New researches

Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Tennessee Cemeteries, Twitter, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, April 11, 2023

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Tennessee Cemeteries, Twitter, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, April 11, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Shuffle Search
Google’s search results look different depending on the order of your query words! Shuffle Search takes a 2-, 3-, or 4-word query and creates a Google search list of all possible orders for those query words.

NEW RESOURCES

Lion’s Roar: Chögyam Trungpa Digital Library at Naropa University launches with catalog of over 170 recorded teachings. “The new Chogyam Trungpa Digital Library at Naropa University is offering an online archive of recorded teachings by the late Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in both audio, video, and transcript formats. On April 4, the library released a new batch of content to mark the 36th anniversary of the passing of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, including a seminar, a community talk, and a radio interview.”

Greeneville Sun: TN Historical Commission Unveils Online Database Of Cemeteries. “The Statewide Cemetery Map and the Tennessee Historic Cemetery Register are now available online in ArcGIS format for public use on the THC’s website. The map has been populated by data from the commission’s cemetery database, which currently contains more than 32,500 cemeteries statewide, a news release notes.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Slate: Twitter Isn’t a Company Anymore. “Twitter, as a defendant, must continue to submit corporate disclosure statements to the court. And so, in its most recent filing, the company provided notice that ‘Twitter, Inc. has been merged into X Corp. and no longer exists.’ As the ‘successor in interest’ to Twitter Inc.—that is, the survivor of the merger—X Corp. is now the defendant in Loomer’s suit. Its parent corporation is identified as X Holdings Corp.” I don’t have enough legal/financial/corporate expertise to assess whether this is sinister or not. It could simply be an attempt to dodge the mountain of bills Twitter hasn’t paid.

Android Police: Google Play will now auto-archive your least-used apps. “If you’re big into downloading media, or playing weighty games, finding all the space you need can be a challenge. Last year, Google introduced the idea of app archiving to help people manage their precious storage, and now it’s tweaking the program to work automatically.”

Ars Technica: Apple releases last week’s security patches for older iPhones, iPads, and Macs . “Last week, Apple released iOS and iPadOS 16.4.1 and macOS Ventura 13.3.1 to patch two actively exploited security vulnerabilities and fix other small bugs. Today it’s following those up with iOS and iPadOS 15.7.5, macOS Monterey 12.6.5, and macOS Big Sur 11.7.6 to patch those same vulnerabilities in older devices that are still receiving software updates but aren’t capable of running the newest OSes.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BuzzFeed News: Twitter Circles Is Broken, Revealing Nudes Not Meant For The General Public. “Eight months and one ownership change later, Circles’ secure functionality appears to have broken. A number of users are publicly warning those who use the feature that their supposedly secure posts — oftentimes nudes — are leaching into the main For You feed, the algorithmically driven homepage of Twitter.”

New Zealand Herald: Privacy fears over New Zealand government departments’ use of Google Analytics. “Privacy experts and analysts warn government departments’ use of Google Analytics may be allowing the world’s biggest marketing company to harvest New Zealanders’ private data for its own purposes.”

Bloomberg: South Korea Fines Google $32 Million for Squeezing Local Rival. “South Korea fined Alphabet Inc.’s Google 42.1 billion won ($32 million) for using its clout in the mobile app market to squeeze out a local rival, the latest sign of intensifying scrutiny on the US tech firm as it seeks to expand overseas.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

MIT Technology Review: How AI is helping historians better understand our past. “Historians say the application of modern computer science to the distant past helps draw connections across a broader swath of the historical record than would otherwise be possible, correcting distortions that come from analyzing history one document at a time. But it introduces distortions of its own, including the risk that machine learning will slip bias or outright falsifications into the historical record.”

EurekAlert: Hooper creating public database of slaving voyages across the Indian Ocean and Asia. “The primary investigators will create an Indian Ocean and Asia (IOA) database of voyages that transported enslaved African, Malagasy, Middle Eastern, Indian, Southeast Asian, and East Asian men, women, and children within and beyond the Indian Ocean world between 1500 and 1940 as an integral part of the SlaveVoyages website.”

