Digital Library of Georgia, Twitter, Google Drive, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 31, 2023

Digital Library of Georgia, Twitter, Google Drive, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 31, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Digital Library of Georgia: Forthcoming Newspapers – Spring 2023. “This year, the Digital Library of Georgia will be adding a variety of new newspaper titles to the Georgia Historic Newspapers (GHN) website (https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/). Below is the list of titles currently slated to be added to GHN in the Spring and Summer of 2023.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

New York Times: Twitter’s Blue Check Apocalypse Is Upon Us. Here’s What to Know.. “For those of you who primarily use Twitter to follow celebrities and news sites, this policy change will affect what you see and read on the service. You may see fewer tweets from accounts you care about in your timeline, for instance, because individuals who choose not to pay for Twitter Blue will become less visible on the site.”

The Verge: Twitter takes its algorithm ‘open-source,’ as Elon Musk promised. “Twitter has released the code that chooses which tweets show up on your timeline to GitHub and has put out a blog post explaining the decision. It breaks down what the algorithm looks at when determining which tweets to feature in the For You timeline and how it ranks and filters them.” As you might imagine, Jane Manchun Wong is already on the case…

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Ars Technica: Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, locking out some users. “Google apparently decided to put a hard limit on the number of files you’re allowed to have on one Google Drive account. Google rolled out this file limit without warning anyone it would happen. Users over the limit found themselves suddenly locked out of new file uploads, and it was up to them to figure out what was going wrong.”

University of Texas at Austin: Harry Ransom Center Acquires Archive of Poet James Fenton. “The archive of the English poet, journalist and literary critic James Fenton is coming to the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Fenton’s body of work traces the political upheavals of our time, including the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the suppression of political protest in China’s Tiananmen Square, and Northern Ireland’s fratricidal bloodletting.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: U.S. published Social Security numbers of 1,900 White House visitors in error. “The United States government erroneously shared the Social Security numbers of more than 1,900 people online earlier this year, part of a data breach that occurred during the publication of the Jan. 6 select committee report, according to a letter reviewed by The Washington Post.”

BBC: ChatGPT banned in Italy over privacy concerns. “Italy has become the first Western country to block advanced chatbot ChatGPT. The Italian data-protection authority said there were privacy concerns relating to the model, which was created by US start-up OpenAI and is backed by Microsoft.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Washington University in St. Louis: Making Internet of Things more secure. “Shantanu Chakrabartty’s lab demonstrates a quantum device for authentication in adversarial wireless environments.”

CoinTelegraph: AI has a role to play in detecting fake NFTs. “Beyond all the good a permissionless internet promises, it also makes it convenient for anyone to freely mint pirated nonfungible tokens (NFTs). There are in fact over 90 million fake copies of NFTs. Because in a permissionless system, what’s to stop bad actors from creating copymints to scam unsuspecting users or damage a brand’s reputation?” Good afternoon, Internet…

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April 1, 2023 at 01:34AM
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National Library of Estonia, Yosl and Chana Mlotek Yiddish Song Collection, Volcanoes on Venus, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, March 31, 2023

National Library of Estonia, Yosl and Chana Mlotek Yiddish Song Collection, Volcanoes on Venus, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, March 31, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Super Edu Search.
Super Edu Search takes higher education institution information from the Department of Education and applies it to a Google search. Did you ever want to search the Web space of all the public universities in Indiana? Or all the HBCUs in the country? Or maybe all the Baptist institutions in Texas? Now you can. Requires Free Data.gov API key.

NEW RESOURCES

From the National Library of Estonia, and machine-translated from Estonian: The National Library’s DigiLabor helps to monetize cultural data. (Based on the rest of the article I don’t think that’s a great translation.) “On March 30, the Estonian National Library’s research portal DigiLabor started operating. Those interested can create new knowledge and values ​​from the datasets themselves or use the help of a library representative. The goal of the National Library’s DigiLab ( digilab.rara.ee ) is to help make the data held by libraries more digitally accessible and usable, to promote data valorization, research and innovation. The DigiLabor collection contains metadata of over 12 million newspaper articles and 70,000 books and 785,000 objects, but the datasets are constantly being supplemented. ”

Forward: The digitized ‘Yosl and Chana Mlotek Yiddish Song Collection’ is now live. “The Workers Circle has unveiled a long anticipated website: the digitization of 400 Yiddish songs, based on the popular out-of-print songbook series, Pearls of Yiddish Song, compiled and written by the late Yiddishist couple, Yosl and Chana Mlotek.”

