Dr. Who, Twitter, Google, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, October 11, 2023

Dr. Who, Twitter, Google, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, October 11, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

BBC: 60 Years of Doctor Who drops on BBC iPlayer alongside landmark online archive. “Before the Anniversary Specials hit our screens, viewers will have the opportunity to travel back in time with any of the Doctors through the show’s 60 year history with the classic series… As the perfect companion to the back catalogue, the BBC will simultaneously launch an extensive online archive from the show’s history.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Now X posts can lock replies to only allow comment from verified accounts. “This change arrives about 11 months after Musk launched paid verification for Twitter Blue, apportioning blue checkmark labels to people willing to part with $7.99 per month. It also means it could be harder for those who don’t pay for the service (with the exception of accounts forced into verified status) to refute misinformation, which researchers report has continued to increase.”

TechCrunch: Google introduces new sustainability features, including a tool for people looking to buy an EV . “Google announced today that it’s introducing new sustainability features, including a new tool aimed at people who are considering buying an EV. The company is also launching an expanded Flood Hub and home energy comparisons.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Guardian: Chewing gum artist makes plea to save Millennium Bridge works. “An artist who paints tiny pictures on discarded chewing gum has pleaded for his works to be saved after being told most of them will be removed from the Millennium Bridge in London as part of engineering work.”

PBS: Former Twitter Insider Describes Elon Musk’s Mixed Signals on Free Speech. “Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover [is] a two-hour special premiering Oct. 10 on PBS and online. The investigation probes the billionaire’s journey from one of the platform’s most provocative users to its owner, and examines the far-reaching impact Musk’s decisions have had on U.S. politics, speech and culture in the year since his takeover.”

Tubefilter: Rooster Teeth moves shows to its website: “YouTube revenue just isn’t cutting it for us anymore.”. “Those animated hits were previously available on multiple platforms, including YouTube, where Rooster Teeth counts more than nine million subscribers on its primary channel. But Shawcross explained that “YouTube revenue just isn’t cutting it for us anymore,” necessitating a focus on the company’s website. ‘We know that it’s frustrating for some of you, but it’s just the reality of what we need to do,’ Shawcross said. ‘Animation is hard and expensive.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: 23andMe says private user data is up for sale after being scraped. “Genetic profiling service 23andMe has commenced an investigation after private user data was scraped off its website. Friday’s confirmation comes five days after an unknown entity took to an online crime forum to advertise the sale of private information for millions of 23andMe users.”

Bloomberg: SEC Probes Twitter Security Lapse Before Elon Musk Took Over. “The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating how Twitter Inc. managed a 2018 security lapse that exposed personal user information… The agency has been scrutinizing whether the former top executives failed to adequately disclose those privacy issues to shareholders or put in place proper controls, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing a confidential investigation.”

Associated Press: Utah sues TikTok, alleging it lures children into addictive and destructive social media habits. “Utah became the latest state Tuesday to file a lawsuit against TikTok, alleging the company is ‘baiting’ children into addictive and unhealthy social media habits. TikTok lures children into hours of social media use, misrepresents the app’s safety and deceptively portrays itself as independent of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, Utah claims in the lawsuit.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Los Angeles Times: Commentary: Elon Musk bought Twitter just to break it. With a new war, we’re paying the price. “For Musk and those who’ve turned the place into a toxic dump of hate-fluencers and bad info, the goal is no longer sharing information. It’s about screaming into the void, no matter how ill-informed the message or baseless the accusation. It’s about eroding confidence in trustworthy sources, individual or institutional, and elevating nefarious users who must stoke fear, doubt and confusion in order to thrive. And as he nears his one-year anniversary, it’s never been clearer that Musk will go to great lengths to deliver.”

Poynter: Opinion | As cheap and dubious content spreads online, print finds a new value. “As the internet becomes flooded with cheap content, discerning truth from falsehood will turn into a Herculean task. A deluge of untrustworthy content threatens to drown out the voices of credibility. It’s under these circumstances we can imagine a revival in the value of print.”

