How To Create a Mastodon Account for Your WordPress Blog In Five Minutes

How To Create a Mastodon Account for Your WordPress Blog In Five Minutes
By ResearchBuzz

I have given up trying to figure out Elon Musk’s deal. Several years ago he speculated that we’re living in a simulation. If he truly believes that, then my best guess is that he thinks the simulation is of Wreck-It Ralph. At any rate, the latest incomprehensible decision is the implementation of mandatory subscription fees, which as you might imagine has accelerated the continuing exodus from Twitter.

I really like Mastodon. The API is excellent and I find the process of creating apps for searching and browsing most instructional. I’m not the only one building tools for Mastodon (it has a thread reader now!) — in fact, I think if you tried Mastodon in November of last year and didn’t enjoy it, you’d find it a much different experience now.

Happily, if you have a WordPress blog, you can start a Mastodon account using a WordPress plugin. The plugin will connect your WordPress blog to the fediverse (a collection of decentralized networks where Mastodon resides) and automatically publish your posts on Mastodon. The plugin will also allow you to track how many people are following that account. Best of all, installing this plugin will take less than five minutes. If you’ve been thinking about joining Mastodon, this is a good way to get your feet wet while you’re exploring the options around setting up a personal account.

In this walkthrough, I’ll install the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress on RB Firehose, the blog which indexes the individual articles which make up the ResearchBuzz digest newsletter.

Please note: If you’ve done a lot of SEO tweaking you may have to take a further step or two. Furthermore, if you’re running a blog with several authors, your installation process will be slightly different.

1. Installing the ActivityPub Plugin

What’s ActivityPub? ActivityPub is a networking protocol used by many decentralized social networks, including Mastodon. You can learn more about it here. This plugin will actually make your blog accessible to several social networks in the fediverse, but for the purpose of this article we’re focusing on Mastodon.

From the Plugins section of your WordPress site, search for ActivityPub. You’re looking for “ActivityPub By Matthias Pfefferle & Automattic·”

 

If you’re using author profiles or you’ve redirected your author pages for SEO purposes, please be sure to read the additional instructions on the plugin page. You also have the option to create a single Mastodon account for your blog instead of creating individual author accounts. We’ll be creating a single account in this article. If everything looks good go ahead and install the plugin. After it’s installed, you’ll find the settings under Settings -> ActivityPub.

2. Setting Up the Plugin

Your settings page starts by showing you your Mastodon user address and profile URL.

The username part is the part that a Mastodon user would paste into a search box in their instance to follow your blog. The icon comes from the author profile, which is why the avatar is a little cartoon me.

 

I do not like this. I want to create a Mastodon account about the blog, not about me. So I will click on the Settings tab at the top of this page to change it. This page has several sections so let’s take them one at a time.

The first part of the settings lets you specify whether you want to set the account by blog authors or for the blog itself.  If you choose that you want a single account for the blog itself, you’ll be able to change the account name. Here I’ve set up a single account called researchbuzz_firehose.

The second part specifies how you want to publish your content on Mastodon and which items you want to publish (posts/pages/attachments.) There’s also a server setting here but it’s a bit outside the scope of this article. Click the Save Changes button when you’re done.

Once you’ve clicked that button and the page refreshes, you’ll see the settings page has a new page called Followers. This is the tab that will show you the people on Mastodon who are following your blog. Of course I don’t have any followers at the moment, but I’ll follow the blog from my own Mastodon account. A search of the new user name finds my account without the cartoon me. (I’m not sure where the blog avatar is pulled from, if anywhere, if anybody knows please let me know.) I’ll follow it.

 

Now when I look on my followers tab I see one follower! Yay!

To see if this is working, I’ll do a test post on ResearchBuzz Firehose.

Did this post appear on my Mastodon account? Yes it did!

 

And that’s all there is to it! If you want to create a basic Mastodon account for your blog all you need is the ActivityPub plugin and a few minutes. It’s up to you to promote your site in order to get followers, of course, but congratulations! You have taken your first step into the fediverse by getting your blog on Mastodon.