Washington University in St. Louis: Scientists share ‘comprehensive’ map of volcanoes on Venus — all 85,000 of them. “Intrigued by reports of recent volcanic eruptions on Venus? WashU planetary scientists Paul Byrne and Rebecca Hahn want you to use their new map of 85,000 volcanoes on Venus to help locate the next active lava flow.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PetaPixel: Midjourney Ends Free Trials After Fake AI Images go Viral. “Midjourney has ended free trials of its AI image generator citing ‘extraordinary demand’ and ‘abuse.’ Founder David Holz took to the company’s discord channel to announce the news. ‘Due to a combination of extraordinary demand and trial abuse we are temporarily disabling free trials until we have our next improvements to the system deployed,’ Holz wrote on March 28.”

Associated Press: TikTok propaganda labels fall flat in ‘huge win’ for Russia . “A year ago, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, TikTok started labeling accounts operated by Russian state propaganda agencies as a way to tell users they were being exposed to Kremlin disinformation. An analysis a year later shows the policy has been applied inconsistently. It ignores dozens of accounts with millions of followers. Even when used, labels have little impact on Russia’s ability to exploit TikTok’s powerful algorithms as part of its effort to shape public opinion about the war.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: Google denies Bard was trained with ChatGPT data. “The Information published a report Wednesday including allegations from a former Google AI researcher that the company used a rival’s responses to train its own chatbot. Google denies that Bard uses that data.”

Engadget: A new Twitter alternative is trying to lure users about to lose their old checkmark. “With Elon Musk set to pull verification from thousands of users who were verified under the company’s previous leadership, one Twitter alternative is hoping to lure some of those ‘legacy’ checkmarks to its platform. T2, an invite-only service led by two former Twitter employees, says it will allow users to carry over their ‘legacy’ Twitter verification to its site.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Politico: The campaign to save TikTok has been years in the making. “The campaign to save TikTok has been years in the making. A POLITICO investigation revealed an effort by TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, dating back to at least 2018, long before concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership reached their current pitch.”

The Guardian: Cyberwarfare leaks show Russian army is adopting mindset of secret police. “A consortium of media outlets have published a bombshell investigation about Russia’s cyber-capabilities, based on a rare leak of documents. The files come from NTC Vulkan, a cybersecurity firm in Moscow that doubles as a contractor to Russian military and intelligence agencies.”

BBC: Google: India tribunal upholds $160m fine on company. “An Indian appeals court has upheld a $160m fine imposed on Google by the country’s antitrust regulator in a case related to Android’s market dominance. The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) said the Competition Commission of India (CCI) findings were correct and Google was liable to pay the fine. But it set aside four of 10 antitrust directives imposed on the firm.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Voice of America: China to Limit Access to Largest Academic Database. “The China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), the largest academic database in China, has notified several universities and research institutes in the U.S., Taiwan and Hong Kong that their access will be limited starting April 1.”

York University: Video platforms like Zoom can disrupt normal visual communication cues. “Visual cues people normally pick up when communicating in-person can become misleading and false over video platforms like Zoom and Skype, making communication not only more difficult, but also exhausting, says new research out of York University.” Good morning, Internet…

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March 31, 2023 at 05:40PM
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Wearing Gay History, Blue Ridge Lambda Press, Google Advertising Transparency, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, March 29, 2023

Wearing Gay History, Blue Ridge Lambda Press, Google Advertising Transparency, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, March 29, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Carl’s Name Net
Genealogists, this one’s for you. Carl’s Name Net takes a name and optional keywords, generates a set of name variants, and builds search URLs for Google, Google Books, Google Scholar, and Internet Archive.

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, via The Guardian: Wearing Gay History. From the About page: “Whether to protest, satirize, or show pride, the LGBT community’s often ignored history can be seen vividly in the clothing we often throw out. We invite you to browse through the t-shirts and explore the short exhibits to more thoroughly understand the history of LGBT communities around the country with select t-shirts from the past forty years.”

