“The Chills”, Royal Neighbors of America, Criminal use of ChatGPT, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, March 28, 2023

“The Chills”, Royal Neighbors of America, Criminal use of ChatGPT, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, March 28, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Sinker Search
Change your Google results by emphasizing one word in the query.

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from Motherboard: Here’s a Database of Media Scientifically Verified to Give You the Chills. “Chills are an innate response for most people. Whether you’re watching a scary movie, or get some harrowing news, it’s a common emotional response to stimuli. And now, scientists have created a database of certain media that has the potential to give you the chills.”

Our Quad Cities: For anniversary, Royal Neighbors unveils digital museum. “Tuesday, March 21, 2023 is the 128th anniversary of Royal Neighbors of America, the Rock Island-based fraternal benefit society and one of the largest women-led life insurers in the U.S. To celebrate its anniversary (during Women’s History Month), Royal Neighbors launched a new Historical Digital Museum that features information on its camps, chapters, leaders, timeline of current events, and archived historical documents, articles, and photos.”

Europol: The criminal use of ChatGPT – a cautionary tale about large language models. “In response to the growing public attention given to ChatGPT, the Europol Innovation Lab organised a number of workshops with subject matter experts from across Europol to explore how criminals can abuse large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, as well as how it may assist investigators in their daily work. Their insights are compiled in Europol’s first Tech Watch Flash report published today. Entitled ‘ChatGPT – the impact of Large Language Models on Law Enforcement’, this document provides an overview on the potential misuse of ChatGPT, and offers an outlook on what may still be to come.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Boing Boing: Having devalued Twitter’s blue checkmark, Elon sells Gold Badges. “No longer serving the purpose of identifying a publication or other notable source as passing whatever Twitter’s idea of verified or notable was, Elon Musk now offers a Gold Badge your company can buy for $1000/mo to prove they are a company that paid $1000.”

Stephen Wolfram: ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”! . “Thanks to some heroic software engineering by our team and by OpenAI, ChatGPT can now call on Wolfram|Alpha—and Wolfram Language as well—to give it what we might think of as ‘computational superpowers’.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Indicted Chinese exile controls Gettr social media site, ex-employees say. “An exiled Chinese tycoon indicted in New York earlier this month in a billion-dollar fraud case controls the conservative social media platform Gettr and used it to promote cryptocurrencies and propaganda, former employees have told The Washington Post.”

India Today: Man clears job interview at Google but fails tenant interview in Bengaluru, here’s the full story. “A Google India employee posted on LinkedIn that a landlord didn’t accept him as a tenant because he worked for Google and thus would probably buy his own home one day.”

WFTS: Florida Sentinel Bulletin history in the process of being digitized at the C. Blythe Andrews, Jr. Library. “The Florida Sentinel Bulletin Collection dates back to the 1940s. The collection highlights African American history that you wouldn’t see in other media outlets. Right now, the library is in the process of digitizing all of the items to make them more accessible to the community.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Guardian: Twitter takes legal action after source code leaked online. “Twitter has revealed some of its source code has been released online and the social media platform owned by Elon Musk is taking legal action to identify the leaker.”

Reuters: Japan ruling party group eyes ban on TikTok, other apps – lawmaker. “A group of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers is planning to compile a proposal next month urging the government to ban social networking services such as TikTok if they are used for disinformation campaigns, an LDP lawmaker said Monday.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT News: A design tool to democratize the art of color-changing mosaics. “Computational tool from MIT CSAIL enables color-changing cellulose-based designs for data visualization, education, fashion, and more.”

WIRED: AI Loves—and Loathes—Language. “The particular kind of data that foils AI more than anything is human language. Unfortunately, human language is also a primary form of data on the meganet. As language confounds deep-learning applications, AI—and meganets—will learn to avoid it in favor of numbers and images, a move that stands to imperil how humans use language with each other.” Good morning, Internet…

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March 28, 2023 at 05:30PM
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American House Museums Web Archive, Scribd Alternatives, Emoji, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 27, 2023

American House Museums Web Archive, Scribd Alternatives, Emoji, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 27, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation: IPLC Launches the Historical Representation at American House Museums Web Archive. “The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of the Historical Representation at American House Museums Web Archive, curated by librarians, library workers, and professors at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. House museums have been a key component of historic preservation in America since the mid 19th century.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: 6 Scribd Alternatives to Host Your PDF Files. “Scribd is a popular document-hosting website, and if someone wanted to share a PDF file online, chances are they would upload it to Scribd. However, its interface and restrictive features are less popular, and the company modified its initial business model. Luckily, there are more than enough Scribd alternatives to choose from.”