September 20, 2023 at 05:39PM
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State Court Report, FOIA Log Explorer, LGBTQ Delaware, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, September 20, 2023

State Court Report, FOIA Log Explorer, LGBTQ Delaware, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, September 20, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Brennan Center for Justice: Brennan Center Launches State Court Report, Website Dedicated to State Constitutions and Courts. “Today the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law launched State Court Report, a nonpartisan website devoted to state constitutions and courts. … State Court Report also offers a database of decisions and briefs from 550 significant state supreme court cases since 2021 across the fifty states, as well as materials from major pending cases.”

MuckRock: Browse thousands of additional FOIA requests with the new FOIA Log Explorer. “MuckRock’s users have already shared almost 90,000 public requests you can search, browse, follow or refile, but that is still just a small segment of the broader world of all Freedom of Information requests. The FOIA Log Explorer expands that view by importing data on thousands of requests from dozens of agencies at the state, local and federal level, making it easier to search through and see what kinds of materials agencies are and are not releasing, as well as helping you craft more targeted requests of your own.”

State of Delaware: Celebrate Delaware’s LGBTQ+ history with a new online resource. “This September, the Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs is proud to offer a sneak-peek introduction to the LGBTQ+ History of Delaware: We Have Always Been Here project!”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BBC: YouTube suspends Russell Brand from advert income. “YouTube has suspended Russell Brand’s channels from making money from adverts for ‘violating’ its ‘creator responsibility policy’. The video platform said it was taking action ‘to protect’ its users. It comes after the Metropolitan Police received a report of an alleged sexual assault in 2003, in the wake of further allegations about the star.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: How to Make Reddit Suck Less on Your Phone. “IT’S BEEN A few months since Reddit shut down the vast majority of third-party clients, and the protests have mostly died down. But using Reddit on mobile is a nightmare—it’s slow, riddled with prompts, and constantly asks if you want notifications. … There is one simple workaround: Use the web version instead. But Reddit also goes out of its way to make this annoying: There are constant pop-ups encouraging you to install the Reddit app, and they take up half the screen. Let’s talk about how to avoid these pop-ups on Apple devices and then go over a few third-party apps—including one still working on Android.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Chortle: Velvet Onion vanishes. “Alternative comedy website The Velvet Onion has disappeared from the internet. The site covered the scene from 2010 to 2018 – but now even the cost of maintaining its archive as a permanent presence has proved too much for founder Didymus Holmes.”

CNBC: Elon Musk says Twitter, now X, is moving to monthly subscription fees and has 550 million users. “Elon Musk discussed his plans for Twitter, now called X, on Monday during a livestreamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Among other things, Musk said the social network is ‘moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system’ in order to combat ‘vast armies of bots.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Sam Bankman-Fried’s Parents Sued by FTX. “”On Monday, FTX filed a lawsuit in federal court in Delaware accusing Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, longtime Stanford law professors, of using their ‘access and influence within the FTX enterprise to enrich themselves.’ The lawsuit seeks to claw back millions of dollars the couple received from their son.”

The Register: Sonos secures a victory in audio patent fight against Google . “The years-long legal drama resulting from a brief fling between Google and smart speaker maker Sonos has resulted in another loss for the Chocolate Factory, which had its claims of copyright infringement tossed out by a US International Trade Commission (ITC) judge Friday.”

Ars Technica: How Google Authenticator made one company’s network breach much, much worse. “A security company is calling out a feature in Google’s authenticator app that it says made a recent internal network breach much worse. Retool, which helps customers secure their software development platforms, made the criticism on Wednesday in a post disclosing a compromise of its customer support system. The breach gave the attackers responsible access to the accounts of 27 customers, all in the cryptocurrency industry.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

George Washington University: Social Media May Be Used to Combat COVID Vaccine Hesitancy in Nigeria. “A social media campaign launched in 2022 helped encourage some Nigerians to roll up their sleeves for a COVID vaccine, according to a study published today in PLOS ONE. ‘Our research suggests that a social media campaign can reduce vaccine hesitancy and increase the vaccination rates in Nigeria and possibly other low-income countries,’ said Doug Evans, the lead author of the paper and a professor of prevention and community health at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.”