The Conversation: TikTok’s poor content moderation fuels the spread of hate speech and misinformation ahead of Indonesia 2024 elections. “Researchers and civil society organisations must start to study TikTok’s potential impact on Indonesia as the country will hold its general and presidential elections in February 2024.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Taiwan News: National Taiwan Library repairs 500-year-old Quran. “The ancient text was given to Tzu Chi Buddhist Humanitarian Foundation Master Cheng Yen (證嚴) by a Tzu Chi Turkish volunteer, Faisal Hu (胡光中), over two years ago, per CNA. Hsu Mei-wen (徐美文), a book restorer at Taiwan Book Hospital of National Taiwan Library, was entrusted with the job. With 15 years of experience, Hsu quickly devoted herself to absorbing the book’s lessons and teachings.” Good morning, Internet…

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April 11, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Monday, April 10, 2023

Twitter, TikTok, Biden Administration, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 10, 2023

Twitter, TikTok, Biden Administration, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 10, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Euronews: Russia mulls lifting Twitter ban after Musk reinstates Kremlin account. “Russia is considering lifting its ban on Twitter after the social media network reinstated access to accounts of Russian state agencies. The ban was imposed before Elon Musk took over running Twitter last October. But since Friday, users can once again search the accounts of the Kremlin and Russia’s Foreign Affairs and Defence ministries, among others.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: On TikTok, ‘The Hunger Games’ is a metaphor for our modern dystopia. “A lot has changed since The Hunger Games peaked in popularity, making it ripe for re-examination. Many of those partaking in the resurgence are revisiting the series for the first time as adults grappling with the climate crisis, social upheaval, and a global pandemic. How do our 2023 adult sensibilities transform our understanding of a beloved childhood franchise?”

Axios: Biden’s digital strategy: an army of influencers. “President Biden’s not-yet-official bid for re-election will lean on hundreds of social media ‘influencers’ who will tout Biden’s record — and soon may have their own briefing room at the White House, Axios has learned.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Gizmodo: ‘Such Is Life:’ FTX Says SBF and Execs Joked About Misplacing Millions of Dollars. “The company said approximately 80,000 transactions made by the company were left as unprocessed entries in some QuickBooks accounts called ‘Ask My Accountant.’ FTX’s hedge fund arm Alameda Research’s record keeping was ‘so poor’ that one document described how employees should ‘come up with some number, idk’ for some crypto token valuations.”

Politico: Twitter fails to report some political ads after promising transparency. “Twitter has failed to disclose some political ads running on its site since early March, according to a review of its activity by POLITICO. At least three promoted fundraising tweets were not included in Twitter’s own data, seemingly contradicting the company’s policies and raising doubts about the integrity of the platform’s data and how many other political ads could go unreported.”

New York Times: Justice Dept. Recently Looked Into Twitter, Lawsuit Says. “A lawsuit filed on Monday by several former Twitter executives said they had personally spent more than $1 million on legal expenses related to shareholder lawsuits and several government investigations, including an inquiry by the Justice Department. The nature of the Justice Department inquiry and whether it was ongoing, was unclear. The lawsuit, filed in Delaware Chancery Court, did not offer other details.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: How A.I. and DNA Are Unlocking the Mysteries of Global Supply Chains. “Amid growing concern about opacity and abuses in global supply chains, companies and government officials are increasingly turning to technologies like DNA tracking, artificial intelligence and blockchains to try to trace raw materials from the source to the store.”

Colgate Maroon-News: LinkedIn is the New Facebook. “It might just be a symptom of summer internship season, but it appears as though the platform is emerging as the new Facebook, which has faded into the background of updates on your parent’s long-lost classmates’ family and your grandmother’s cat. Already saturated with older working professionals, LinkedIn has a promising future in the social media networking world as it appeals more and more to young people.”