Notre Dame News: New study offers improved strategy for social media communications during wildfires. “In collaboration with the CRC, the research team collected Twitter data on the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in Alberta, Canada. They analyzed 934 tweets from the headquarters account, which received 33,861 retweets and 34,722 likes. They also looked at 629 tweets from the Alberta account, which received 4,802 retweets and 2,862 likes. Measuring engagement as the total number of likes, retweets, clicks and replies, the team used text analysis to identify the audience (victims or supporters) and then analyzed how audience match between accounts affected user engagement.” Good morning, Internet…

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October 11, 2023 at 05:31PM
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United States Meteorology, Fijian-Australians, Mastodon, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 10, 2023

United States Meteorology, Fijian-Australians, Mastodon, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 10, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

National Center for Atmospheric Research: Scientists Gain Powerful Tool To Scrutinize Changing U.S. Weather Patterns. “An extraordinary new dataset of high-resolution weather simulations that span more than four decades over the continental United States is now available to the Earth system science community.”

National Library of Australia: Collecting with Fijian Australians at the National Library. “The National Library has worked closely with Fijian Australians to make sure their contribution to Australian life is appropriately represented in the collection across all the formats that the Library collects. As a result, the National Library now holds one of the most substantial records of Fijian Australian life in the country.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Mastodon actually has 407K+ more monthly users than it thought. “The service, which competes with X (formerly Twitter) and other newcomers like Threads, Bluesky, Pebble and Spill, had been undercounting its users due to a network connectivity error, according to founder and CEO Eugen Rochko, and actually has 407,814 more monthly active users than it had been reporting previously. The adjustment also included a gain of 2.34 million registered users across an additional 727 servers that had not been counted due to the error.”

Retraction Watch: Signs of undeclared ChatGPT use in papers mounting. “Ostensibly authored by researchers in China, ‘Revitalizing our earth: unleashing the power of green energy in soil remediation for a sustainable future’ includes the extraneous phrase ‘Regenerate response’ at the end of a methods section. For those unfamiliar, ‘Regenerate response’ is a button in OpenAI’s ChatGPT that prompts the chatbot to rework an unsatisfactory answer.”

USEFUL STUFF

Musings About Librarianship: List of academic search engines that use Large Language models for generative answers. “This is a non-comprehensive list of academic search engines that use generative AI (almost always Large language models) to generate direct answers on top of list of relevant results, typically using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Techniques. We expect a lot more!”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

NBC News: Verified accounts spread fake news release about a Biden $8 billion aid package to Israel. “A doctored White House news release posted online falsely claimed that the Biden administration had authorized $8 billion in emergency aid to Israel on Saturday. The fact that it was faked didn’t stop it from being posted across the internet and rising to the top of Google search results.”

Indian Express: National Film Archive of India seeks donations for digitisation, restoration of films. “National Film Archive of India, which is now a part of the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), has sought funds in the form of sponsorships and donations for carrying out film digitisation and restoration projects.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Visa Applicants’ Social Media Data Doesn’t Help Screen for Terrorism, Documents Show. “A disputed rule that forces millions of applicants for a visa to enter the United States to disclose their social media profiles to the government has done little to help screen for possible terrorists, newly disclosed documents show.”

Hürriyet Daily News: SPK fines man for stock market manipulation via social media advice. “The Capital Markets Board (SPK) has issued a substantial fine of around 3.9 million Turkish Liras ($141,200) on an individual with a significant following on social media for alleged stock market manipulation through advice provided to his followers. The fine comes as a result of Halil İbrahim Babadağı’s recommendations to buy or hold certain stocks on his social media account.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

National Academies: Innovation Aided Completion of 2020 Census, But Coverage and Data Quality Issues Persist. “The U.S. Census Bureau’s ability to adjust its approaches and innovate enabled it to complete the 2020 census despite the difficulties raised by the COVID pandemic and other challenges, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report reviews the 2020 census and the quality of data collected and makes recommendations for the 2030 census.” 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. I live at Calishat.

October 11, 2023 at 12:17AM
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Working On Mastodon Content Curation Tools as Twitter Continues to Decline

Working On Mastodon Content Curation Tools as Twitter Continues to Decline
By ResearchBuzz

It’s funny how things change. Once I relied heavily on Twitter for current news and links via tools like Listimonkey and Nuzzel. Now both Listimonkey and Nuzzel are long dead and Twitter’s disinformation and hate speech problems get worse almost by the hour.

But ResearchBuzz is still here, and I still need to do content curation in order to bring you interesting news twice a day. RSS feeds and Google Alerts remain important parts of my toolbox, but I also need tools to monitor the current events link flow that takes place on social media. Nothing exists that is both suitable and affordable, so I’m making my own. Because its API is open and free, I am focusing on Mastodon. And because it’s the right thing to do I’m sharing the tools I make with you.