Roanoke College: Roanoke researchers lead digital preservation project for LGBTQ+ history archive. “For the first time ever, Virginians now have digital access to the full run of the historic newsletter. The Blue Ridge Lambda Press was published for 25 years, from 1983 to 2008, comprising 26 volumes, hundreds of issues, and thousands of pages of Virginia LGBTQ+ history.”

Android Police: Google’s new Ads Transparency Center makes it easier to investigate ads. “Sometimes you want to know a little more about that ad you keep seeing over and over and over again online. Today, Google is launching a new searchable hub of every ad that shows up from verified Google advertisers in Search, YouTube, and Display over the past 30 days.”

Utah State University: Beaver Mountain’s History Celebrated in New Digital Collection at USU. “Located 27 miles up the canyon from Logan, the Beaver Mountain Ski Resort has been a central part of Cache Valley’s winter sports community since 1939. The resort is also popular with Utah State University students, who can take skiing and snowboarding classes there. Despite the resort’s important place in Utah’s ski history and culture, it has typically received less attention from historians and other researchers than larger resorts in the state.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Woolly introduces a Twitter and TweetDeck-inspired Mastodon app. “The slow but steady Twitter exodus has brought a new abundance of third-party Mastodon apps like Ivory, Mammoth and Ice Cubes that connect users to the increasingly popular open source and decentralized social network. Today, we can add one more app to that list with the launch of Woolly, another solidly built iOS Mastodon client focused on offering a more customizable home screen, threaded views for reading longer conversations and a TweetDeck-inspired layout for the iPad.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

National Library of Finland: National Library of Finland to terminate microfilming in early 2024. “Microfilming will be discontinued for several reasons. One is that as the required technology is no longer developed except to a very limited extent, we would be unable to replace our ageing equipment. Access to equipment maintenance services is also uncertain, making microfilming risky.”

Harvard Gazette: Putting Black culture on the map — of historic places. “Only 3 percent of the sites listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places currently focus on the experiences of Black American history and culture. Jocelyn Imani, Black history and culture director at the Trust for Public Land, wants to remedy that, and is part of the effort to preserve such sites.”

CNBC: Google reshuffles virtual assistant unit with focus on Bard A.I. technology. “Google is reshuffling the reporting structure of its virtual assistant unit — called Assistant — to focus more on Bard, the company’s new artificial intelligence chat technology.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried tried to bribe Chinese officials, prosecutors say. “Federal prosecutors tacked on a 13th criminal charge against Sam Bankman-Fried, accusing the FTX co-founder of bribing ‘one or more’ Chinese government officials with $40 million worth of cryptocurrency.”

Gizmodo: Court Orders GitHub to Reveal Who Leaked Twitter’s Source Code. “After Twitter caught wind of its source code being leaked on GitHub, the only thing on the company’s mind was revenge. Now, Twitter has an ace up its sleeve as the US District Court for the Northern District of California signed off on a subpoena yesterday.”

Reuters: Twitter Blocks Pakistan Government’s Official Account In India. “Twitter has blocked the Pakistan government’s account from being viewed in India in response to a legal demand, according to a notice on the social media platform on Thursday.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

BuzzFeed News: Here’s What The World’s Most Heavily Guarded Photo Archive Looks Like. “If you travel about 51 miles north of Pittsburgh and go 220 feet underground, past armed guards, you’ll find the Bettmann Archive. If you’re somewhat familiar with the world of photojournalism, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of this renowned archive that’s managed by Getty Images. Preserving around 11 million images, the archive is a visual record of many of the world’s most important historical events since the invention of the camera in the early 1800s.” 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 30, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Semi-Aquatic Insects, Google Advertising, Zoom, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 29, 2023

Semi-Aquatic Insects, Google Advertising, Zoom, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 29, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Phys .org: Some bugs live in water as larvae: Now there is a database to track these semi-aquatic insects. “… so-called semi-aquatic insects are an important food source for animals in the water and on land and are used as bioindicators to assess water quality and the state of freshwater ecosystems. Thanks to the commitment of nearly 100 researchers, the EPTO-database is the first global data source regarding geo-referenced and freely available data sets on aquatic insect occurrences worldwide. The project was coordinated by IGB.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Ads Tests Blue Badges For Verified Advertisers In Search. “Google is testing showing blue badge icons and labels on some search ads for advertisers who are verified by Google Ads. The blue label is a blue circle with ridges and checkmark within it. This is from the ongoing Google advertiser verification program and now we are seeing Google test little blue checkmarks for advertisers who are verified.”