Northwestern University: People online might not be as outraged as you think. “The prevalence of moral outrage online can be explained in part by our psychology, according to William Brady, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Brady recently led a new study, published April 10, 2023 in Nature Human Behavior, that explores why people tend to misperceive others as angrier than they really are online. In turn, he says, users tend to engage with triggering content, thereby amplifying it and giving it an algorithmic boost.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Engadget: Museum creates giant ‘Donkey Kong’ cabinet with a little help from Nintendo. “The Strong National Museum of Play in New York unveiled an absolutely massive Donkey Kong arcade cabinet that’s nearly 20 feet tall. Donkey Kong is co-starring in the biggest movie in the world right now, so it is only fitting that he also gets an equally gargantuan arcade cabinet.” Good afternoon, Internet…

April 11, 2023 at 12:17AM
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Find Relationships Between Wikipedia Entities with Crony Corral

Find Relationships Between Wikipedia Entities with Crony Corral
By ResearchBuzz

Do you sometimes feel that you should have a pen and paper for taking notes when you read the news? Do you long for a program that lists all the people involved in a news story so you can get details when they pop up after an extended absence?

It’s hard to keep up with all the current events when there’s such a ferment of things going on. It seems like your choices are either to severely restrict your news intake for your mental health, or go around in a state of half-understanding which certainly isn’t good for MY anxiety, I don’t know about you.

Even when we’re not consuming the news, though, it’s still being made. Newspapers are still publishing. And Wikipedia is still churning away, aggregating and integrating news content, as people far bolder than me try to make sense of everything.

I wanted a way to harness Wikipedia’s consistency in keeping up with news and turn it into a tool that would allow me to examine the relationships between people outside of a single news article. And, after several false starts and multiple epic discussions with Curly, I am pleased to present to you Crony Corral, at https://searchgizmos.com/crony/ .

Crony Corral accepts input of names – people names, organization names, or company names – separated by commas. Once the names are entered, CC searches for them on Wikipedia and pulls their Wikidata properties, looking for matches across 17 different Wikidata properties:

P159: headquarters location – Location of the main office of an organization, company, or institution.
P108: employer – Used to link a person to the organization or company they work or have worked for.
P69: educated at – The educational institution(s) a person has attended.
P551: residence – The place where a person lives or has lived.
P102: member of political party – The political party a person is or has been a member of.
P106: occupation – Refers to the main job or profession of a person.
P39: position held – Used to link a person to the political, organizational, or professional positions they have held.
P937: work location – Indicates the place where a person primarily conducts their work.
P452: industry – Refers to the main industrial sector or sectors that a company, organization, or product is involved in.
P17: country – Indicates the country that a geographical entity or organization is part of or associated with.
P1056: product or material produced – Refers to the main product(s) or material(s) produced by a company or organization.
P749: parent organization – Indicates the higher-level organization that a subsidiary or lower-level organization is part of.
P414: stock exchange – Refers to the stock exchange where a company’s shares are traded.
P112: founded by – Indicates the person or organization that founded a company, organization, or institution.
P127: owned by – Refers to the person, organization, or entity that owns a particular asset or resource. (I think institutional / stock ownership is in here too.)
P355: subsidiary – Used to link a parent company or organization to its subsidiaries or lower-level organizations.
P27: country of citizenship – Indicates the country where a person holds citizenship.

When matches are found, they’re gathered into pairs which are presented to the user in a drop-down menu. Users can choose a pair from the menu and find Wikipedia pages which the two names have in common with a relationship level of 1 (minimal relationship) to 5 (close relationship).

Here’s how it works.

Using Crony Corral

Start by entering a list of names. They don’t have to be all people names or all company names, but only people will match people and only organizations will match organizations (companies, NGOs, etc.) That’s because the two groups use different Wikidata properties. I have put in 75 names at a time without a problem, but it took a good little while to sort them all out and the menu of matches was huge.