I’ve mentioned MastoGizmos.com several times, but that’s not the only kind of Mastodon tool I make. I’ve also made utilities that are designed to be used on a local machine. Those programs are available through my GitHub account. For the most part I’ve made them available as HTML files so all you have to do is download them and open them in your browser. (Make sure you’ve enabled JavaScript!). Here are three of them. Maybe you’ll find one useful.

Mastodon Stadium Seats

One of the disadvantages of Mastodon’s decentralized social media is a lack of a single flow to follow. If you’re on a big Mastodon instance like mstdn.social and news breaks, you will likely quickly get a lot of news and links about it. On the other hand if you’re on a small Mastodon instance, it might be a while before news trickles down to you unless you’ve put in a lot of work and followed a lot of people from larger instances. ( I know there are relays available but that’s not a solution for an end user.) I made Mastodon Stadium Seats for when a big news event is happening and I want to see what’s going on even from my tiny instance. It works by querying the larger instances for specified hashtags and showing the results on an HTML page. In the code there’s a space where you can specify the instances and hashtags you want to monitor:

Once you’ve downloaded the HTML file, edit the values above to your preference and open the file in your Web browser. It will give you a plain display of the last 14 posts mentioning your hashtags and it updates every 90 seconds.

This tool isn’t meant to be fancy — it’s just a cheap “stadium seat” where you can see more of what’s happening across the fediverse. For “regular” news days (I have to put that in quotes, it’s 2023, regular news days don’t exist, just less-busy ones) I have a more polished tool that I cast to a second monitor. It’s called VibesMasto News Monitor, and it’s named after Vibesmaster G-Nice.

VibesMasto News Monitor

 

I only use Mastodon Stadium Seats when there’s breaking news or a large event which much of social media will be watching (like a political debate.) For everyday news monitoring I use VibesMasto News Monitor. As you can see in the screenshot above it uses external content (in this case, headlines from the New York Times) and a list of trending links from Mastodon.Social in addition to hashtag monitors. I’m not really looking for specific information with this tool so much as I want a one glance display that tells me what’s happening (and links to more information if I want it.)

Like Stadium Seats, this tool is an HTML file that you can download and run locally. To customize it you change three parts of the code:

const rssFeeds = [

‘https://mastodon.social/tags/rss.rss’,
‘https://mastodon.social/tags/opensource.rss’,
‘https://mastodon.social/tags/foss.rss’,

];

This changes the tags you’re monitoring in the third column. You can change either the tag (the “opensource” part of opensource.rss) or the instance (the “mastodon.social” part of the URL.)

const response = await fetch(‘https://mastodon.social/api/v1/trends/links’);

This changes the trending links in the middle column. All you have to do is change the mastodon.social part with the instance name of your choice — for example, https://journa.host/api/v1/trends/links .

const feedUrl = ‘https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml’;

This changes the news source at the top of the first column. You should be able to use pretty much any RSS feed as long as it doesn’t have crazy formatting. Once you’ve downloaded the HTML page and made the changes you should be able to open it locally in your browser. I keep mine in a folder on my desktop and review the hashtags every morning before I launch it.

I cast VibesMasto to a second monitor that sits beside my computer and glance at it from time to time. It keeps me informed without me running to check news sites all the time and without alerts bleeping and blooping all over the place. But it doesn’t do the heavy lifting that something like Nuzzel could do. Nuzzel was valuable because it could go through Twitter lists and aggregate all the interesting links that your followings posted so you could review them at your leisure.

Mastodon is decentralized, so instead of gathering links from follows I made a tool to grab them from instances. Let me tell you about Mastodon Link Ripper.

Mastodon Link Ripper

 

Mastodon Link Ripper does just what it says — rips links from the current timelines of the Mastodon instances you specify. It then removes duplicates and presents them to you in aggregate. A basic filter allows you to remove posts based on keywords. The site is also hardcoded to filter out posts more than 48 hours old, but you can adjust that. (The code is well-commented and shows you what you need to change.)

Like the other tools I’ve mentioned so far, this is a single HTML file that you download and open locally in your browser. Unlike other tools I’ve mentioned so far, this one has text input forms so you don’t have to edit the page itself. Just enter your keywords, any filter words, rip the links, and have a good skim.