MakeUseOf: 5 Online Tools and Websites to Make Your Own Emojis . “Have you ever wished a specific emoji existed but couldn’t find it? Well, now you can explore making your own. Fortunately, you don’t need any advanced software, or technical and artistic skills to make emojis, as there are online tools that allow you to do that. Here are five websites to use to make your own emojis.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: How Twitch lost its way. “Delivering live video content to millions of people, 24 hours per day, is expensive, and as Twitch grows, it incurs greater costs. But Twitch’s moves in pursuit of profitability have confused and upset creators, fans and staff. Creators have decried new monetization schemes that put the onus on them to run more ads.”

Reuters: Microsoft threatens to restrict data from rival AI search tools. “Several rival search engines have launched their own AI-powered chatbots, which aim to combine the the conversational skills of Microsoft’s ChatGPT with search engine results.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: Asian Americans are anxious about hate crimes. TikTok ban rhetoric isn’t helping. “Ever since the US government shot down a Chinese spy balloon last month, [Ellen] Min has withdrawn from her normal routine out of a concern she or her family may become targeted in one of the hundreds of anti-Asian hate crimes the FBI now says are occurring every year. The wave of anti-Asian hate that surged with the pandemic may only get worse, Min worries, as both political parties have amplified fears about China and the threat it poses to US economic and national security.”

The Verge: The Linus Tech Tips YouTube hack is the latest in a line of crypto scam breaches. “Popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips has been hacked this morning, with the channel’s 15.3 million subscribers seeing videos for crypto scams instead of tech hardware reviews. It’s the latest breach in a series of high-profile YouTube accounts being hacked, with scammers regularly gaining access to prominent accounts to rename them and livestream crypto scam videos.”

New York Times: Online Troll Named Microchip Tells of Sowing ‘Chaos’ in 2016 Election. “The defendant in the unusual trial, Douglass Mackey, and the pseudonymous witness collaborated to beat Hillary Clinton. They met for the first time in a Brooklyn courtroom.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Motherboard: Microsoft Now Claims GPT-4 Shows ‘Sparks’ of General Intelligence. “Microsoft is betting heavily on integrating OpenAI’s GPT language models into its products to compete with Google, and, the company now claims, its AI is an early form of artificial general intelligence (AGI).”

The Conversation: How TikTok became a breeding ground for hate speech in the latest Malaysia general election. “Hate speech on social media is a major issue across many regions of the world, including Southeast Asia. Hate speech includes expressions to discriminate, insult, demean, or provoke violence against individuals or groups based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, nationality or others.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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March 28, 2023 at 12:44AM
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Build Focused Google Searches Around Associated Topics With Wiki-Guided Google Search

Build Focused Google Searches Around Associated Topics With Wiki-Guided Google Search
By ResearchBuzz

How do we ask for what we don’t know?

It’s my favorite question. I chew on it all the time like it’s a mental cinnamon toothpick because it’s such an essential question of search.

All we can bring to a search engine topic query is ourselves and what we know. And unless we’re some kind of expert on the topic, we probably know woefully little and what we know probably contains misinformation of various sorts. Our lack of understanding makes us more susceptible to junk searches or shallow, SEO-serving search results that exist only to bump up a Web site’s ranking, and not to provide knowledge.

Knowing everything is an impossible strategy. Fact-checking every single Web page you get in a search result, also impossible. So currently we tend to trust Google (or Bing or DuckDuckGo or You or whichever search engine you use) to guide us to the most useful search results available.

The problem with that is twofold: search engine algorithms are usually opaque and there is a constant conflict between the search engine trying to serve the most useful results possible and SEO black hats trying to game the system and serve results for the money/propaganda benefits/etc.

I can’t start a search engine because ResearchBuzz is just one (1) person. But I can and do try to figure out ways to make searches focused enough to break through the SEO / general knowledge fog and into richer results  with more context.