Let’s not put in 75 names. Let’s instead use the very basic example of Louisa May Alcott and her father, Amos Bronson Alcott. Put those two names in (separated by a comma) and click the button.

After a moment the menu of sub-groups will populate. This shows all the matches from the group of names you entered. Even though we only entered two people, there’s still a long list in the menu. That’s because being family members, Amos Bronson and Louisa May Alcott of course shared many life experiences. You’ll note that they match for several residences. That’s because Crony Corral considers all values in a Wikidata property – all employers, all occupations, etc – when looking for matches. Which of these menu items you pick, however, doesn’t matter, because they all represent the same two people.

Once you’ve chosen the pair you want to review, you need to choose the minimum mentions threshold.

What happens in this next part is that Crony Corral searches for Wikipedia pages that the two names you’re looking at have in common. It then counts the number of times each name is mentioned in that common group. Pages with only one mention of each name would be the slightest-possible affiliation, while pages with both names mentioned five times would indicate a close association.

If you want to see all mentions, set it at 1, but if you’re searching for famous people pairs you’ll get a LOT of results this way. Here’s what Amos Bronson and Louisa’s common articles list looks like with a minimum mentions setting of two:

There were nine results, covering a variety of people, places, and things. If you’re an Alcott fan some of these pages might make immediate sense (Fruitlands) or they might take a moment to put into context (I always forget the Alcotts lived in New Hampshire at one point.)

Each article has three search links under it: one for Google, one for DuckDuckGo, and one for Bing. The search links search for the title of the Wikipedia article as well as the name pair you’re searching for. If you clicked on the the Germantown Academy (not shown) Google search link, this would open in a new tab:

These search results get right to the point: Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown and that’s why the two Alcotts have a relationship to that Wikipedia page. And do you see how rich the results are, how focused they are on information? That’s because you’ve added the additional context of Germantown Academy, which is getting you past shallow SEO and ecommerce results. There might be all kinds of companies trying to rank for Louisa May Alcott or even Bronson Alcott as a search query. I don’t think anybody’s worried about ranking for Louisa May Alcott Bronson Alcott Germantown Academy.

What happens when you want to explore a network around someone but you only have one name? Use a different Gizmo first: Wiki-Guided Google Search ( https://searchgizmos.com/wggs/ .)

Getting a List of Names With Wiki-Guided Google Search

Sometimes you’ll have one name to start with and you want to explore the network of that one person – perhaps you want to explore Amos Bronson Alcott outside the context of his family. How do you get started? Use Wiki-Guided Google Search. It’s designed to find you related pages for a Wikipedia topic, so this is a little off-label use, but it still works. Set your topic search for Bronson Alcott and your minimum mentions to 1. You’ll get a long list of results, including a lot of names.

Going through this list got me over a half-dozen names, which I added to a Crony Corral query along with the original Amos Bronson Alcott search term. From there I have plenty of intersections to explore.

April 10, 2023 at 10:48PM
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Wikipedia Official Link Property Explorer (WOLPE): Get Your Web Directory On

Wikipedia Official Link Property Explorer (WOLPE): Get Your Web Directory On
By ResearchBuzz

Do you miss Yahoo and DMoz and all the other link directories that used to roam free across the vast plains of the Internet? I would put the serious decline as starting in 2011, when Google Directory shut down.

That was a while ago so if you were busy then, a bit of backstory: link directories indexed Web resources instead of spidering them. In other words, an entry for a website on a directory like Yahoo would be the name of the site and a description of a few sentences. If it was a really big/important/popular site, subsites might also be indexed and described as well. A directory’s listings were searchable by keyword as well as browsable by category and generally they were browsable by other parameters as well (most recent, most popular, editor’s picks, etc.)

A collection of Websites aggregated with such basic information is a very different search experience from that of a full-text engine like Google, which spiders and makes searchable the entire text content of sites. The limited amount of searchable text in a directory meant that general searches were more productive, while the category structure meant that you could gain context about your topic as you explored to learn more about it. I firmly believe that the Internet ecosystem would benefit from a good Web directory, though there isn’t one available.