Twitter is only getting worse, Google’s search engine is filling up with infosewage. At this point I’ve been writing about search engines for almost 30 years and I’m discouraged. It seems to be more and more about giving the shareholders dollars and selling advertising than it is helping people find things.

Was it probably always that way? Possibly but not this baldly. We are surrounded by endless authoritative structures — FCC license databases, local business license records, secretary of state business filings, local government resource lists — and they are so rarely applied when we’re searching for real, true information. Why? There are structured resource lists available from places like Wikipedia that we could apply to our general Web searches. We don’t.

Well, they don’t. I do. And I will keep working on this problem. I’m only one person and I don’t count for much but I deeply believe there are ways we can counter what’s happening and I will keep trying to make tools for it and I will keep sharing them with you. It’s important.

 

 

 

 

 

 

October 10, 2023 at 07:18PM
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Florida Civil Rights, 1960s San Francisco Photography, Google Chrome, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, October 10, 2023

Florida Civil Rights, 1960s San Francisco Photography, Google Chrome, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, October 10, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

WFSU: A new virtual museum helps visitors learn about Florida’s civil rights leaders. “The first virtual civil rights museum in Florida launched earlier this month. It features civil rights leaders from the early 1900s all the way into the early 60s. Two Tallahassee natives, Jackie Perkins and Delaitre Hollinger, created the virtual museum. It tells the stories of what the founders call ‘pioneers’ in both education and civil rights. Perkins says the museum includes individuals from all walks of life regardless of race, color or religion.”

San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. mystery images find a permanent home (where you can see them too). “A cache of mysterious Kodachrome slides found abandoned on a Mission District street corner are going to the San Francisco Public Library’s History Center — where they’ll join collections including Harvey Milk’s papers and the San Francisco Call-Bulletin photo morgue.” The digitizing process is already underway.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bleeping Computer: Google Chrome’s organize tabs will automatically reorder tabs. “In a bid to upgrade user experience, the Chrome team is developing an ‘Organise Tabs’ feature, soon to be seen at the top left corner of the browser, adjacent to the tab search function. This new addition would be a natural extension of Tab Groups functionality.”

Search Engine Journal: Google Launches October 2023 Core Algorithm Update. “Google has confirmed the rollout of its latest core algorithm update, dubbed the ‘October 2023 Core Update.’ This marks the third core update to Google’s search ranking systems this year, following the March and August core updates.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Graphic Images of Violence Flood Social Media Amid Israel-Gaza Conflict. “On X, formerly known as Twitter, a violent video claiming to show the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Saturday morning. The New York Times found hundreds of X accounts sharing images of dead bodies, claiming to be Israeli civilians killed in the past 24 hours of fighting. Some of the images viewed by The Times appeared to be manipulated and edited. Underneath some of the videos and images posted on X, people warned that they could be spread as part of a campaign to stoke fear among Israelis. Some of the accounts claimed to be working on behalf of Hamas.”

Ars Technica: 4chan users manipulate AI tools to unleash torrent of racist images. “Despite leading AI companies’ attempts to block users from turning AI image generators into engines of racist content, many 4chan users are still turning to these tools to ‘quickly flood the Internet with racist garbage,’ 404 Media reported.”

Daily Bruin: UCLA Library receives donation of political cartoon collection dating back to 1690. “The collection, donated by Michael and Susan Kahn, contains more than one million political cartoons and caricatures originating between 1690 and 2022. The donation from the family also includes additional funding for classes and workshops focused on political cartoons…. The political cartoon collection contains works from 59 countries and in 30 languages, according to the UCLA Library. It will be available digitally during the 2024-2025 academic year through the UCLA Library Special Collections.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bloomberg: Alphabet’s Pichai Set to Testify in Google Pay Antitrust Trial. “Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai is set to be called by Epic Games Inc. to testify in an antitrust trial over Google Play policies that could threaten billions of dollars in revenue generated by the app marketplace.”

Hyperallergic: Artists Call on Congress to Stop Corporations From Copyrighting AI Art. “To keep large corporations from gaining copyrights over art made with AI, artists and allies are being called upon to post about the AI Day Of Action on their social media accounts today and to contact their congresspeople using links and scripts provided by Fight for the Future. Artists’ rights over their work have long been contested, yet nothing has brought the conversation to such a head as the advent of generative AI and its potential for corporate exploitation.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

ABS: ABS Joins Korean Industry Leaders on 3D Printing Project for Ship Operations . “ABS signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to work with key stakeholders in Korea to develop and demonstrate a 3D printing system for ocean-going vessels. Using a digital library for the design process, the system aims to support rapid maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) by using 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing (AM), to manufacture parts on a vessel while at sea.”