SlashGear: Zoom Just Added New AI-Powered Features, Here’s What They Do . “Starting with chats, users will soon be able to use a generative AI-assisted feature to compose their messages. The composing system will let users specify the tone — from formal to playful — and also pick between three presets for the length of messages they want the AI to generate.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Another art museum chief quits as Russia pressures cultural institutions. “The director, Marina Loshak, insisted Tuesday that her resignation after a decade in the post was voluntary. But her departure is the latest example of turnover in the leadership of Russian cultural institutions amid wartime demands from the government that art exhibitions reflect patriotic, national values.”

Engadget: Twitter’s secret VIP list is the reason you see Elon Musk’s tweets so often. “We now know why Twitter’s algorithm seems to recommend some users’ tweets so often. Newsletter Platformer reports that the company has a secret VIP list of a few dozen accounts ‘it monitors and offers increased visibility’ in its recommendation algorithm. The accounts include Elon Musk, as well as a handful of other prominent Twitter users.”

The Independent: The Global Music Vault wants to preserve the world’s music in case of disaster – but how will they do it?. “When Luke Jenkinson, an Australian entrepreneur now living in Norway, saw what was being done with the Arctic World Archive and the Global Seed Vault, his mind went to something less tangible than food or even history.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bloomberg: Google violated order to save evidence, antitrust judge says. “Alphabet Inc’s Google flouted a court order requiring it to save records of employee chats in antitrust litigation over its Google Play app store policies, a federal judge concluded.”

The Hill: Twitter restricts Greene’s congressional account over ‘vengeance’ post. “Twitter on Tuesday restricted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) congressional account for seven days after she repeatedly posted an image of a poster about a rally called ‘Trans Day of Vengeance.'”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechCrunch: Twitter is dying . “The value that Twitter’s platform produced, by combining valuable streams of qualification and curiosity, is being beaten and wrung out. What’s left has — for months now — felt like an echo-y shell of its former self. And it’s clear that with every freshly destructive decision — whether it’s unbanning the nazis and letting the toxicity rip, turning verification into a pay-to-play megaphone or literally banning journalists — Musk has applied his vast wealth to destroying as much of the information network’s value as possible in as short a time as possible; each decision triggering another exodus of expertise as more long-time users give up and depart.”

Brigham Young University: Can AI predict how you’ll vote in the next election?. “In one experiment, the researchers created artificial personas by assigning the AI certain characteristics like race, age, ideology, and religiosity; and then tested to see if the artificial personas would vote the same as humans did in 2012, 2016, and 2020 U.S. presidential elections. Using the American National Election Studies (ANES) for their comparative human database, they found a high correspondence between how the AI and humans voted.” Good morning, Internet…

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March 30, 2023 at 12:39AM
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Turn a Wikipedia Page Into a Contact Directory With RoloWiki

Turn a Wikipedia Page Into a Contact Directory With RoloWiki
By ResearchBuzz

When you want the official Facebook account or the LinkedIn for a famous person, what do you do? A quick Web search? It’s either that, ask a friend, or try to guess.

But there are other places that have that kind of information too, like Wikipedia. And if you’re looking to get such data on many people in the same category — lists of CEOs or active politicians, for example — Wikipedia might be a faster option. But how do you extract the data without doing a lot of poking and clicking and spending much more time than you would with a Web search?

I like this question. I answered it with RoloWiki ( https://searchgizmos.com/rolowiki/ ).  RoloWiki lets you specify a Wikipedia article and then shows you the content of that page. The difference is that the internal links to other Wikipedia pages are replaced with a function call that extracts a predetermined list of available Wikidata properties about that Wikidata entity. Here’s how to use it.