Well, if they’re so great, why don’t major link directories exist today? I would guess a couple of reasons. First, Yahoo started charging a $299 submission fee to add links to its directory. I think it might have been intended to act as a filter for spam and so forth but it ended up filtering out all the hobbyists and labor-of-love types, the people who make really great content, because they couldn’t afford $299. Then, if I recall correctly, Yahoo decided not only did the directory require $299 as a submission fee but also as a yearly fee of $299 – and that was the beginning of the end for Yahoo. (I apparently ranted about this in late December 2014, so feel free to read that if you want more of my opinions about what lead to Yahoo’s decline.)

(If you care to draw parallels between that and the current mania of social media platforms for charging their users, with implications about how high those fees will go once users are locked in, I will sit here quietly and not interrupt.)

The second reason, I think, has to do with attention flow. Before the rise of social media, there was a tremendous amount of content curation energy focused on the Web itself. As Facebook got larger, there was still a certain amount of flow between the greater Web and Facebook. Facebook made content available by RSS and didn’t throttle the reach of external links like it does now. But as Facebook went more and more walled-garden, that curation energy became focused on Facebook to Facebook’s benefit and the Web’s deficit. And that was the beginning of the end for the Open Directory Project.

But the thing is, there’s still a lot of curation energy on the Web. Huge numbers of people contribute to Wikipedia. And more importantly, Wikidata has as one of its properties “official website.” So why not turn Wikipedia into a searchable link directory?

Sounded good to me, so I made WOLPE: Wikipedia Official Link Property Explorer – https://searchgizmos.com/wolpe/ . I really wanted to call it WikiHoo but I can’t afford a lawyer.

How to Use WOLPE

WOLPE is easy to use. You’ve got two search type options: Title Only, or Summary (which searches a brief description of the page.) Both pages have limited text, but the summary has enough that it will find closely-related keywords. Make your search general, two or three words. WOLPE will find you Wikipedia pages with official website properties; links, in other words. Here’s what the default search, Eurythmics, looks like with the Title Only option:

Just one result. On the other hand, if you search for the summary, you’ll find the pages for the duo’s two members, as well as affiliated people and topics.

I wanted to add a third option for a full-text search of Wikipedia, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to do it without running afoul of Wikipedia’s API rate limits. It worked only if I rate-limited the API calls to an extent that it was just too slow.

I also want to figure out how to add a category structure, because I liked it as a mechanism for passive learning as you were exploring your chosen topic. But it’s fun to use as-is!

April 10, 2023 at 06:23PM
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Project 88 Art Gallery, Archives New Zealand, Media TikTok, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, April 10, 2023

Project 88 Art Gallery, Archives New Zealand, Media TikTok, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, April 10, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Contemporary Biography Builder
Use Wikipedia data to create lifespan-bounded searches for historical and contemporary figures. Creates searches for Google Books, Internet Archive, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and Chronicling America.

NEW RESOURCES

Mid-Day: Here is how this Mumbai art gallery has gone online to make art more accessible. “The art gallery, Project 88, is embarking on an effort to transport their physical experiences to the virtual domain with curated videos of exhibits, talks and sessions held at the gallery through their YouTube channel. Titled Art Talks, the channel was an experiment that the gallery resorted to during the Covid-19-induced lockdown two years ago, but not pursued further till now.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Radio New Zealand: National Archives reboots problematic search system. “Archives NZ says it has set up a new team to work on its breach-ridden main search system. The high-tech replacement for its main Collections search software went badly wrong last year. The $4 million Swedish system exasperated researchers, lawyers and other users with multiple shutdowns, security breaches, delays and slow searches.”

USEFUL STUFF

International Journalists’ Network: Advice for using TikTok to drive news engagement. “During a recent ICFJ Empowering the Truth Global Summit session, Openly TikTok Lead and LGBTQ+ correspondent Enrique Anarte shared with journalists how to make engaging news TikToks.”