The Register: ChatGPT’s odds of getting code questions correct are worse than a coin flip . “ChatGPT, OpenAI’s fabulating chatbot, produces wrong answers to software programming questions more than half the time, according to a study from Purdue University. That said, the bot was convincing enough to fool a third of participants.” Good morning, Internet…

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September 20, 2023 at 05:30PM
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Washington Respiratory Health, T2, Google Play, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 19, 2023

Washington Respiratory Health, T2, Google Play, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 19, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

KNDU: New respiratory illness dashboard launches to monitor numbers across Washington. “A new Respiratory Illness Data Dashboard from the Department of Health will allow Washington residents to track COVID-19, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) activity by region across the state.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Twitter/X rival T2 rebrands as ‘Pebble,’ saying the old name was never meant to be permanent . “An X challenger didn’t hide its ambitions to take on the social network formerly known as Twitter when it dubbed itself T2 at launch, but now that name — one which indicates a desire to build a Twitter clone — is no more. The company announced on its platform that the would-be X rival will now be called ‘Pebble.'” “Like the smartwatch?” said my not-quite-keeping-up memory.

Android Police: The Play Store rolls out auto app archiving option for everyone. “Auto archiving was previously only available when you were already running low on storage, with a prompt appearing asking you if you’d like to turn the option on to save some space. As spotted by Mishaal Rahman on X (formerly Twitter) and AssembleDebug on Telegram, the auto archive option is rolling out to a lot more people.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Interview Magazine: Meet Mark Kerrigan, the Man Who Finds Famous People. “As the managing director of Celebrity Service, the online database that most magazines use to find the details of any talent they’re looking to feature, Mark has worked for nearly three decades making the most inaccessible people a little more accessible. We thanked him for his service with some sangria at Sevilla, where he arrived with a briefcase of pre-internet Celebrity Service artifacts, and some stories about his years of seeking out the stars.”

Bloomberg: D Billions Is Creating a YouTube Kids’ Entertainment Empire in Kyrgyzstan. “If you have young children, there’s a good chance they have consumed some of the D Billions videos on YouTube. The videos feature four main characters — Cha-Cha, Boom-Boom, Lya-Lya and Chicky — who dress in primary colors and sing silly songs. One goal of the music is to teach kids words in different languages. Another is to keep them entertained and clicking on more and more videos.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Popular Science: Patch a potential privacy risk by deleting your ancient LiveJournal. “I looked into ways to back up LiveJournal posts. It wasn’t straightforward. At all. LiveJournal offers an official exporting tool, but it can only export one month’s worth of posts at a time, which is basically useless. I tried using Wget to scrape old entries, but this backfired hilariously: LiveJournal blocked my IP address. After a lot of research, I figured out that using WordPress is the best way to back up your old LiveJournal posts. Of course, if you have no interest in saving anything and just want to delete your LiveJournal account, you can skip straight to that section below.”

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: Lindemann family returns 33 long-sought ancient statues to Cambodia. “Billionaire George Lindemann showcased his collection of Khmer treasures and passed them on to his children. But investigations by ICIJ and others traced many of his prized antiquities back to pillaged sacred sites.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: How to Tell if Your A.I. Is Conscious. “In a new report, scientists offer a list of measurable qualities that might indicate the presence of some presence in a machine.”

UNESCO: UNESCO and WMF join Forces to inventory the Jewish Heritage Worldwide. “UNESCO and World Monuments Fund (WMF) will establish a partnership aimed at accelerating the documentation of Jewish cultural heritage worldwide and better protecting these sites. The partnership will initially run for five years. It will benefit from an initial investment of $1 million USD and will be open to external funding.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Ubergizmo: A Canadian Camera Was Able To Capture 4.8 Million Frames Per Second Cost-Effectively. “An innovative camera capable of capturing an astounding 4.8 million frames per second has been developed by Canadian scientists. What sets this camera apart from its commercial counterparts is not just its remarkable speed but also its significantly lower cost, thanks to the utilization of off-the-shelf components. This achievement is detailed in a study published in the journal Optica.” 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.

