Misinformation Dissemination Chinese Exclusion Act Gfycat More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz July 4 2023

Misinformation Dissemination, Chinese Exclusion Act, Gfycat, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, July 4, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Northeastern University: Why do rational people believe lies online? Northeastern research explains how misinformation spreads . “Spanning three departments—philosophy, economics and computer science—at Northeastern University London, the project uses computer simulations to help us learn more about how knowledge flows within a social media community. Now two years in, the researchers have launched an interactive website and made some impressive discoveries, including insight into how and why rational people can come to believe the wrong thing.”

Washington Post: Ancestry records released from era when U.S. banned Chinese immigrants. “A new database released Thursday gives users around the world access to information related to the Chinese exclusion era — six decades during which the United States and Canada barred entry to most people of Chinese descent and limited the rights of those who had already come.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mashable: Gfycat is shutting down, so save your best reaction GIFs now. “Gfycat is being put down. The GIF-hosting platform has announced it will soon shut down, with its entire archive of funny GIFs and memes set to disappear in just under two months, on Sept. 1.”

TechCrunch: Proton launches its password manager Proton Pass. “A couple of months after unveiling Proton Pass, Proton — the company behind end-to-end encrypted email service Proton Mail — is officially launching its password manager to everyone. As a reminder, Proton Pass is an end-to-end encrypted password manager for individuals and (soon) families.”

Bleeping Computer: YouTube tests restricting ad blocker users to 3 video views. “YouTube is currently running what it describes as a ‘small experiment globally,’ warning users to toggle off their ad blockers and avoid being limited to only three video views. As first spotted by a Reddit user on Wednesday, YouTube now displays a pop-up that notifies ad blocker users targeted by this test that ‘video player will be blocked after 3 videos.'”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: Why CEO David Baszucki is ready for Roblox to grow up. “It’s been years since the number of adults gaming outnumbered kids — it seems like that’s driving a lot of growth for everyone, including Roblox. But these virtual world games seem like they all want to expand to be much more than just for kids and much more than just for games.”

VOA: Ethiopia’s Social Media Ban Brings Challenges. “Four months into a social media ban, communications businesses and civil rights groups in Ethiopia are feeling the impact. Strict regulations are making it harder for them to reach audiences or verify information.”

Review Geek: ‘The Password Game’ Perfectly Parodies the Worst Part of the Internet. “Developed by Neal.fun, The Password Game is an excellent parody of the average website’s signup process. It starts out nice and easy—choose a password that’s at least five characters. Then, the game says you’ve forgotten to include a number and uppercase letter. Alright, that’s not too hard. Before you know it, The Password Game will force you to perform algebra, decipher strange codes, and dip into distant memories.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Hill: DEA administrator says social media companies not complying to address fentanyl crisis. “Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrator Anne Milgram said Sunday that various social media companies are not complying with them to help address the ongoing fentanyl crisis.”

Reuters: Australian firm sues Twitter for $665,000 for not paying bills. “An Australian project management firm has filed a lawsuit against Twitter Inc in a U.S. court seeking cumulative payments of about A$1 million ($665,000) over alleged non-payment of bills for work done in four countries, court filings showed.”

New York Times: Cracking Down on Dissent, Russia Seeds a Surveillance Supply Chain. “Russia is incubating a cottage industry of new digital surveillance tools to suppress domestic opposition to the war in Ukraine. The tech may also be sold overseas.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Harvard Business Review: 13 Principles for Using AI Responsibly. “Leaders, prioritizing speed to market, are driving the current AI arms race in which major corporate players are rushing products and potentially short-changing critical considerations like ethical guidelines, bias detection, and safety measures. For instance, major tech corporations are laying off their AI ethics teams precisely at a time when responsible actions are needed most.” Good morning, Internet…

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July 4, 2023 at 05:26PM
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Illinois Crime WWII Military History Twitter More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz July 3 2023

Illinois Crime, WWII Military History, Twitter, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, July 3, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Illinois State Police: Illinois State Police Announces a New Public Website for Crime Statistics. “Crime in Illinois Online includes data on crime rates per county, the type of offenses, trends, and more. The website is interactive and contains pin-point crime mapping, data tables, FAQs, agency compliance tracking, and the ability to download crime reports. Previous years’ Crime in Illinois Annual Uniform Crime Reports will still be available and future reports will be presented in the
same format.”