In December I made Clumpy Bounce Topic Search, which was an attempt to use Wikipedia categories to build Google queries for broad topics. And it works pretty good and it’s fun, but it’s no good for specific topics, people, etc.

I’ve been trying a bunch of different approaches to address this, to build a set of related query topics that works and provides meaningful search results without excessive weirdness and junk results. Finally I figured out a good way was to count Wikidata entry mentions across Wikipedia pages, so now there’s Wiki-Guided Google Search ( https://searchgizmos.com/wggs/ ).

Using Wiki-Guided Google Search

To use WGGS, you provide two things: a Wikipedia topic (it’s case-sensitive, so keep that in mind) and the number of times the topic should be mentioned in another Wikipedia article before that topic is included in the search results. Fewer mentions will lead to less-associated topics (and occasional nonsense.) If you’re not sure how many mentions you should screen for, start at 2 and go higher if you’re getting too many results.

Let’s stick with the default search here. Solar energy is definitely a popular topic, so it’s going to have lots of mentions. A mention filter of 5 will still find plenty of results. Click the search button.

Results include the name of the associated topic (with a link back to its Wikipedia article), a bit of excerpt, and links to Google and Google News searches for both your original topic and the associated topic.

The first time I ran this search I said out loud “Morocco?!” Morocco as a topic associated with solar energy would have taken me a while to come up with on my own, though it makes sense if you think about it. And man, does it bring great results.

Adding Morocco as additional context to our query about solar energy gets past those shallow sites about solar power and takes us straight to rich results (and, of course, a Wikipedia article.) Here’s another result, this time for “solar energy” and “Passive solar building design”:

 

I don’t have any proof to back this up, but I suspect that the formality and structure of Wikipedia’s language use helps make the results more information-oriented.

WGGS also works great for people search, especially for people who have been influential in our culture but are possibly lesser-known. My favorite pianist is Henry Byrd, who used the name Professor Longhair. He influenced any number of better-known musicians but is not well-known himself. However, if you put his name into WGGS with a filter of 4 you’ll see that his name appears in a variety of contexts:

 

And these too yield tasty search results.

March 27, 2023 at 10:52PM
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Group Wikipedia Category Pages By Age, Education, or Gender With Wiki Bunch

Group Wikipedia Category Pages By Age, Education, or Gender With Wiki Bunch
By ResearchBuzz

I think a lot about searching, but I think about search results, too, and the way information is organized.

Often search results are presented by relevance, by date, or alphabetically. But does it always have to be that way? If you’re grouping specific kinds of content there might be a host of other parameters available.

When you have the ability to sort information in different ways, you’re able to look at it from different perspectives. That leads you to different ideas or new avenues of exploration.

I wanted to make a sorter that used something besides date or alphabet. So I turned to the Wikipedia API (which is basically my personal fun park) and decided to see if I could make a people-sorter. And that’s why there’s Wiki Bunch ( https://searchgizmos.com/wikibunch/ ). Wiki Bunch takes a Wikipedia category (ideally one containing people so you get results) and sorts them by age, gender, or place of education. (Wiki Bunch also offers the option to sort by place of birth, but the parameters on that are so wide – everything from a hospital to a state – that it doesn’t work well.)

Using Wiki Bunch is really simple. Enter a Wikipedia category (you can paste the URL of the category page to make it easy) and choose what you want to group the pages by. The default is grouping American astronauts by age. When you’ve made your selection hit the blue button.

Wiki Bunch will think for a few seconds (sometimes for MANY seconds if it’s a big category) and then present you with a list of Wikipedia pages grouped by your property of preference.

 

All properties Wiki Bunch sorts by except age are available as discrete Wikidata properties. Age, however, isn’t: Wiki Bunch has to calculate it based on birth date and the current date, as well as filter out pages with death dates. This means sometimes there will be oddities; occasionally a death date property isn’t available and you’ll find a 150-year-old person on your list. Some people have incomplete birth dates (just the year, for example) and those aren’t included as they can’t be properly calculated.