September 20, 2023 at 12:32AM
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Tracking Shrinkflation, Wolfram Language, Twitter, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, September 19, 2023

Tracking Shrinkflation, Wolfram Language, Twitter, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, September 19, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Boing Boing: Shrinkflation database tracks diminishing size of food products. “The Shrinkflation Tracker, by Sam Lader, is on a mission to stop manufacturers quietly putting less food inside product packaging without a corresponding fall in price to consumers. The practice is out of control, so much so that even major retailers are beginning to warn customers against lest they suspect complicity in the practice.” The listings are UK and Ireland-focused at the moment.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Wolfram Blog: Creamy or Crunchy: Visualizing Food Protein Structures in Wolfram Language. “Explore protein structures with the new Wolfram ProteinVisualization paclet and the BioMoleculePlot3D resource function. Designed for researchers, educators and all structural biology enthusiasts, the paclet offers an immersive experience for viewing the intricate structures of biomolecules, including proteins, nucleic acids and their complexes.”

TechCrunch: X launches account verification based on government ID. “X, formerly Twitter, has launched government ID-based account verification for paid users to prevent impersonation and give them benefits such as ‘prioritized support.'”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: How to Make Sure Important Emails Don’t End Up in Spam. “It’s important to regularly check the contents of your spam folder, and to set up a list of safe senders. So, for example, you might put your kid’s school on there, or your key contacts from work, or your significant other. Email sent from these addresses will never be canned, so you don’t have to worry that something has slipped past you. These lists can be configured in just about every email app, and they are easy to set up. Here’s how.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

BBC: Bovington: Tank museum videos become global social media hit. “A museum tucked away in rural Dorset has described how tank enthusiasts from around the world have made it an unlikely YouTube success. The Tank Museum in Bovington has more than 100 million views on its channel. This means it reaches a greater audience on the video sharing platform than the likes of the Louvre in Paris and the Met in New York.”

New York Times: ‘One of the Most Hated People in the World’: Sam Bankman-Fried’s 250 Pages of Justifications. “In a draft of his unsent posts, which he formatted as a series of tweets spanning roughly 70 typed pages, he criticized some of his closest colleagues, interspersing his arguments with photos from his high school years and stock images of popcorn and a garden maze. Every few pages, a key moment in the narrative is accompanied with a link to a music video by Alicia Keys, Katy Perry or Rihanna.”

Ars Technica: Funky AI-generated spiraling medieval village captivates social media. “On Sunday, a Reddit user named ‘Ugleh’ posted an AI-generated image of a spiral-shaped medieval village that rapidly gained attention on social media for its remarkable geometric qualities. Follow-up posts garnered even more praise, including a tweet with over 145,000 likes. Ugleh created the images using Stable Diffusion and a guidance technique called ControlNet.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Harvard Gazette: So what exactly is Google accused of?. “Digital economy expert says much of antitrust case comes down to how much influence search giant wields on default setting on devices like phones, PCs.”

Bleeping Computer: TikTok flooded by ‘Elon Musk’ cryptocurrency giveaway scams. “TikTok is flooded by a surge of fake cryptocurrency giveaways posted to the video-sharing platform, with almost all of the videos pretending to be themes based on Elon Musk, Tesla, or SpaceX.”

Techdirt: A Trio Of Failed Lawsuits Trying To Sue Websites For Moderating Content. “Why do people still file these lawsuits? For years now, we see lawsuits filed against websites over their content moderation decisions, despite Section 230 barring them (and the 1st Amendment rights of the platform backing that up). These lawsuits always fail.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Guardian: I quit Facebook and Twitter cold turkey – and I barely know myself. “The thing that perhaps I hated most was the capacity – no, the encouragement! – the platform gave people to confect and cultivate parallel, false lives. The perfect marriages. The beautiful, oh-so thoughtfully, eclectically curated homes with ocean- or bucolic bush-outlooks. The perfectly adjusted children and their prodigious A+ results, and their expertise with anything – ball, bat, violin – they took to hand. The holidays, replete with glimpses of the pointy-end cabin and club lounge.”