University of Southern Mississippi: WWII Combat StoryMap: 103rd Infantry Division. “In 2022, the Dale Center began a new, multi-year digital humanities project designed to create a new website highlighting the wartime history of the division along with a digital document collection of the division’s historical record. As part of that project, the Dale Center’s 103rd Infantry Division project team created an interactive, digital-narrative timeline and map of the Division’s history, called a StoryMap.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Waxy: Twitter bug causes self-DDOS tied to Elon Musk’s emergency blocks and rate limits: “It’s amateur hour”. “Are shadowy AI companies scraping Twitter for training data? Maybe! But on Mastodon this morning, web developer Sheldon Chang noticed another source of unusual traffic: a bug in Twitter’s web app that is constantly sending requests to Twitter in an infinite loop.”

Bleeping Computer: Twitter’s bot spam keeps getting worse — it’s about porn this time. “Forget crypto spam accounts, Twitter’s got another problem which involves bots and accounts promoting adult content and infiltrating Direct Messages and interactions on the platform. And there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution in sight. While the problem has existed for while, the uptick in porn bots is ironic, given Elon Musk’s promising claims of tackling bots and fake accounts on Twitter, after his acquisition of the platform.”

The Verge: At least one big third-party Reddit iOS app will live on. “Many Reddit users are mourning the June 30th shutdowns of third-party apps like Apollo for Reddit, rif is fun for Reddit (RIF), and BaconReader, but at least one popular Reddit app will still be around: Narwhal for Reddit.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 13 Ways to Give Vivaldi a Complete Makeover. “There are dozens of ways to make your Vivaldi browser look, feel, and behave more uniquely. From basic theme changes to using mouse gestures as a means to navigate the internet in a more efficient manner, Vivaldi offers plenty of customization options.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Associated Press: Why social media is being blamed for fueling the riots in France. “Social media companies are once again under scrutiny, this time in France as the country’s president blames TikTok, Snapchat and other platforms for helping fuel widespread riots over the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old driver.”

Ars Technica: Torrent of image-based phishing emails are harder to detect and more convincing. “Phishing mongers have released a torrent of image-based junk emails that embed QR codes into their bodies to successfully bypass security protections and provide a level of customization to more easily fool recipients, researchers said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

US Department of Energy: U.S. Department of Energy Releases Plan to Ensure Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research. “Key elements of the new DOE public access plan, as laid out by OSTP, will include elimination of any ’embargo’ period before the public gains free access to journal articles or final accepted manuscripts resulting from federal funding; immediate access to scientific data displayed in or underlying publications and expanded access to scientific data not displayed in publications; and broad adoption of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for research outputs, organizations, awards and contracts, and people.”

TechXplore: Rendering three-dimensional images from eye reflections with NeRF. “Vision depends on light entering the eyes through the transparent tissues of the cornea, pupil and lens. When the light reaches the retina, photoreceptors produce signals and transmit them via the optical nerve to the brain, where an image is formed. Some of that light entering the eye is reflected back into the world by a highly reflective thin film of fluid covering the cornea. Researchers at the University of Maryland were able to capture this reflected light and extract a three-dimensional model of the surroundings.” 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.

July 4, 2023 at 12:49AM
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Considering a Post-Twitter World With Mastodon

Considering a Post-Twitter World With Mastodon
By ResearchBuzz

While not everyone was willing to bet on a certain date, much of the Very Online community has been waiting for Twitter to experience some kind of big-enough, ridiculous-enough catastrophe that the user base would be permanently fractured. Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, the company has been making incomprehensible decisions, refusing in many cases to pay its bills, and enduring as its CEO a man who would surely be facing greater consequences from his behavior were it not for the protective buffer of ridiculous wealth.

