National Museums of Kenya, the online archive features over 430 high-resolution images and 55 exhibits that showcase different aspects of Maasai life, including their language, mythology, jewellery, and rituals. The exhibition is an immersive experience that offers visitors a chance to learn more about the Maasai through audio-narrated stories and to speak and count in Maa.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

How-To Geek: Microsoft Edge Just Got a Big PDF Upgrade. “PDFs can be opened on almost any device these days, but it was, first and foremost, an Adobe-developed standard, and Acrobat is still a tremendously powerful tool for viewing PDFs. Microsoft is now working with Adobe to improve PDF viewing and editing in the Edge web browser.”

Search Engine Land: New updates to Google’s gambling and games policy. “If you or your clients are involved in sports betting, or your brand is in this field, will soon have the opportunity to advertise on Google and target users in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: You Can Add Face ID Lock to iPhone Apps That Don’t Support It. “Face ID is great for locking and unlocking your iPhone, but it’s even better for authenticating apps that contain sensitive data. While many apps now support Face ID log in, there are still plenty that don’t—but there’s a hack that can lock any app behind Face ID, thanks to an interesting quirk of iOS.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

How-To Geek: Mozilla Is Rebuilding Thunderbird “From the Ground Up”. “Mozilla released Thunderbird 102 back in June 2022, marking the first phase of a multi-year revamp of the popular mail client. It had a few much-needed setup improvements and bug fixes, as well as some design tweaks. There’s also a more significant update planned for later in 2023, named ‘Supernova,’ which was already teased as a major redesign. However, it’s not just a redesign — the app is being rebuilt ‘from the ground up.'”

Library of Congress: Library Acquires Archives of Garth Fagan Dance Company. “The Library of Congress has acquired the papers of choreographer Garth Fagan and Garth Fagan Dance, the company founded by Fagan in 1970. Garth Fagan Dance is distinguished by the artistic imagination and polyrhythmic movement of Jamaican-born Fagan, layered with the discipline and strength of ballet training. The company has performed in more than 660 cities in 24 countries on six continents.”

Kotaku: As More Games Disappear Forever, John Carmack Has Some Great Advice About Preservation. “Doom co-creator John Carmack, legendary game designer, rocket guy and VR enthusiast, left Meta/Facebook late last year after a decade working on the company’s virtual reality efforts. Just because he’s gone, though, doesn’t mean the company’s decisions are out of his thoughts.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Gizmodo: Pentagon Employees Are Too Horny to Follow National Security Protocols. “The list of what DoD employees are downloading in spite of bans includes dating apps, Chinese drone apps, third-party virtual private networks, cryptocurrency apps, games, and apps related to multi-level marketing schemes.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TidBITS: Mastodon Clients Could Do So Much More. “If developers can break free from thinking of Twitter as the apex of microblogging, we could see tools that would radically change and improve our ways of interacting. Here are a few ideas that have occurred to me; share yours in the comments below and on Mastodon, where we can hope they’ll catch the eye of developers.”

Ars Technica: AI-powered Bing Chat spills its secrets via prompt injection attack. “On Tuesday, Microsoft revealed a ‘New Bing’ search engine and conversational bot powered by ChatGPT-like technology from OpenAI. On Wednesday, a Stanford University student named Kevin Liu used a prompt injection attack to discover Bing Chat’s initial prompt, which is a list of statements that governs how it interacts with people who use the service.” Good morning, Internet…

February 11, 2023 at 06:31PM
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