Washington Post [unpaywalled] – There’s a flood of real, misleading and fake breaking news and information online. Proceed with caution: “Anyone with an internet connection can watch breaking news unfold in real time, or at least some version of it. Across social media, posts can fly up faster than most fact-checkers and moderators can handle,… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Internet
(Almost) 200 Years of News-Based Economic Sentiment
(Almost) 200 Years of News-Based Economic Sentiment Jules H. van Binsbergen, Svetlana Bryzgalova, Mayukh Mukhopadhyay & Varun Sharma – Working Paper 32026. DOI 10.3386/w32026 Issue Date January 2024. “Using text from 200 million pages of 13,000 US local newspapers and machine learning methods, we construct a 170-year-long measure of economic sentiment at the country and state… Continue Reading
Fake Local News Sites Tracker: 1,268 Sites and Counting
“In June 2024, NewsGuard reported that so-called pink slime websites — sites posing as independent news outlets but secretly funded by partisan groups — now outnumber daily newspapers in the U.S. Below, we track the spread of pink slime websites, as compared to Northwestern Local News Initiative’s count of daily newspapers. (Northwestern’s tracker was last… Continue Reading
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 13, 2024
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 13, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex… Continue Reading
The Public Domain Review
“Founded in 2011, The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas. As our name suggests, the focus is on works now fallen into the public domain, that vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is… Continue Reading
In an Era of Fakes, How to Know When Someone Online Is Real
WSJ via MSN: “You’re on Facebook, LinkedIn or X and get a message. Maybe it’s from a stranger in your industry, maybe someone from your hometown claiming to know you from way back when. The person wants to reconnect or get your advice. This could all be wonderful. Or it could be the start of… Continue Reading
New Ways to Search Archived Music News
Internet Archive Blogs: “When MTVNews.com went offline in late June, Internet users were quick to discover that some (but sadly, not all) of the site had been archived in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. While you can no longer browse MTV News directly on the web, the archived pages are available via the Wayback Machine,… Continue Reading
TikTok Content Farms Use AI Voiceovers to Mass-Produce Political Misinformation
“In September 2023, NewsGuard identified what appeared to be the first of its kind: a network of 17 TikTok accounts using AI text-to-speech software to create videos advancing conspiracy theories about celebrities, amassing hundreds of millions of views. Now, the phenomenon appears to be growing and shifting its focus to politics. NewsGuard has identified 41… Continue Reading
Everyone Has A Price And Corporations Know Yours
The Lever – “Digital surveillance and customer isolation are locking us into a consumer hell of personalized prices. Six years ago, I was at a conference at the University of Chicago, the intellectual heart of corporate-friendly capitalism, when my eyes found the cover of the Chicago Booth Review, the business school’s flagship publication. “Are You… Continue Reading
Even Disinformation Experts Don’t Know How to Stop It
The New York Times – “Researchers have learned plenty about misinformation and how it spreads. But they’re still struggling to figure out how to stop it…Holding the line against misinformation and disinformation is demoralizing and sometimes dangerous work, requiring an unusual degree of optimism and doggedness. Increasingly, however, even the most committed warriors are feeling… Continue Reading
GoogleDark Web Monitoring
Gizmodo: “The Mountain View company will integrate Dark Web monitoring with Google’s Results About You page sometime toward the end of the month. That feature notifies users if their personal information, their name, address, or phone number, appears in search results. Google has previously stated its goal to scrub personal information from results, though it… Continue Reading
Every Phone Can ID Your Router – Here’s How to Stop It
PC Mag: “Your smartphone constantly checks available Wi-Fi nodes, looking to reconnect with any that you’ve used before. You can see it happening, and it’s very convenient (though vulnerable to spoofing and “evil twin” attacks). What you don’t see is that your smartphone also uploads identifying details about your router to giant databases maintained by… Continue Reading