Unfortunately for Mr. Musk, the consequences of unpredictable behavior  eventually become predictable; after firing over 80% of the company’s personnel , Twitter has been sputtering. Over the weekend Elon Musk suddenly made the decision to start limiting the number of tweets users could read; this followed Twitter’s decision to limit view-ability of its content to logged-in users. There’s a lot of debate over why Twitter and Elon Musk are both currently behaving as they are (I am inclined to believe Andy Baio’s assessment) but the upshot is this: Twitter is no longer reliable. Spam bots are worse than ever. Entire countries have been questioning the increase of hate on the platform. And users are leaving in droves. Where does that leave you, person who wants the news and the community but does not want the hate or the drama? You do have options. You have LOTS of options considering all the apps and networks that have popped up, but in this article I’m going to talk about Mastodon.

Mastodon is a decentralized network made up of individual servers, not a single server at the mercy of being ruined by inexplicable acts/actors.  Some people think that because Mastodon is decentralized, it’s too complicated for the average user. I don’t think that’s the case. There are lots of ways Mastodon could be made friendlier, to be sure, but there are lots of people working on that, including me. (More on that later.)

In this article I’m going to highlight some resources I think you should know about and introduce you to several Mastodon tools I’ve made (including four I produced this weekend because apparently Twitter falling apart is good for my creativity.) If you’d like to follow me on Mastodon, I’m researchbuzz@researchbuzz.masto.host.

Getting Started

For an in-depth, all-round walkthrough on how to use Mastodon, I still think Danielle Navarro’s primer, Everything I know about Mastodon, is your best bet. This will tell you everything you need to get started.

If you don’t have time to read that and want more of a “just the facts” primer, check out Clive Thompson’s Come Join Me on Mastodon, Folks .

On the other hand, if you’re the type who likes their guides with lots of asides and interesting-but-not-immediately-useful background and some silliness, I heartily recommend Skulls in the Stars’ An intro to Mastodon from a relative newcomer!

Finding People to Follow

There is a big, active project called Academics on Mastodon which aggregates lists of Mastodon user names by academic community (using Google Sheets, mostly.) The lists range from African Studies to Theologidons, but there are also sections for academic groups (formal network structures on Mastodon),

There’s a tool called Fedifinder that was designed to find those in your Twitter community who had moved to Mastodon. I would have expected with Twitter’s changes that this tool would no longer work, but as of this writing (July 3) it apparently does. I used it last November, and it helped me a lot finding my Twitter people on Mastodon.

Fedified has a tool called Discover Mastodon, which describes itself as “A dynamic collection of engaging Mastodon accounts, organized by topic area.” When I wrote about Fedified last fall, I noted “Fedified is a project managing a spreadsheet of 207 (at this writing) Mastodon accounts of Twitter verified users,” so I suspect this listing is being vetted in some way. I did notice several names that were instantly familiar if you’re a big Twitter user: Neil Gaiman, Jessamyn West, Ed Bott. There are lots of people listed here but I wasn’t super impressed by the diversity.

Fedi.Directory is a human-curated, searchable subject index of Mastodon accounts. Want to find people who talk about Commodore 64, or art history, or solarpunk? This is where you can get really specific.

If you’ve followed ResearchBuzz for a while, you know I created a couple of Mastodon resource lists last November. Between the two of them, the lists contain over 80 different resources related to Mastodon. I haven’t checked the links since I wrote it so I don’t know if they all work, but I suspect that enough of them do that it’s worth a browse. Here is part I and here is part II.

Tools

In addition to curating the Mastodon resource list, I’ve also built several Mastodon-related tools, things that should help a beginner Mastodon user  understand how things work, or simply understand the possibilities. These tools may not work on your phone because of (what I think are) conflicts between the WordPress JavaScript and my JavaScript. These tools are both free and ad-free.

Mastodon URL Helper —  Mastodon’s username format can be confusing to the new user. Enter your Mastodon user name and MUH breaks it down for you, showing you your user name, your instance name, your home page, and how you can get RSS feeds of your content.

MastoTrends — Want to see popular links that are flying around Mastodon? Just open this page. It grabs some random large servers via the Instances.Social API, looks at their popular link lists, and filters them for duplicates. All you have to do is browse.

MastoWindow — Mastodon is very hashtag-friendly. MastoWindow lets you search for Mastodon instances and and explore their hashtag content.