Larry Ferlazzo: This Week’s Free & Useful Artificial Intelligence Tools For The Classroom. “At least, for now, I’m going to make this a weekly feature which will highlight additions to THE BEST NEW – & FREE – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS THAT COULD BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Distant Librarian: ChatGPTLibrarian is still finding his (its?) voice. “One of my alerts just tripped over a new blog called ChatGPTLibrarian. The site was launched in March 2023 by librarian Victor Santiago, and I think he’s still trying to decide if he’s going to write as him, or as an AI-assisted author.”

The Independent: This is the official Twitter emoji for King Charles’s coronation. “Buckingham Palace has revealed an official emoji to celebrate the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla. “The colourful cartoon motif depicts the 17th century jewelled solid gold St Edward’s Crown with purple velvet cap – the regalia which will be used to crown the King on 6 May. “Buckingham Palace has revealed an official emoji to celebrate the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla. The colourful cartoon motif depicts the 17th century jewelled solid gold St Edward’s Crown with purple velvet cap – the regalia which will be used to crown the King on 6 May.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: Washington vows to tackle AI, as tech titans and critics descend. “…policymakers arrive to the new debate bruised from battles over how to regulate the technology industry — having passed no comprehensive tech laws despite years of congressional hearings, historic investigations and bipartisan-backed proposals. This time, some are hoping to move quickly to avoid similar errors.”

KRON: Twitter sued after failing to pay over $1.2 million in Oakland rent: court docs. “Twitter has been renting space at 1330 Broadway in Oakland since the lease term began in 2021. The Delaware-based company which owns the property located on Broadway in Oakland claims they served a Notice of failure to Pay Rent to Twitter in December. In December, the company said Twitter owed a sum of $327,550.25.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNN: Academic researchers blast Twitter’s data paywall as ‘outrageously expensive’. “In an open letter this week, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research — a group representing dozens of researchers and civil society organizations — said free and open access to Twitter data has historically enabled systematic, large-scale research on social media’s role in public health initiatives, foreign propaganda, political discourse, and even the bots and spam that Musk has blamed for ruining Twitter. But Twitter’s new tiered access system undercuts all of that, the researchers said.”

New York Times: A.I. Is Coming for Lawyers, Again. “Previous advances in A.I. inspired predictions that the law was the lucrative profession most likely to suffer job losses. It didn’t happen. Is this time different?”

PsyPost: Flow experiences on TikTok and Instagram linked to mental health issues. “Greater experiences of ‘telepresence’ — which refer to a user’s sense of immersion in the world created by social media apps — among both TikTok and Instagram users are linked to higher levels of depression and anxiety, according to new research published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.” Good morning, Internet…

April 10, 2023 at 05:27PM
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Sunday, April 9, 2023

Metaverse Fashion Week, Plant Identification Apps, Stable Diffusion, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 9, 2023

Metaverse Fashion Week, Plant Identification Apps, Stable Diffusion, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, April 9, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Block: Decentraland Metaverse Fashion Week attendance plummets 76% amid ‘worrisome’ trading volume. “While the metaverse platform attracted 108,000 ‘unique attendees’ last year, the company said only 26,000 attended this year, a dramatic decline of 76% for the event that ran from March 28 through March 31. Despite top brands like Dolce & Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger and Adidas all sponsoring shows, a Decentraland spokesperson said the most people signed in at one time barely eclipsed 1,000 people.”

USEFUL STUFF

CNN: Best plant identification apps for mobile in 2023, tested by our editors. “Spring has officially sprung and people will be spending more time in the great outdoors as the season gears up. Whether you’re looking for help in identifying plants along your morning hike or in designing the flower or food garden of your dreams, there is a mobile plant identification app that can help you.”