Semafor: The Princeton researchers calling out ‘AI snake oil’. “In July, a new study about ChatGPT started going viral on social media, which seemed to validate growing suspicions about how the chatbot had gotten “dumber” over time. As often happens in these circumstances, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor stepped in as the voices of reason. The Princeton computer science professor and Ph.D candidate, respectively, are the authors of the popular newsletter and soon-to-be book AI Snake Oil, which exists to ‘dispel hype, remove misconceptions, and clarify the limits of AI.'” 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.

September 19, 2023 at 05:31PM
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How Buildings Use Energy, Louisiana Government Salaries, WordPress ActivityPub, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 18, 2023

How Buildings Use Energy, Louisiana Government Salaries, WordPress ActivityPub, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 18, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

NREL:
NREL Researchers Reveal How Buildings Across United States Do—and Could—Use Energy . “Buildings are responsible for 40% of total energy use in the United States, including 75% of all electricity use and 35% of the nation’s carbon emissions….To facilitate decarbonization of the U.S. building stock, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have created a new, meticulously researched data set that details how buildings do—and could—use energy. This data set, called the End-Use Load Profiles, reveals the massive climate impacts that improvements to the U.S. building stock could have.”

Louisiana Illuminator: Louisiana government salary database is finally live. “The state of Louisiana has made a searchable database of state employee salary information publicly available. The database is available on the state’s financial transparency website… It includes all executive branch salary information but does not yet include salaried higher education employees.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: WordPress blogs can now be followed in the fediverse, including Mastodon. “In March, WordPress.com owner Automattic made a commitment to the fediverse — the decentralized social networks that include the Twitter rival Mastodon and others — with the acquisition of an ActivityPub plug-in that allows WordPress blogs to reach readers on other federated platforms. Now, the company is announcing ActivityPub 1.0.0 for WordPress has been released allowing WordPress blogs to be followed by others on apps like Mastodon and others in the fediverse and then receive replies back as comments on their own sites.”

Search Engine Land: TikTok quietly adds Wikipedia snippets to its search results. “TikTok now serves Wikipedia snippets in some of its search results. This is the first time that the platform has offered its users results from the wider web as historically, it exclusively featured its own content in SERPs.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 10 Lightweight Linux Distributions to Give Your Old PC New Life. “Old PCs can’t cope with the demands of modern operating systems and software. While upgrading hardware such as memory can help, the better solution is a lightweight operating system. Many Linux distros are designed to be lightweight, with versions of Linux under 500MB and even under 100MB available. If you’re looking for a resource-light operating system for your PC, try these compact, lightweight Linux distros.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Troy University: Troy University’s Rosa Parks Museum receives grant to create new mobile app. “A grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services will enable Troy University’s Rosa Parks Museum to create a mobile app that will engage its visitors, especially the large numbers of school children who tour the museum each year on field trips.”

Futurism: Microsoft Publishes Garbled AI Article Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player “Useless”. “Former NBA player Brandon Hunter passed away unexpectedly at the young age of 42 this week, a tragedy that rattled fans of his 2000s career with the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic. But in an unhinged twist on what was otherwise a somber news story, Microsoft’s MSN news portal published a garbled, seemingly AI-generated article that derided Hunter as ‘useless’ in its headline.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: Greater Manchester Police officers’ details hacked in cyber attack. “Police officers’ personal details have been hacked after a company was targeted in a cyber attack. The firm in Stockport, which makes ID cards, holds information on various UK organisations including some of the staff employed by Greater Manchester Police (GMP). The force confirmed it was aware of the ransomware attack.”

WIRED: China-Linked Hackers Breached a Power Grid—Again. “Today, researchers on the Threat Hunter Team at Broadcom-owned security firm Symantec revealed that a Chinese hacker group with connections to APT41, which Symantec is calling RedFly, breached the computer network of a national power grid in an Asian country—though Symantec has declined to name which country was targeted. The breach began in February of this year and persisted for at least six months as the hackers expanded their foothold throughout the IT network of the country’s national electric utility, though it’s not clear how close the hackers came to gaining the ability to disrupt power generation or transmission.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Bill Willingham: Willingham Sends Fables Into the Public Domain. “As of now, 15 September 2023, the comic book property called Fables, including all related Fables spin-offs and characters, is now in the public domain. What was once wholly owned by Bill Willingham is now owned by everyone, for all time. It’s done, and as most experts will tell you, once done it cannot be undone. Take-backs are neither contemplated nor possible.” 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.