MastoWindow v2 — Browsing hashtags one instance at a time is great, but sometimes you want to do a wider search. MastoWindow v2 searches for hashtags across a number of Mastodon instances (over 80 at this writing.)

RSStodon v2 — I’m not going to include the first version of RSStodon here, because it stunk. But that’s why I made version 2. Enter the language code of your choice and a hashtag, and RSStodon will create RSS feeds for that hashtag from the top 10 Mastodon instances in your language of choice (as listed on Instances.Social.) Not only that, the feeds are bundled into an OPML file that you can download and import to your favorite RSS feed reader.

Mastodon Web Search — You can’t search across all of Mastodon’s instances at once because it’s decentralized, but what if you tried it using Google? MWS looks up Mastodon instances via the Instances.Social API and bundles them into a Google search with the site: syntax.

July 3, 2023 at 09:19PM
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India Street Lettering NOAA Student Opportunities Electric School Buses More: Monday ResearchBuzz July 3 2023

India Street Lettering, NOAA Student Opportunities, Electric School Buses, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, July 3, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, and I was alerted to its existence from a recent news article that isn’t nearly as good as this old one from Scroll.In: Not Arial or Times New Roman, Indian streets are ruled by charming homegrown fonts. “As she was walking down a street in Panjim in 2017, a shop sign caught the eye of Pooja Saxena, a typeface and graphic designer. The wooden sign, written in cursive Sans Serif font, was advertising Bentex watches and straps. It was the elaborately designed ‘B’ with its multiple curves and an eye in the middle that intrigued her. It was the perfect addition to her online project, titled India Street Lettering, where she documents street lettering and signage from across India.”

NOAA: NOAA launches new student opportunities database!. “The new student opportunities database is a searchable database of more than 60 scholarships, fellowships, internships, youth programs, and more across NOAA and our partners. The database includes opportunities appropriate for kindergarten through graduate students and recent graduates. Users can filter by grade level, type of opportunity, citizenship requirement, application period, and in-person and virtual opportunities.”

School Transportation News: WRI Releases Comprehensive Electric School Bus Dashboard. “WRI’s Electric School Bus Initiative is collecting and electric school bus or ESB data for school districts, policymakers and communities to track and accelerate toward an equitable transition. Its new Electric School Bus Dashboard, published June 22, offers data on various topics relating to ESBs, such as state adoption, school district adoption, equity, and funding.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Apollo and other popular third-party Reddit apps have shut down. “Several popular third-party Reddit apps are no longer operational, while a few have chosen to charge users for access, now that the website’s new API rules are in effect. In a lengthy post bidding farewell, Apollo founder Christian Selig said Reddit pulled the plug a little too early, cutting off the app’s access to content on the website.”

The Verge: Twitter has started blocking unregistered users. “If you currently try to access Twitter without logging in to your user account, you’ll be unable to see any of the content that was previously available to the wider public. Instead, you’ll meet a Twitter window that asks you to either sign in to the platform or create a new account, effectively blocking you from viewing tweets and user profiles or browsing through threads unless you’re a registered Twitter user.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Journal (Ireland): Elon Musk has ‘ambivalent’ stance on misinformation and harassment, ex-Twitter safety chief claims. “TWITTER’S FORMER SAFETY chief has claimed that Elon Musk has an ‘ambivalent’ attitude towards misinformation and that the company has undergone a ‘stunning transformation’ under the billionaire’s ownership. Yoel Roth, who served as Twitter’s Head of Trust and Safety until November last year, believes that his former department, whose tasks included fighting misinformation, is no longer operational.”

Techradar: ChatGPT is now a brilliant tool for winding up telemarketers and scammers. ” A recent Wall Street Journal report details one of these engagements where a telemarketer claiming to be from Bank of America called a potential mark only to be answered by Whitey Whitebeard, one of the AIs. Whitey, as a character, has a habit of speaking in circles. The AI was so effective at its job the scammer eventually hung up out of sheer exhaustion about six minutes into the call.”