March 27, 2023 at 07:09PM
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Medieval and Renaissance Women, Undeniable Street View, Introduction to Probability, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, March 27, 2023

Medieval and Renaissance Women, Undeniable Street View, Introduction to Probability, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, March 27, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: The Anti-Bullseye Name Search
Most names in English are expressed in news articles and other places like this: Firstname Lastname, or possibly Firstname Middlename Lastname. TABNS takes a name and generates a Google search that searches for the name in reverse order (Lastname Firstname) and *specifically excludes* the most common expression of firstname lastname.

NEW RESOURCES

British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog: Medieval and Renaissance Women: full list of the manuscripts. “Rejoice! Over the past year, we’ve been hard at work digitising and cataloguing manuscripts connected with Medieval and Renaissance Women. We can now announce that all the manuscript volumes are online, no fewer than 93 (NINETY-THREE) of them.”

Creative Review: The Undeniable Street View exposes the destruction in Ukraine. “Created by a group of Ukrainian organisations – including United24, Voices of Children, Nova Ukraine and Vostok-SOS – The Undeniable Street View offers viewers an unprecedented insight into the destruction of residential buildings and other non-military targets since the conflict began a year ago.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Wolfram Blog: Stack the Odds in Your Favor and Master Probability with Wolfram Language. “I am glad to announce the launch of Introduction to Probability, a free interactive course aiming to help you learn probability intuitively, from simple to advanced concepts. Anyone who wants to learn probability for the first time, needs a refresher or is looking to apply probability professionally will find great value in this course. It will help students understand and use randomness and random variables.”

WordPress Blog: Introducing the WordPress Developer Blog. “With much activity happening in the WordPress development space every day, keeping up-to-date with the latest updates can be challenging. The new WordPress Developer Blog is a developer-focused resource to help you stay on top of the latest software features, tutorials, and learning materials relevant to the open source project.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Hollywood, music industry brace for a TikTok ban. “Since the last time the U.S. government considered banning TikTok in 2020, the app has evolved from a social platform supporting a robust ecosystem of content creators and small businesses to an entertainment powerhouse, upending Hollywood power structures and rewriting the rules of the entertainment landscape. A ban now would threaten not the livelihoods of TikTok’s biggest stars and thousands of small businesses, it could deal a massive blow to the entertainment industry, forcing movie studios, record labels, casting directors, Hollywood agents, and actors to radically shift the way they do business.”

WIRED: Your Favorite Podcast Is Probably an ‘Experience’ Now. “Podcasts have always been a deeply personal experience, thanks in part to how most people listen to them: With headphones in, on commutes or while cleaning, and without a whole lot of subsequent discussion among peers. Now, though, the most financially and creatively successful podcasts are the ones that are also cultivating their own communities, with hosts taking care to connect on a more personal level with the fans whose ears they’ve whispered into for all these years.”

Engadget: Levi’s will ‘supplement’ human models with AI-generated fakes. “Levi’s is partnering with an AI company on computer-generated fashion models to ‘supplement human models.’ The company frames the move as part of a ‘digital transformation journey’ of diversity, equity, inclusion and sustainability. Although that sounds noble on the surface, Levi’s is essentially hiring a robot to generate the appearance of diversity while ridding itself of the burden of paying human beings who represent the qualities it wants to be associated with its brand.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CBS News: At least 17 members of Congress had sensitive information exposed in data breach. “The hacking of the DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority data system has triggered at least three investigations and a federal civil lawsuit against the District of Columbia government, CBS News has learned. It has also sent a significant shock through Congress and its staffers.”

Techdirt: Utah’s Governor Live Streams Signing Of Unconstitutional Social Media Bill On All The Social Media Platforms He Hates. “On Thursday, Utah’s governor Spencer Cox officially signed into law two bills that seek to ‘protect the children’ on the internet. He did with a signing ceremony that he chose to stream on nearly every social media platform, despite his assertions that those platforms are problematic.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WVXU: The Cincinnati Zoo is creating a massive behavioral database to better understand its animals. “Out of uniform and hidden from the animals, Cincinnati Zoo scientists are collecting massive amounts of information on its 400 species — like Huto the Komoto dragon, hippos Fiona and Fritz, and Nutmeg the fox — so they can live their best lives in Cincinnati.”

Internet Archive Blog: The Fight Continues. “We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.”