Using RoloWiki

Start using RoloWiki by entering the name of a Wikipedia article and clicking the button. The default value is “List of chief executive officers” so let’s stay with that.

When you click the button RoloWiki will show you what looks like a regular Wikipedia article, though the formatting is different and the edit links don’t work.

 

See someone interesting? Click on their name. A box will open in the upper right corner providing additional information on them. RoloWiki looks for a number for Wikidata properties – first and last name, date of birth, occupation, official website, Library of Congress reference ID, Wikimedia Commons category, LinkedIn ID, Facebook account, and Twitter account. (Bear in mind that not all accounts have all Wikidata properties available.)

 

 

The Wikidata Properties box stays in the upper corner of the page to minimize interfering with your browsing

Isn’t that nice? You can turn Wikipedia pages into mini contact directories.

Because of the Wikidata properties being people-oriented, RoloWiki is best for people search, but you can search for companies and institutions as well. Apple doesn’t work because it’s too ambiguous, but other companies work fine:

March 29, 2023 at 08:30PM
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LGBTQ Rights Worldwide, Zagreb Film Cartoons, UK NFT, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 29, 2023

LGBTQ Rights Worldwide, Zagreb Film Cartoons, UK NFT, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 29, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Time-Sliced News Search.
This tool takes a year and query you input and generates date-restricted searches for several news search engines, including Google News, Google Books (Books, Newspapers, and Magazines are searched separately), Newspapers.com, and Chronicling America.

NEW RESOURCES

Out in Perth: New database tracks global progress and decline on LGBTI+ rights. “The ILGA World Database, a platform launched by ILGA World compiling laws, news, and references to human rights bodies and advocacy opportunities with the United Nations related to LGBTI+ people worldwide. The free, interactive, and collaborative platform gives details insights on the state of laws and proposed legislation concerning sexuality, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics issues in 193 UN member States and 47 non-independent territories.”

Cartoon Brew: Some Of The Weirdest And Most Stylish Cartoons Ever Made Are Now Free To View On Youtube. “Zagreb Film produced some of the wildest, most eclectic animated shorts of the 20th century, but their work has been exceptionally difficult to view — until now.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BBC: NFT: Plans for Royal Mint produced token dropped by government. “Plans for a government backed non-fungible token (NFT) produced by the Royal Mint have been dropped, the Treasury has announced. Rishi Sunak ordered the creation of a ‘NFT for Britain’ that could be traded online, while chancellor in April 2022.”

ProPublica: A Rare Statue of Buddha Fails to Sell at Auction as Questions Swirl Around a Renowned Art Collection. “What happened may be a sign that objects from the collection of James and Marilynn Alsdorf will have trouble finding buyers following questions about how they were acquired. The piece from Nepal was once displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago.”

Engadget: Fitbit challenges, adventures and open groups join the Google graveyard today. “If you’re a longtime Fitbit user, the demise of open groups, adventures and challenges is likely to come as a shame, particularly since two of them made the platform more social and were widely copied by the company’s competitors.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: The Ultimate Todoist Keyboard Shortcuts Cheatsheet. “Productivity is a hot topic of conversation. As such, choosing the right tool for the job is crucial. Todoist is a popular and robust app that lets you create simple shopping lists or more complex projects – including professional ones.” Extensive. No annotation, but extensive.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: How we might stop the flood of data-driven misinformation. “People are often tempted to trust statistics and algorithms as neutral arbiters. But algorithms are incapable of independently understanding the worth of what they’re generating. They’re also very good at producing the appearance of meaning, which makes it that much easier to trawl through data sets in search of the conclusions you want to see in them.”

University of Iowa Libraries: Preserving Hawkeye sports history, one digitized film at a time. “The University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections and Archives and Conservation and Collections Care have an initiative to digitize about 530 films of football, men’s and women’s basketball, wrestling, and track films that date back to the 1930s and go through at least 1989. The films’ state of degradation is dramatic, especially for the older material, and many of these films don’t have much life left in them.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CoinDesk: Binance, CEO Zhao Sued by CFTC Over ‘Willful Evasion’ of U.S. Laws, Unregistered Crypto Derivatives Products. “The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sued crypto exchange Binance and founder Changpeng Zhao Monday on allegations the company knowingly offered unregistered crypto derivatives products in the U.S. against federal law.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

La Trobe University: New project to track alcohol in Influencer posts. “A new research project led by La Trobe University will use artificial intelligence software to monitor social media influencers’ Instagram posts for alcohol marketing, to inform future regulation and reduce alcohol harms.”

