TechCrunch: “Starting today, users of the social magazine app Flipboard can follow any federated accounts, meaning those that participate in the social network of interconnected servers known as the fediverse..this now includes Threads accounts in addition to Mastodon accounts and others. With the update, which deepens Flipboard’s connection with the ActivityPub social graph, any Flipboard… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: August 2024
Who Has Your Face
EFF – Who Has Your Face – “Law enforcement and government agencies have access to over 641 million photos for facial recognition purposes—photos of more than half of Americans. Knowing which agencies can access these images is necessary to fight back against this invasion of privacy. Learn more below. Table of Contents State Licenses/IDs Passports,… Continue Reading
How to Turn Off AI Overview Results in Your Google Searches
How to Geek – “Have you been scrolling through Google settings looking for the button that turns off AI overviews in search? I tried it too and learned two things. First, there’s no official way to disable AI overviews. Luckily, there are workarounds to get rid of those experimental search results on Google. Google Doesn’t… Continue Reading
De-Google your life: How to delete all photos from Google Photos
Proton Blog: “Using Google Photos to store and share your pictures means allowing the company to see, analyze, and process them. Many people concerned about their privacy have taken steps to move away from the Google ecosystem, despite the company’s efforts to hide its surveillance-based business model. Apart from privacy concerns, Google made promises about… Continue Reading
In November 2024, everything is at stake
“The cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate. That’s a quote from Thomas Jefferson, and it’s super-relevant to our situation today. Our schools aren’t doing enough to create an educated electorate, and most of our journalists are doing a terrible job. This is terrifying, because the 2024 elections could be the… Continue Reading
Thousands of Corporate Secrets Were Left Exposed. This Guy Found Them All
Wired – Security researcher Bill Demirkapi found more than 15,000 hardcoded secrets and 66,000 vulnerable websites—all by searching overlooked data sources [unpaywalled]: “If you know where to look, plenty of secrets can be found online. Since the fall of 2021, independent security researcher Bill Demirkapi has been building ways to tap into huge data sources,… Continue Reading
Mainframes Find New Life in AI Era
WSJ via MSN: “Banks, insurance providers and airlines still find uses, including artificial intelligence, for the large computers that have been around for decades The industrial-strength mainframe computer, invented decades ago for heavy-duty data processing, is proving its staying power even as next-generation artificial intelligence takes center stage. The two are interconnected: Banks, insurance providers… Continue Reading
The Files are in the Computer: On Copyright, Memorization, and Generative AI
Cooper, A. Feder and Grimmelmann, James and Grimmelmann, James, The Files are in the Computer: On Copyright, Memorization, and Generative AI (April 22, 2024). Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper Forthcoming, Chicago-Kent Law Review, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4803118 – “The New York Times’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft alleges that OpenAI’s GPT models have… Continue Reading
Pandemic-Era Liquid Wealth Is Running Dry
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: “Households accumulated more liquid assets beginning in 2020 than would have been expected without the pandemic. These “extra” liquid assets have dissipated, but their evolution has differed significantly by income group. While middle- and lower-income households hold substantially less liquid wealth than implied by pre-pandemic projections, the level for… Continue Reading
There’s Now a Nasal Spray for Dangerous Allergic Reactions
AP: “U.S. health officials on Friday approved a nasal spray to treat severe allergic reactions, the first needle-free alternative to shots like EpiPen. The Food and Drug Administration said it approved the spray from drugmaker ARS Pharmaceuticals Inc. as an emergency treatment for adults and older children experiencing life-threatening allergic reactions known as anaphylaxis. Anaphylaxis… Continue Reading
How Close Are the Planet’s Climate Tipping Points?
The New York Times – article and visualizations [unpaywalled]: “Earth’s warming could trigger sweeping changes in the natural world that would be hard, if not impossible, to reverse. Right now, every moment of every day, we humans are reconfiguring Earth’s climate bit by bit. Hotter summers and wetter storms. Higher seas and fiercer wildfires. The… Continue Reading
The mining of the public domain
Jessamyn West, Librarian.net – “Public.work is a search engine for public domain content.” The site claims to have over 100,000 public domain images. This in and of itself is not that special, but the interface is. It’s gorgeous, a fun and engaging discovery layer where every search becomes a URL that can be shared [example]… Continue Reading