Make Tech Easier: How to Use Stable Diffusion to Create AI-Generated Images. “Artificial intelligence chatbots, like ChatGPT, have become incredibly powerful recently – they’re all over the news! But don’t forget about AI image generators (like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney). They can make virtually any image when provided with just a few words. Follow this tutorial to learn how to do this for free with no restrictions by running Stable Diffusion on your computer.” Really in-depth.

MakeUseOf: The 7 Best YouTube Channels About Cybersecurity. “Whether you’re a cybersecurity professional or just a hobbyist, reading through verbose whitepapers and case studies can get a tad overwhelming. That’s where YouTube comes in, with plenty of cybersecurity-related content. But what are the best channels to follow? Here are our top picks, in no particular order.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Techdirt: Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Tower Tree Stories. “Those of you who have followed the game jams over the years will surely recognize that name, because this is David’s fourth straight win, and the third in this category. In the past his winning games have all shared a common purpose: guiding players in an exploration of one or more paintings that had just entered the public domain that year. But this time we’ve got something very different. Tower Tree Stories isn’t based on a famous painting or an artist, but rather on something a little more low-key: the 1927 yearbook of Greensburg High School in Indiana, a full copy of which is the backbone of the game.”

CNN: The city without TikTok offers a window to America’s potential future. “At the time of its exit [from Hong Kong], TikTok had a relatively modest presence in the city and was not ubiquitous like it is in the US today. But the varied reactions to its departure, and the way users have pivoted to other platforms or even real-life offline communities, offer Americans a glimpse into their potential TikTok-less future.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bellingcat: From Discord to 4chan: The Improbable Journey of a US Intelligence Leak. “These documents appeared to be dated to early March, around the time they were first posted online on Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers. However, Bellingcat has seen evidence that some documents dated to January could have been posted online even earlier, although it is unclear exactly when. Bellingcat also spoke to three members of the Discord community where the images had been posted who claimed that many more documents had been shared across other Discord servers in recent months.”

Wall Street Journal: Facebook, Twitter Rebuffed Sandy Hook Families’ Request for Data in Alex Jones Case . “Twitter and Facebook rebuffed subpoenas from families of the Sandy Hook school massacre victims, who were seeking internal company data to show how conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s false claims about the killings spread on social media, according to court documents and lawyers for the families.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Wired: Twitter’s Open Source Algorithm Is a Red Herring. “Mozilla, the nonprofit where I am a senior fellow, famously open-sourced the Netscape browser code and invited a community of developers around the world to contribute to it in 1998, and it has continued to push for an open internet since. So why aren’t I impressed or excited by Musk’s decision? If anything, Twitter’s so-called ‘open sourcing’ is a clever red herring to distract from its recent moves away from transparency.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Hackaday: Tired Of Web Scraping? Make The AI Do It. “[James Turk] has a novel approach to the problem of scraping web content in a structured way without needing to write the kind of page-specific code web scrapers usually have to deal with. How? Just enlist the help of a natural language AI. Scrapeghost relies on OpenAI’s GPT API to parse a web page’s content, pull out and classify any salient bits, and format it in a useful way.” Good afternoon, Internet…

April 10, 2023 at 12:34AM
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Google Stadia, Twitter, Photo Editing Apps, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, April 9, 2023

Google Stadia, Twitter, Photo Editing Apps, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, April 9, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Techdirt: Everything Stadia Is Now Officially Dead, Project Head Exits Google. “The tech industry is absolutely lousy with failure, of course. Ambitious projects and ideas are entertained all the time. Hell, that’s why we get so much actual cool stuff that works coming out of the industry. But for a company with the resources of Google to fail this hard, this fast, and this completely in an endeavor that really kinda should be at least partially in its wheelhouse is not a good look.”

Deadline: Elon Musk’s Twitter Wrongly Labels The BBC As Being “Government Funded”. “The BBC is not funded by the UK government. It is funded by the British public, through a system known as the license fee. The government plays a role in setting the level of the license fee, but the fee is collected by the companies contracted by the BBC through the TV Licensing authority. The BBC’s operations and editorial decision-making are entirely independent of the government.”