Nature: ‘In case I die, I need to publish this paper’: scientist who left the lab to fight in Ukraine. “When Russia invaded his home country in February 2022, neuroscientist Sergiy Sylantyev was leading a research programme at the University of Aberdeen, UK, investigating chemical signalling in the brain. Within weeks, Sylantyev — who had no military experience — travelled to Ukraine, where he was quickly deployed to the front lines as a foot soldier.”

Princeton University: The world has a food-waste problem. Can this wireless tech help fix it?. “One bad apple may not spoil the whole bunch, but when it comes to distributing food, a lot of good goes out with the bad. Now, researchers from Princeton University and Microsoft Research have developed a fast and accurate way to determine fruit quality, piece by piece, using high-frequency wireless technology. The new tool gives suppliers a way to sort fruit based on fine-grained ripeness measurements.” 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. I live at Calishat.

October 10, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Georgia City Directories, Astronomers Without Borders, Reddit, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 9, 2023

Georgia City Directories, Astronomers Without Borders, Reddit, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 9, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Georgia Public Library Service: Historical city directories from across Georgia are now freely accessible online. “Georgia Public Library Service has completed a two year-long project to digitize 214 city directories, which document 17 different Georgia communities across nearly 100 years. The directories, contributed by 12 public library systems, are now full-text searchable and freely available in the Digital Library of Georgia.”

Space: Hold the annular solar eclipse in your hand with new ‘One Eclipse’ app from Astronomers Without Borders. “With the interactive eclipse map, users are able to pinpoint the perfect viewing spot for observing the upcoming eclipse and the handy countdown timer lets you see the exact moment when you can expect to experience the moon’s shadow. The eclipse simulator lets you see what the eclipse will look like from any location on Earth, from start to finish.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TorrentFreak: Reddit Sees Copyright Takedowns Peak While Subreddit Bans Drop. “Reddit’s latest transparency report shows a modest increase in DMCA takedown notices. The number of copyright infringement-related user- and subreddit bans has declined, however. The latest data follows a hectic period at Reddit, where protests over an API policy change triggered a ‘dramatic’ 1169% increase in user data requests.”

Mashable: Snapchat’s Bitmoji update upsets users. “Snapchat users are once again frustrated with an update to the social media platform. This time it involves the once delightful, now disquieting Bitmoji. Last week, Snapchat’s cartoon avatars underwent a makeover that startled users, as part of the company’s effort to bring Bitmoji further into 3D.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: Raspberry Pi 4 vs. Raspberry Pi 5: 14 Key Differences. “Launching in late October, the Raspberry Pi 5 offers numerous hardware upgrades compared to the Pi 4. Wondering which board to choose for your next project? Read on for a detailed comparison of these two single-board computers’ specifications and capabilities.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

ABC News (Australia): How a soap opera star pushed a conspiracy theory linking the Voice to Parliament to a UN takeover. “In the past few weeks, a conspiracy theory suggesting the Voice is a secret plot devised by the UN to strip Australians of their private property and sovereignty has spread like wildfire. Since early August, versions of a social media video promoting the baseless accusation have recorded nearly twice as many shares on Facebook as any content published by either the official Yes or No campaign.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: A Giacometti for a Cezanne: Jeffrey Epstein’s Role in a Pricey Art Deal. “Mr. Epstein helped the billionaire Leon Black defer capital gains taxes from the swap. A Senate committee is scrutinizing some of Mr. Black’s art deals as it looks into tax avoidance schemes.”

South China Morning Post: ‘Gold-digger’: China blogger jailed over fake news claiming woman’s grandpa was tycoon husband, attracting 470 million views online. “A man in China who spread fake news online about a ‘gold-digger’ marrying an ageing tycoon, alongside photos of a young woman with her grandfather, has been jailed for a year. The perpetrator, surnamed Wu, was sentenced by Dongguan No 1 People’s Court in southeastern Guangdong province, for ‘fabricating facts that defamed’ and which resulted in ‘serious consequences that jeopardised the social order’.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Brigham Young University: AI-powered chat assistance elevates online conversation quality, BYU study finds. “Check the comments section of many social media and digital news platforms, and you’re likely to find a cesspool of insults, threats and even harassment. In fact, a Pew Research Center survey found that 41% of American adults have personally experienced online harassment, and one in five adults say they’ve been harassed online for their political views. But researchers at BYU and Duke University say derisive online conversations don’t have to be the norm. A joint paper between the two universities found that artificial intelligence can be used to improve conversation quality and promote civil dialogue in online interactions.”