University of Birmingham: New project brings the work of Stuart Hall back into the spotlight. “A new multidisciplinary project will expand public understanding and engagement with the work of the celebrated cultural theorist, Professor Stuart Hall. Stuart Hall was a Jamaican-British academic, writer, cultural studies pioneer, public intellectual and teacher who was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1932. As a leading public intellectual, he made major interventions in the cultural and political life of Britain, such as coining the term ‘Thatcherism’ and his work on race and class.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

VOA: FBI Turning to Social Media to Track Traitors. “The video is part of an expansive, long-running campaign by the FBI to use social media advertisements to recruit disgruntled Russian officials stationed across the United States and beyond, in part to sniff out Americans who have betrayed their country in order to aid Moscow. A VOA analysis finds the FBI has paid tens of thousands of dollars, at minimum, to multiple platforms for social media ads targeting Russian officials, with the pace of such ad buys increasing just before and then after Moscow launched its latest invasion of Ukraine.”

United States Courts: Librarians Trade Books for Databases in the Digital Age. “This month, courts are marking the 75th anniversary of the creation of the circuit librarian position, a role that today makes possible a wide variety of services in the digital age. Librarians train court professionals to make effective use of databases and presentation tools, negotiate contracts for legal research services, plan and staff court civics and community outreach events, archive court historical data, produce news summaries, and monitor social media.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: A.I. Is Coming for Mathematics, Too. “In 2019, Christian Szegedy, a computer scientist formerly at Google and now at a start-up in the Bay Area, predicted that a computer system would match or exceed the problem-solving ability of the best human mathematicians within a decade. Last year he revised the target date to 2026.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

USAID: The United States and Sesame Workshop Partner to Support Ukrainian Children and Families Affected by Russia’s War Against Ukraine . “Through funding provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. Department of State, Ukrainian children and families will now have access to new Sesame Street content in Ukrainian language, as well as tools and resources to help children, caregivers, and teachers process the trauma of conflict and displacement. These resources include animated videos and teacher training workshops.” 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.

July 3, 2023 at 05:29PM
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NYC Naturalization Records Washington Military Records Pixel Fold More: Sunday ResearchBuzz July 2 2023

NYC Naturalization Records, Washington Military Records, Pixel Fold, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, July 2, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Queens Daily Eagle: Go back in time with the court’s new naturalization database. “[Abraham] Kaplan’s naturalization record, along with thousands of others, can now be found through the new free online naturalization documents database, a joint project from the Queens Public Library and the Office of Court Administration. The new program… gives public access to around 400,000 naturalization records signed in the courts of Queens and the Bronx between 1794 and 1952.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Fold3: New Military Records from Washington State . “If you have ancestors who have served at a military base in Washington State, you’ll love our new collection of US, Washington State Military Records, 1855-1950. This collection contains more than 140 thousand records for servicemembers in Washington State.”

The Verge: It’s taken one day for customers to report broken Pixel Fold screens. “The Google Pixel Fold was only officially released yesterday, and unfortunately, we’re seeing some of the first major casualties of Hot Foldable Summer. Reports of broken and damaged screens are starting to trickle in, ranging from ‘Hmm, that might not be great’ to ‘Oh dear God, the humanity.'”

TechCrunch: India court rejects Twitter’s lawsuit against gov’t challenging block orders. “The Karnataka High Court dismissed the high-profile plea, filed last year, and also fined the Elon Musk-owned firm 5 million Indian rupees ($61,000). The court observed that despite being issued notices, Twitter did not provide reasons for why it delayed compliance to the amendments to India’s IT rules.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNN: McDonald’s bet on viral success with its Grimace shake. TikTok users are pretending it killed them. “With a vibrant purple hue, a meme-able mascot and limited window of availability, McDonald’s had all the ingredients to turn its Grimace milkshake into a viral sensation. What the company likely did not intend was for the shake’s success to come from TikTok users playing dead.” Kids today…. are AWESOME. I thought I was going to crack a rib laughing.

CNBC: Google employees boo company at drag show that was nearly canceled amid religious employee protest. “A drag show originally meant to celebrate the end of Pride month turned into a rallying cry for corporate allyship as dozens of Google employees attended, some of whom booed their employer.”

