Washington Post: “Sick of companies grabbing and selling your address, birth date, location, online activity, dog food brand and even adult-film preferences? Oh boy, do I have some good news. A new iPhone and Android app called Permission Slip makes it super simple to order companies to delete your personal information and secrets. Trying it… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: January 2024
How to Reduce Your Exposure to Plastic in Food (and Everywhere Else)
Consumer Reports – “It’s nearly impossible to completely avoid bisphenols and phthalates. But several small, strategic shifts can help. Plasticizers—the most common of which are called phthalates—are used to make plastic more flexible and more durable. They’re so widely used that today, they show up inside almost all of us, right along with other chemicals… Continue Reading
All Science journals will now do an AI-powered check for image fraud
Ars Technica: “On Thursday [January 4, 2024], the research publisher Science announced that all of its journals will begin using commercial software that automates the process of detecting improperly manipulated images. The move comes many years into our awareness that the transition to digital data and publishing has made it comically easy to commit research… Continue Reading
How to Get a Job in the Age of AI, According to a Top LinkedIn Executive
Bloomberg [read free]: “Daniel Shapero has been at LinkedIn since 2008, when the Great Recession rocked the labor market. He’s since risen through the ranks to become the company’s chief operating officer, guiding the platform through significant strategic shifts. Now owned by Microsoft Corp., the professional networking site is taking on its next big transformation:… Continue Reading
Report: Thomas May Also Be Dodging Tax Bill With Failure to Report Gifts
The Lever – “If billionaires’ largesse was designed to keep the justice on the high court, experts say the money could be considered a taxable payment… Much of the public outcry over Thomas’ long history of undisclosed gifts has centered on whether the activities violate federal ethics laws. Lawmakers have also zeroed in on one… Continue Reading
How to configure and use hot corners on macOS
The Verge: “There’s a lot to explore in macOS — from file sharing to keyboard remapping — so you’d be forgiven for not having discovered every single feature that Apple’s desktop operating system has to offer. One of the most useful and yet less well known features is something Apple calls hot corners. Like keyboard… Continue Reading
White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers Paid Off President Trump
Staff Report Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Democratic Staff, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member. U.S. House of Representatives, January 4, 2024 “Donald J. Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his presidency, according to new documents released by House Democrats on Thursday that show how much he received from overseas… Continue Reading
Two years, 400 journalists and 50 climate experts
The Reuters Institute: Here’s what we learnt about how to report on climate change – “Since the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN) kicked off in January 2022, reporters, editors, photographers and fact-checkers alike have gathered week after week, talking to fellow reporters and to science and policy experts about how to understand the ways climate… Continue Reading
Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?
Neil Perry, Megha Srivastava, Deepak Kumar, and Dan Boneh. 2023. Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ’23), November 26–30, 2023, Copenhagen, Denmark. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 16 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3576915.3623157 “We conducted the first user study examining how… Continue Reading
How social media platforms shaped our initial understanding of the Israel-Hamas conflict
The Atlantic Council – The Big Story – Distortion by Design. Emerson T. Brooking, Layla Mashkoor, Jacqueline Malaret: “The first declaration of war came via Telegram. On October 7, at 7:14 a.m. local time, Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades used its Telegram channel to announce the beginning of a coordinated terror attack against Israel. Posts on Hamas’s… Continue Reading
A New Kind of AI Copy Can Fully Replicate Famous People
Politico – The Law Is Powerless. “…AI-generated digital replicas illuminate a new kind of policy gray zone created by powerful new “generative AI” platforms, where existing laws and old norms begin to fail. In Washington, spurred mainly by actors and performers alarmed by AI’s capacity to mimic their image and voice, some members of Congress… Continue Reading
NIST Tool Will Make Math-Heavy Research Papers Easier to View Online
NIST – A tool developed by a NIST scientist will help arXiv preprints become more accessible. Preprints of scientific papers from physics and other math-heavy disciplines could become far more accessible with the use of a NIST-developed tool that converts formulas to a format easily viewable as a webpage. The arXiv preprint server, which has… Continue Reading