September 19, 2023 at 12:30AM
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Turfgrass Information Center, University-Associated Retirement Communities, Chromebooks, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, September 18, 2023

Turfgrass Information Center, University-Associated Retirement Communities, Chromebooks, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, September 18, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Michigan State University: MSU Libraries’ Turfgrass Information Center TGIF database now open access. “The TGIF database indexes material from a wide variety of sources including governments, higher learning institutions, professional organizations and private publishers. Materials include articles from peer-reviewed publications, technical reports and conference proceedings, trade and professional publications, local professional newsletters, popular magazines, monographs, theses and dissertations, fact sheets and brochures, images, software, and web documents.”

McKnights Senior Living: First national directory of university-associated retirement communities launches. “The website provides a comprehensive list of the university retirement communities, or URCs, in the country, with information on the history, services and costs of those communities. Carle said the goal of the site is to provide a one-stop directory and information resource for consumers, a membership resource site for academic institutions and senior living providers, and a certification program.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

How-To Geek: Some Chromebooks Will Now Get 10 Years of Updates. “Sustainability starts with tech that actually lasts a long time. After all, the best way to produce less e-waste is to avoid replacing technology that still works. While a smartphone can last 2-4 years, PCs can last much longer, and this also extends to laptops as long as you take good care of them. If you have a Chromebook, however, you’re in luck, as Google has just announced a notable extension to the lifespan of Chromebooks.”

Associated Press: Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signs law restricting release of her travel, security records. “Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law Thursday restricting release of her travel and security records after the Legislature wrapped up a special session marked by a fight to more broadly scale back the state Freedom of Information Act.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Search Engine Roundtable: Advertiser Lost Thousands Of Dollars Lost During Google Ads Experimental Test. “A respected advertiser in the PPC community said that a Google Ads experiment that the customer did not opt in to or have the option to opt out of cost the company thousands of dollars in lost ad spend.”

WIRED: How to Take Back the Internet . “ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Have a Nice Future, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to Cory Doctorow, a writer, internet activist, and author of The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. As the US government takes Google to court in an antitrust case this week, Doctorow explains why he believes monopoly power has made the internet a miserable place and what we can do to get our digital lives back.” A podcast with show notes and transcription.

El País: ‘When regulating artificial intelligence, we must place race and gender at the center of the debate’. “One of the most recent research projects organized by 32-year-old Brazilian anthropologist Fernanda K. Martins found that platforms such as Spotify recommend more male artists to users than women, regardless of the musical genre being searched for. This is what academics call ‘algorithmic discrimination.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: US judge will not order DOJ official to exit Google advertising case. “U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema on Friday declined to order a Justice Department official to stay out of the government’s advertising antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet’s Google but said the department ‘should think about it.'”

TechCrunch: TikTok fined $379M in EU for failing to keep kids’ data safe. “It’s been a long time coming but TikTok has finally been found in breach of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in relation to its handling of children’s data. Under the decision issued today by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), the video sharing platform has been reprimanded and fined €345 million (~$379 million). It has also been ordered to bring its offending data processing into compliance within three months.”

Ars Technica: “Most notorious” illegal shadow library sued by textbook publishers [Updated]. “Publishers suing include Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. They claimed that Library Genesis (aka Libgen) is operated by unknown individuals based outside the United States, who know that the shadow library is ‘one of the largest, most notorious, and far-reaching infringement operations in the world’ and intentionally violate copyright laws with ‘absolutely no legal justification for what they do.'”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Penn State University: Penn State team to triple size of forensic database of mitochondrial DNA. “In circumstances where potential crime scene evidence such as hair or bone might be old or degraded, forensic scientists rely on DNA from a cell’s mitochondria — an organelle that has its own genome separate from the ‘human genome’ in the cell’s nucleus. Now, the National Institute of Justice has awarded a team of researchers from Penn State $770,000 to sequence the mitochondrial genomes of 10,000 Pennsylvanians. This will more than triple the size of the existing database and provide a crucial point of reference for use in human identification cases.”