Northwestern: Instant evolution: AI designs new robot from scratch in seconds. “A team led by Northwestern University researchers has developed the first artificial intelligence (AI) to date that can intelligently design robots from scratch. To test the new AI, the researchers gave the system a simple prompt: Design a robot that can walk across a flat surface. While it took nature billions of years to evolve the first walking species, the new algorithm compressed evolution to lightning speed — designing a successfully walking robot in mere seconds.” 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. I live at Calishat.

October 10, 2023 at 12:56AM
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Tracking Ukraine Restoration, Racism Harms Health, Internet Governance Forum, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, October 9, 2023

Tracking Ukraine Restoration, Racism Harms Health, Internet Governance Forum, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, October 9, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

UNITED24: Monitoring rebuilding efforts — a joint project by UNITED24 and LUN. (This link is to a Google Doc.) “18 residential buildings in Kyiv Oblast are actively being rebuilt, funded by UNITED24. From now on, you can read the stories of their residents and observe the progress, thanks to the monitoring project of the IT company LUN.”

Berkeley Public Health: The data are clear: Racism harms health. “Our just-launched website, Racism Harms Health, compiles research data culled from more than 250 studies across the spectrum of American life—from workplaces and policing to education and housing—showing exactly how racism harms health. It makes the evidence clear and easily accessible to public health practitioners, policymakers, students, researchers, and anyone interested in an equitable, healthy society.”

EVENTS

Kyodo News: U.N. forum on internet governance begins in Kyoto, focus on AI. “A U.N. forum on public policy issues regarding the internet began in Kyoto on Sunday with focus on artificial intelligence and measures against disinformation. The results of the discussions at the Internet Governance Forum scheduled through Thursday will be utilized for the Hiroshima AI Process, in which the Group of Seven industrialized nations will establish rules on AI-related topics.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Decrypt: Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Creator Yuga Labs Confirms Layoffs. “Yuga Labs, the $4 billion startup behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club and other prominent NFT projects, announced Friday that it has restructured the company and eliminated certain roles as a result, leading to layoffs.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: The Easiest Ways to Access Your Computer Remotely. “FROM MUSIC STREAMING to video calling, the internet has given us so much. It has also made it much easier to get to your computer when you’re not actually sitting in front of it. There are now numerous remote access programs to choose from that will connect one computer to another across the web. What’s more, a lot of the basic tools are free to use.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen. “Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.”

Canadian Press: MuchMusic’s expansive physical videotape archive is finally going digital. “Decades of MuchMusic programming is being rescued from the sands of time. The music channel’s owner Bell Media says it’s on the final stretch of a years-long project to go through tens of thousands of videotapes and transfer pieces of pop culture history into a new digital archive.”

Chicago Tribune: Landmarks: A 200-year archive of maps faces uncertain future as 5-generation run of Chicago surveyors nears end. “A group of college students in Springfield was engaged in an ambitious project to digitize all the written records associated with court cases argued by Abraham Lincoln back when he was just an Illinois attorney. One name the students found that appeared in a couple of cases associated with Lincoln was Samuel S. Greeley, a prominent surveyor based in Chicago in the city’s early days.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Euromaidan: Texty: Russian museums refuse to return 110,000 Ukrainian looted treasures. “A new investigation by the Ukrainian media outlet TEXTY reveals that two of Russia’s biggest museums – the State Hermitage Museum and the State Historical Museum – hold over 110,000 artifacts that were taken from modern-day Ukraine. The study excluded icons, artwork, and weapons, as their origins are harder to trace. It also did not look at objects looted during the current war in Ukraine.”

ZDNet: Patch now: This serious Linux vulnerability affects nearly all distributions. “As security holes go, CVE-2023-4911, aka ‘Looney Tunables,’ isn’t horrid. It has a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 7.8, which is ranked as important, not critical. On the other hand, this GNU C Library’s (glibc) dynamic loader vulnerability is a buffer overflow, which is always big trouble, and it’s in pretty much all Linux distributions, so it’s more than bad enough.”