Flinders University: Plus side of app use before bed. “Overuse of mobile devices gets a bad rap but an upside may be their ability to create a distraction and positively affect teenagers’ ability to get to sleep, new Flinders University research shows. Feedback from more than 600 teenagers from age 12 to 18 at South Australian schools between June and September 2019 has led the international research group to point to a more nuanced view on using the wide range of mobile content – led by Youtube, music apps, Instagram and Snapchat – before young people’s bedtime.”

Eos: Deluges of Data Are Changing Astronomical Science. “For scientists who study the cosmos, hard-to-grasp numbers are par for the course. But the sheer quantity of data flowing from modern research telescopes, to say nothing of the promised deluges of upcoming astronomical surveys, is astounding even astronomers. That embarrassment of riches has necessitated some serious data wrangling by myself and my colleagues, and it’s changing astronomical science forever.” Good morning, Internet…

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March 29, 2023 at 05:29PM
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Twitter, iPhone, Commercial Spyware, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 28, 2023

Twitter, iPhone, Commercial Spyware, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 28, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ABC News: Twitter celebs balk at paying Elon Musk for blue check mark. “William Shatner, Monica Lewinsky and other prolific Twitter commentators — some household names, others little-known journalists — could soon be losing the blue check marks that helped verify their identity on the social media platform.”

Axios: Musk says Twitter will only show verified accounts in “For You” timeline. “Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced Monday evening that only tweets by verified users will show up in the platform’s default main feed of ‘For You’ recommendations starting April 15.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: Finally, There’s an Easy Way to Reduce Background Noise on Your iPhone. “As reported by 9to5Mac, Apple is adding Voice Isolation mode to phone calls as part of iOS 16.4. According to Apple, Voice Isolation mode ‘prioritizes your voice and blocks out ambient noise around you,’ a simple solution to clearer audio during phone calls.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Rest of World: Twitter blocked 122 accounts in India at the government’s request. “Twitter blocked 122 accounts belonging to journalists, authors, and politicians in India this week in response to legal requests from the Indian government.”

Daily Beast: Elon Musk’s Twitter Makes Millions Off Anti-LGBT “Groomer” Tweets: Report. “Under Elon Musk’s leadership of Twitter, tweets linking LGBT people to ‘grooming’ have sky-rocketed, jumping 119 percent since Musk’s takeover in October 2022, according to a new report released by the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The study also found that Twitter is making millions from big-name advertisers, whose brands are appearing alongside hateful anti-LGBT rhetoric.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Engadget: Biden administration bans federal agencies from using commercial spyware. “In an executive order signed Monday, President Biden barred federal agencies from using commercial spyware that threatens US national security or carries a risk of improper use by foreign governments and individuals.”

WIRED: A US Agency Rejected Face Recognition—and Landed in Big Trouble. “Officials working on Login.gov, used to access dozens of government sites, worried about algorithmic bias. Their decision breached federal security rules.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NHK: Japan donates washi paper to restore ancient Ukrainian texts. “The western Japanese prefecture of Tokushima has donated locally-produced washi paper to an archive in Ukraine, so that old documents can be restored.”

Washington Post: The biggest decider of who backs a TikTok ban? If they use TikTok.. “More Americans back a TikTok ban than oppose one, with a majority expressing concerns over the company’s links to China, underscoring that distrust of the foreign-owned app has spread beyond Washington, even as its domestic user base soars.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Ars Technica: Hobbyist builds ChatGPT client for MS-DOS . “On Sunday, Singapore-based retrocomputing enthusiast Yeo Kheng Meng released a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS that can run on a 4.77 MHz IBM PC from 1981, providing a unique way to converse with the popular OpenAI language model.” You don’t know how much I miss those super-solid IBM keyboards. 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 29, 2023 at 12:28AM
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