National Library of Medicine: Introducing Pebblescout: Index and Search Petabyte-Scale Sequence Resources Faster than Ever. “NCBI is excited to introduce Pebblescout, a pilot web service that allows you to search for sequence matches in very large nucleotide databases, such as runs in the NIH Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and assemblies for whole genome shotgun sequencing projects in Genbank – faster and more efficiently!” 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.

September 18, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Protecting Personal Health Information, Twitch, Twitter, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 17, 2023

Protecting Personal Health Information, Twitch, Twitter, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, September 17, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

FTC: Updated FTC-HHS publication outlines privacy and security laws and rules that impact consumer health data. “Ever wondered about the intersection of some of the health privacy and security-related laws and rules enforced by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Health and Human Services? You’re not alone, which is why FTC and HHS have teamed up to update a joint publication – Collecting, Using, or Sharing Consumer Health Information? Look to HIPAA, the FTC Act, and the Health Breach Notification Rule – that helps businesses learn more about their legal obligations.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Game Rant: Twitch Reveals 2 New Modding Features . “Twitch has announced two moderation features, which are intended to make a live streamer’s community safer. These two features are the ability to share a banned user’s comments and a new ‘shield mode’ alongside the current ‘Mod View’ that is integrated into the streaming platform’s available features. These new Twitch tools are available now for moderators to experiment with and try out.”

Marketing/Beat: Revival strategy: X turns to Google to sell programmatic ads. “X,formerly Twitter, will start receiving programmatic ads for Google as it continues to seek new advertising supply sources to replenish its funds. Google confirmed today that X would use the programmatic ad platform for publishers, Google Ads Manager, to participate in online auctions to sell its inventory.”

USEFUL STUFF

The Markup: Twitter is Still Throttling Competitors’ Links—Check for Yourself. “Twitter continues to slow traffic to competing sites nearly a month after it partially pulled back from such throttling, a Markup analysis has found. Users of the social platform, now officially known as X, are made to wait on average about two and a half seconds after clicking on links to Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Substack, the analysis found. That’s more than 60 times longer than the average wait for links to other sites.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: TikTok Rankles Employees With Return-to-Office Tracking Tools. “TikTok employees in the United States expressed frustration and dismay this week after the company introduced a tool for tracking office attendance and threatened disciplinary action for failing to comply with new in-person mandates, in an unusual effort to get workers back into the office with custom data-collection technology.”

Engadget: Billboard’s latest top 50 chart pulls the biggest tracks from TikTok. “TikTok and Billboard are collaborating on a pop music chart. TikTok Billboard Top 50 Chart is a new weekly roundup listing the most popular songs on the social platform in the US. The list debuts with the track ‘SkeeYee’ by Sexyy Red taking the inaugural top spot.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Los Angeles Times: California lawmakers pass bill to make it easier to delete online personal data. “California lawmakers on Thursday passed a bill known as the Delete Act that would allow consumers, with a single request, to have every data broker delete their personal information. Data brokers include a variety of businesses that gather and sell people’s personal information, such as their address, marital status and spending habits. Those companies include credit reporting agencies, people-search sites and data analytic firms that work with political campaigns.”

Boing Boing: Typeface trolls shaking down users of Adobe’s font platform. “Do you use a font through Adobe’s font platform? Is it Proxima Nova? Users of the typeface report being threatened by a foundry that claims to represent its creator, and Adobe isn’t taking calls. The copyright troll business model, where lawyers demand money from people who know that proving their innocence would cost even more, has come to the land of fancy fonts.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Washington State University: Machine learning innovation reduces computer power usage. “A framework that uses machine learning to make decisions about power usage can reduce energy use by up to 60% without affecting computing performance in multi-core processors used in large servers around the world.”

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: Study: YouTube did not actively direct users toward anti-vaccine content during COVID-19. “New research led by data science experts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and United Nations Global Pulse found that there is no strong evidence that YouTube promoted anti-vaccine sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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September 18, 2023 at 12:48AM
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