Romea .cz: The Czech Republic’s disinformation influencers: Unfulfilled ambitions, personal debt, and ever more radical content. “In the Czech Republic, the activities of its more or less successful disinformation influencers are being kept alive by a small group of faithful fans willing to pay for such anti-system content or for public ‘happenings’. According to research, the strong supporters of such conspiracy theories and of disinformation in Czech society are at a minimum.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Russian court fines Google an additional $47 million. “A Russian court has fined Alphabet’s Google 4 billion roubles ($47 million) for failing to pay an earlier fine over alleged abuse of its dominant position in the video hosting market, the country’s anti-monopoly watchdog said on Tuesday.”

Techdirt: Terrible People Are Still Using Forged Court Orders To Disappear Content They Don’t Like. “‘Cursory review’ is the name of the game. Bullshit is fed to DMCA inboxes in hopes the people overseeing millions (or billions!) of pieces of uploaded content won’t spend too much time vetting takedown requests. When the initial takedown requests fail, bullshit artists (some of them hired!) decide to exploit the public sector.”

CitizenLab: Should We Chat? Privacy in the WeChat Ecosystem. “This work performs the first analysis of WeChat’s tracking ecosystem. Using reverse engineering methods to intercept WeChat’s network requests, we identified exactly what types of data the WeChat app is sending to its servers, and when.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Chronicle of Philanthropy: Seeking to Curb Racial Bias in Medicine, Doris Duke Fund Awards $10 Million to Health Groups. “The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is awarding more than $10 million to five health organizations to reconsider the use of race in medical algorithms, which research shows can lead to potentially dangerous results for patients of color.”

MIT News: Gamifying medical data labeling to advance AI. “Through the app, users review anything from images of potentially cancerous skin lesions or audio clips of heart and lung sounds that could indicate a problem. If the users are accurate, Centaur uses their opinions and awards them small cash prizes. Those opinions, in turn, help medical AI companies train and improve their algorithms.” 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.

July 2, 2023 at 05:27PM
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Two New Gizmos to Explore Mastodon: Hashtag Search and Trending Content

Two New Gizmos to Explore Mastodon: Hashtag Search and Trending Content
By ResearchBuzz

If you use Twitter, you probably know about its recent decision to limit content visibility to registered users only. Add in today’s adventures in rate-limiting and Twitter is a plain mess.

I’ve been spending an increasing amount of time on Mastodon. It feels more like a community than Twitter has in the last ten years; even though I have 1700 followers, about 1/3 of what I had at Twitter’s peak, there is an unbelievable amount of engagement. (I care about that because it feels like there is a meaningful flow of information and ideas happening, not because I want to be an influencer or any of that nonsense. For the last few years on Twitter I’ve felt like a shipwrecked sailor throwing out bottles that never, ever came back.)

With the increased activity on Mastodon I wanted more ways to explore content. Since I use my own tiny instance and Mastodon content is scattered across lots of instances, searching Mastodon isn’t as simple as going to a central location and plugging in a keyword. Furthermore, Mastodon makes it easy to protect your privacy and there are certain hurdles to doing full keyword searches across the Fediverse.

On the other hand, the Fediverse is VERY friendly to hashtags and trending content, and makes them easily accessible. So I made a couple of Gizmos to take advantage of that.

In January I made a Gizmo called MastoWindow, which lets you browse hashtags one instance at a time. That’s great if you just want to browse an instance, but no good at all for search. So I made MastoWindow 2! Enter a hashtag and MW2 searches for it across Mastodon instances with more than 1000 users that are registered on Instances.Social. (At this writing that’s about 80 instances – MW2 uses the Instances.Social API to generate a list of Mastodon instances every time the program runs.) Currently image thumbnails are not being returned because I want this to be a fast search.

 

If you’re more interested in links that are hot around the multiverse, check out MastoTrends. It’s really easy to use: just visit the page. It’ll automatically populate with a collection of trending content from across several random Mastodon instances. It’s just for getting a quick idea of what’s being passed around Mastodon – — if you want to do a deeper dive on popular content, check out FediTrends , which is more extensive than these Gizmos.