International Atomic Energy Agency: IAEA and FAO Kickstart the Development of Pioneering Protein Quality Database. “Nutrition experts from the IAEA, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Health Organization as well as national, research and academic institutions came together recently to outline the framework for a first-of-a-kind protein quality database, to help governments assess the protein adequacy of foods sold to consumers and develop optimal dietary protein requirements.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you.

March 27, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Windows Snipping Tools, Social Media Muting, AI Chatbots, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 26, 2023

Windows Snipping Tools, Social Media Muting, AI Chatbots, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 26, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bleeping Computer: Microsoft pushes OOB security updates for Windows Snipping tool flaw. “Now tracked as CVE-2023-28303, the Acropalypse vulnerability is caused by image editors not properly removing cropped image data when overwriting the original file. For example, if you take a screenshot and crop out sensitive information, such as account numbers, you should have reasonable expectations that this cropped data will be removed when saving the image. However, with this bug, both the Google Pixel’s Markup Tool and the Windows Snipping Tool were found to be leaving the cropped data within the original file.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: How to Mute Everyone. “Free yourself from manufactured outrage and the fear of missing out. Life is too short to subject yourself to the ravings of every misguided relative, drunk friend, or semi-acquaintance. It’s time you learned how to mute.”

The Verge: AI chatbots compared: Bard vs. Bing vs. ChatGPT. “The web is full of chattering bots, but which is the most useful and for what? We compare Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Techdirt: Game Jam Winner Spotlight: The Pigeon Wager. “Jason Morningstar seems to have a knack for Deep Cut games: last year he handily snagged the prize with The Obstruction Method, and this year’s entry has once again demonstrated why the category is one of our favorites. The Pigeon Wager takes its inspiration from ‘The Military Use Of The Homing Pigeon’, an article published in a 1927 issue of an ornithology quarterly. On this humble foundation, the game builds a live-action roleplaying exercise full of drama and creativity.”

Motherboard: The Amateurs Jailbreaking GPT Say They’re Preventing a Closed-Source AI Dystopia. “OpenAI’s latest version of its popular large language model, GPT-4, is the company’s ‘most capable and aligned model yet,’ according to CEO Sam Altman. Yet, within two days of its release, developers were already able to override its moderation filters, providing users with harmful content that ranged from telling users how to hack into someone’s computer to explaining why Mexicans should be deported. This jailbreak is only the latest in a series that users have been able to run on GPT models.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wall Street Journal: U.S. State-Government Websites Use TikTok Trackers, Review Finds. “More than two dozen state governments have placed web-tracking code made by TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. on official websites, according to a new report from a cybersecurity company, illustrating the difficulties U.S. regulators face in curtailing data-collection efforts by the popular Chinese-owned app.”

Ars Technica: “Click-to-cancel” rule would penalize companies that make you cancel by phone. “Canceling a subscription should be just as easy as signing up for the service, the Federal Trade Commission said in a proposed ‘click-to-cancel’ rule announced today. If approved, the plan ‘would put an end to companies requiring you to call customer service to cancel an account that you opened on their website,’ FTC commissioners said.”

The Record: BreachForums says it is closing after suspected law enforcement access to backend. “In an abrupt about-face, the new administrator of popular cybercriminal platform BreachForums said they plan to shut down the site after its previous administrator was allegedly arrested last week.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Arizona: Confused by quantum computing? Students are developing a puzzle game to help. “University of Arizona students have developed a computer game to make complex quantum computation concepts easier to grasp. The game challenges users to arrange puzzle pieces into a shape that models a quantum computing circuit. The game was designed to teach students, and even quantum researchers, an unconventional model of quantum computation.”

SiliconAngle: Databricks open-sources an AI it says is as good as ChatGPT, but much easier to train. “Big-data analytics firm Databricks Inc. has emerged as an unlikely player in the generative artificial intelligence space, open-sourcing a new AI model that it claims is ‘as magical as ChatGPT,’ despite being trained on far less data in less than three hours using a single machine.” Good afternoon, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you.