USEFUL STUFF

Slashgear: 12 Best iPhone Apps For Photo Editing (2023). “Apple coined the phrase, “There’s an app for that,” when marketing the iPhone 3g in 2009, eventually dedicating a whole section to the App Store for photo editing apps. We’ve compiled a list of the best photo editing apps for the iPhone. Some are more general, some are for specific tasks, but all are worthy of a place on your device.”

ZDNet: How to bookmark a Mastodon post (and why you should). “What is this feature? It’s very much like the bookmarks you use on your web browser — a convenient method of saving a post so you can easily refer to it later. You may not have used the bookmark feature on Twitter, but Mastodon is different. ”

Slashgear: 5 Tools To Convert JPG To PDF On Any Device . “When you think of JPGs, you likely think of the photos you capture with your phone camera or the pictures you download online. However, JPGs can actually be a lot of other things, such as a screenshot of a lasagna recipe or an image of your signature. In these cases, it might be better for your JPG images to be converted into PDFs instead. This way, you can readily send your PDF to anyone, and it will be more convenient for your recipients to view it.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Search Engine Land: 21 best ChatGPT alternatives. “An important thing to remember as you go through this list: these products are at very early developmental stages. Some will rapidly develop and improve, a few will be shut down, and others will pivot away entirely from what they’re doing now.”

Ars Technica: Artists astound with AI-generated film stills from a parallel universe. “Since last year, a group of artists have been using an AI image generator called Midjourney to create still photos of films that don’t exist. They call the trend ‘AI cinema.’ We spoke to one of its practitioners, Julie Wieland, and asked her about her technique, which she calls ‘synthography,’ for synthetic photography.”

Carlow Nationalist: Carlow Lecture Will Examine The Significance Of Church Interiors. (I am not putting this under “events” because it is not virtual and attendable.) “The talk will also include an introduction to a spin-off project Dr Roddy is leading entitled ‘PARISH’ (Preserving and Recording Ireland’s Sacred Heritage), a collaboration between Maynooth University and the University of Notre Dame in the USA. This project aims to produce an online database containing comprehensive photographic and other data records of the interiors of (initially) all Catholic churches on the island of Ireland.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

PC Magazine: MSI Confirms Breach as Ransomware Gang Claims Responsibility. “A new statement from MSI says users should avoid downloading firmware and BIOS updates from third-party sources, and instead only obtain such software from the company’s official website. The statement suggests MSI is worried hackers could circulate malicious versions of the company’s BIOS software when the ransomware gang, Money Message, claims it stole the PC maker’s source code.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Newswise: Internet access must become human right or we risk ever-widening inequality. “People around the globe are so dependent on the internet to exercise socio-economic human rights such as education, healthcare, work, and housing that online access must now be considered a basic human right, a new study reveals. Particularly in developing countries, internet access can make the difference between people receiving an education, staying healthy, finding a home, and securing employment – or not.”

Harvard Business Review: When Celebrity ‘Crypto-Influencers’ Rake in Cash, Investors Lose Big. “[Professor Joseph] Pacelli and his colleagues analyzed about 36,000 tweets in which 180 influencers touted cryptocurrencies over a two-year period. They found that, on average, mentions of cryptocurrencies in tweets are associated with a 1.83 percent return in the first day, but are subsequently associated with significant negative returns—an average loss of 19 percent after three months. ”

Search Engine Journal: Seven Free Open Source GPT Models Released. “Silicon Valley AI company Cerebras released seven open source GPT models to provide an alternative to the tightly controlled and proprietary systems available today. The royalty free open source GPT models, including the weights and training recipe have been released under the highly permissive Apache 2.0 license by Cerebras, a Silicon Valley based AI infrastructure for AI applications company.” Good morning, Internet…

April 9, 2023 at 05:28PM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/fGkxUrZ