July 2, 2023 at 12:16AM
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The Old Vine Registry WordPress Brave Browser More: Saturday ResearchBuzz July 1 2023

The Old Vine Registry, WordPress, Brave Browser, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, July 1, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Harpers UK: Old Vine database goes live. “The Old Vine Registry currently has 2,200 vineyards recorded from entries collected over 13 years. Portugal and Spain lead with 822 and 383 old vineyards registered respectively. The United States comes in third with 334 vineyards, followed by Australia and France with 208 and 142 respectively.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WordPress: WordPress 6.3 Beta 2 . “WordPress 6.3 Beta 2 is ready for download and testing. This is the first release of the 6.3 cycle, as there was no Beta 1 due to technical issues with packaging the release. Rather than further delaying a beta release, the release squad has decided to package and ship Beta 2.”

Ars Technica: Brave aims to curb practice of websites that port scan visitors. “Starting in version 1.54, Brave will automatically block website port scanning, a practice that a surprisingly large number of sites were found engaging in a few years ago.”

USEFUL STUFF

Boing Boing: Get rid of ridiculous faces: DeArrow extension crowdsources non-hideous YouTube thumbnails . “If you can’t stand the horrible thumbnails people use on their YouTube videos to grab your attention, the DeArrow browser extension is for you. It’s an ‘open source browser extension for crowdsourcing better titles and thumbnails on YouTube. The goal is to make titles accurate and reduce sensationalism. No more arrows, ridiculous faces, and no more clickbait.'”

MakeUseOf: The 7 Best Apps and Websites to Set Multiple Timers. “Do you find it difficult to multitask and often don’t get much done? Multitasking can be stressful, especially in today’s era with daily activities transitioning online. Setting multiple timers relieves the stress of multitasking at home and work, and it saves you from recalculating how long to spend on different projects.” Shoutout to all the other timer nerds.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

9to5 Mac: Reddit plagued with 1-star App Store reviews over API debacle as users search for 0-star button. “Despite site-stopping protests by mods and users, Reddit leadership chose to brute force its way through any reasonable way of continuing third-party app support. Instead, the company hopes its luxury-priced API will be its secret shortcut to an overvalued IPO. As a result, Reddit’s official iOS app is being torpedo’d in the App Store.”

CNN: Melinda French Gates says more women must join the AI race to help prevent bias. “As Silicon Valley and beyond is gripped by the fervor of artificial intelligence, Melinda French Gates is raising the alarm that more women must be involved in developing these tech tools.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bloomberg: Europe to Open AI ‘crash test’ centres to ensure safety . “The Europe Union is introducing ‘crash test’ systems for artificial intelligence to ensure new innovations are safe before they hit the market. The trade bloc launched four permanent testing and experimental facilities across Europe on Tuesday, having injected ₹220 million ($240 million) into the project.”

National Academies: New Report Recommends Ways That U.S. Colleges and Universities Can Mitigate Risks Related to Foreign-Funded Language and Culture Institutes. “The report, developed in response to a mandate from Congress, follows one released in January that examined Confucius Institutes — Chinese government-funded language and culture centers — and recommended conditions that a college or university should meet for the U.S. Department of Defense to consider granting a waiver to the institution to host a CI while receiving DOD funding for research.”

New York Times: Publishers Clearing House Pays $18.5 Million in ‘Dark Patterns’ Suit. “Publishers Clearing House, the direct marketing company that uses sweepstakes to sell magazine subscriptions, agreed on Monday to pay $18.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission, which accused the company of using what’s known as dark patterns to trick customers into paying for products or giving up their data.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New Atlas: Technique turns maps of lost neighborhoods into possible VR landscapes. “Using old insurance fire maps, researchers have enabled a machine-learning system to recreate 3D models of neighborhoods that no longer exist. Not only could the technique lead to VR tours of the ‘hoods, but it could help study the economic impact of urbanization.”

Axios: Online hate and harassment continues to rise. “More than half of Americans say they have experienced hate or harassment online, according to a new survey from the Anti-Defamation League, with a dramatic rise in incidents over the last 12 months, especially among teens.” Good morning, Internet…

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July 1, 2023 at 05:31PM
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