March 27, 2023 at 12:26AM
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Tulsa Historical Photography, DPReview Conservation, Mozilla.ai, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, March 26, 2023

Tulsa Historical Photography, DPReview Conservation, Mozilla.ai, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, March 26, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

News on 6: Tulsa Historical Society And Museum Adds 50,000 Photos To Online Archive. “The Tulsa Historical Society and Museum has now added 50,000 of its photos online. This means anyone can view pieces of Tulsa’s history, any time they want and all for free.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PetaPixel: To Save its Content, Archive Team is Attempting to Back Up All of DPReview. “Following yesterday’s news that DPReview is shutting down, photographers around the web began wondering what would happen to its huge library of articles, reviews, and camera test images, including the website’s excellent studio shot comparison tool. Archive Team aims to scrape more than 4 million articles and posts within the next three weeks.”

Mozilla: Introducing Mozilla.ai: Investing in trustworthy AI. “The vision for Mozilla.ai is to make it easy to develop trustworthy AI products. We will build things and hire / collaborate with people that share our vision: AI that has agency, accountability, transparency and openness at its core. Mozilla.ai will be a space outside big tech and academia for like-minded founders, developers, scientists, product managers and builders to gather.”

Search Engine Journal: OpenAI Introduces Plugin Support For ChatGPT. “OpenAI announced the introduction of plugin support for ChatGPT. This development aims to enhance the language model’s capabilities, allowing it to access up-to-date information, perform computations, and use third-party services. OpenAI plans to gradually roll out plugins and study their real-world use, impact, and potential challenges.”

USEFUL STUFF

Noupe: A Quick Guide to Color Blind Design: How to Present Data to Everyone. “Reduced color perception or the capacity to distinguish between colors are symptoms of color blindness. Color blindness affects 1 in 200 women and 1 in every 12 men. Do digital resources like websites and educational materials affect color blindness? Absolutely! Consider accessibility best practices when creating online documents to ensure that your website or online products are accessible to all visitors.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Search Engine Land: How The Verge gamed Google with its ‘best printer 2023’ article. “Technology news publisher The Verge has published a 600-word article half-filled with ChatGPT content and a heavy dose of sarcasm that has been outranking more in-depth, well-researched and arguably more helpful content written by humans at publications like the New York Times for the competitive query [best printer 2023].”

Wall Street Journal: Elon Musk Offers Employees Stock Grants Valuing Twitter at About $20 Billion. “Elon Musk said Twitter Inc. employees will receive stock awards based on a roughly $20 billion valuation, less than half of the $44 billion price he acquired the company for last year, according to an email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.”

AFP: Kenya police misleadingly use old protest photos in online hunt for March 2023 rally participants. “After violent anti-government protests in Nairobi, Kenyan police took to social media to announce they were looking for suspects who partook in the rallies organised by the opposition on March 20, 2023. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) posted a series of images on Twitter purporting to show individuals suspected of causing mayhem during the demonstrations. But AFP Fact Check found that some of the photos were old and unrelated.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Next Web: Big Tech gives EU access to thousands of user accounts each year. “Most of us share huge amounts of personal information online, and Big Tech companies are in many ways the gatekeepers of this data. But how much do they share with the authorities? And how often do governments request user data? According to new research by VPN provider SurfShark, the answer is a lot, and a lot again.”

University of Texas at San Antonio: Uncovering the unheard: Researchers reveal inaudible remote cyber-attacks on voice assistant devices. “Guenevere Chen, an associate professor in the UTSA Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, recently published a paper on USENIX Security 2023 that demonstrates a novel inaudible voice trojan attack to exploit vulnerabilities of smart device microphones and voice assistants — like Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa or Amazon’s Echo and Microsoft Cortana — and provide defense mechanisms for users.”

TechCrunch: Google removes hundreds of Kenya-focused loan apps from Play Store. “Google has taken down hundreds of loan apps from the Play Store in Kenya since its new policy, which requires digital lenders in the East African country to submit proof of license, went into effect in January. The policy came in the wake of Kenya’s Digital Credit Providers (DCP) regulations last year, which required entities that provide loans digitally to acquire a license to operate from the Central Bank of Kenya.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WUSF: USF researchers create 3D models and virtual tours honoring the legacy of President Jimmy Carter. “The researchers were tasked by the NPS to digitally scan and preserve furniture items that the 39th president built himself. They also created virtual tours of his boyhood home, farm, and depot that served as his campaign headquarters in 1975. The house in Plains where Carter and his wife Rosalynn currently live will eventually be included in the tour as well.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you.

March 26, 2023 at 05:31PM
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