VN Express: Google Maps used to advertise illegal services in Vietnam. “People are trying to advertise illegal services anonymously using Google Maps’s tagging feature, the broadcast watchdog said. Le Quang Tu Do, head of the Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information, confirmed this on Thursday, saying his agency has received reports about tags not being properly displayed on Google Maps.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Tech Xplore: Study: Digital watermark protections can be easily bypassed. “Major digital media companies—OpenAI, Alphabet, Amazon, DeepMind—have promised to develop tools to combat disinformation. One key approach is the use of watermarking on AI-generated content. But a paper published Sept. 29 on the preprint server arXiv raises troubling news about the ability to curb such digital abuse. Professors at the University of Maryland ran tests demonstrating easy run-arounds of protective watermarks.” 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. I live at Calishat.

October 9, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Google, Reddit, Deepfake Voices, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 8, 2023

Google, Reddit, Deepfake Voices, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, October 8, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CBC: Still unsatisfied with Online News Act, Google says it expects to remove news links this year. “Google says it still expects to remove news links from its search engine at the end of the year. The company has been a part of the regulatory process for the Online News Act, which will require tech giants to pay media outlets for news content that is shared or repurposed on their online platforms. Google says draft regulations to implement the bill don’t address the company’s concerns.”

Mashable: Reddit just made some big updates to its search function. “Reddit has launched a slew of updates to its search functionality. The app broke down the latest additions, which include a media search tab, a media search within subreddits, and accessibility features, in a blog post on Wednesday.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

BBC: AI: Voice cloning tech emerges in Sudan civil war. “A campaign using artificial intelligence to impersonate Omar al-Bashir, the former leader of Sudan, has received hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok, adding online confusion to a country torn apart by civil war.”

VietnamNet: Online cuisine map to bring Vietnamese foods to the world. “The Vietnam Cuisine Culture Association (VCCA) is working to develop a national online cuisine map with a view to introducing Vietnamese cuisine quintessence to the world through helping those who want to explore the country’s food.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

404 Media: People Exploited YouTube Bug to Upload “Undeletable” Porn Videos. “A small community of people who search for adult content on YouTube has discovered a bug that allows them to continue hosting porn on YouTube, even if their channels are deleted.”

Europol: Europol and TikTok collaborate to bolster efforts against terrorist content. “On 28 September, a large-scale voluntary Referral Action Day between TikTok, Europol’s European Counter Terrorism Centre (ECTC) and 11 countries took place targeting suspected terrorist and violent extremist content online. In collaboration with the video sharing platform TikTok, investigators from the participating countries, together with the ECTC’s European Union Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU), performed an exercise to detect material glorifying past terrorist attacks or terrorist perpetrators.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Defense One: Taiwan is using generative AI to fight Chinese disinfo. “As Taiwan approaches a pivotal presidential election in January, Tang said that both the government and a wide network of volunteers are preparing for China to increase efforts to manipulate Taiwanese civilians. Taiwanese civil society has developed new organizations to combat it. A group called Cofacts allows users to forward dubious messages to a chatbot. Human editors check the messages, enter them into a database, and get back to the user with a verdict.”

City University of New York: A call for ethical guidelines for social media data use in public health research. “Three studies by CUNY SPH investigators highlight the need for stronger guidance on research ethics for using data from social media platforms in public health research, especially the use of personal identifiers.”

Harvard University: Undoing Empire, One Plant at a Time. “This summer, the Davis Center’s Imperiia team partnered with the Harvard Map Collection on the “Undoing Empire” project. The project was awarded a Harvard Library Advancing Open Knowledge grant to sustain work across a six-month period. It has three goals: 1) create a database of biodiversity in 19th-century Ukraine, 2) create an inclusive strategy for mapping historical places, and 3) develop best practices for producing data that can be preserved via the Harvard Geospatial Library and the Harvard Library (HOLLIS) catalog.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Yale Library: In the cards: Library partners work together to solve mysteries of rare tarot deck. “For the past five years, and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the library has collaborated internally and partnered internationally to study the world’s three earliest 15th-century Italian tarot (or tarocchi) decks. One of these decks is the Visconti di Modrone deck, held in the Cary Collection of Playing Cards at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Dating from ca. 1440–45, it is one of the oldest of the three.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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October 9, 2023 at 12:15AM
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