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Category Archives: Knowledge Management

Delete all your tweets for free with Cyd

Wired: “Michah Lee wants to help you achieve that same cleansing release. Today, he launched Cyd—an acronym for “Claw back Your Data”—a desktop application designed to give users more control over their X history: archiving it, trimming it to their preferences, or destroying it altogether. In the free version of Cyd, the program allows anyone to download their X posts—Cyd can save up to 2,000 of your most recent posts itself, or you can use X’s built-in feature that allows you to download your entire archive—and then automatically delete them. For $36 a year, users can access Cyd’s premium features, like erasing the contents of their account with more fine-grained filters based on variables like date, number of likes or retweets, or keywords, un-retweeting or removing likes from posts en masse, and unfollowing all X users. While Cyd for now is designed specifically for managing—or emptying out—your X account, Lee says he hopes to eventually add other features for carrying out the same archiving and deletion functions on services like Facebook and Reddit. “A handful of billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos control all the platforms that we use all the time and where we have all our data,” Lee says. “I want to basically make it so that the users of these platforms—everybody else who isn’t one of these really rich tech billionaires—has a bit more power.”

Top Ten EFF Digital Security Resources for People Concerned About Incoming Trump Administration

“In the wake of the 2024 election in the United States, many people are concerned about tightening up their digital privacy and security practices. As always, we recommend that people start making their security plan by understanding their risks. For most people in the U.S., the threats that they face and the methods by which… Continue Reading

How ChatGPT Search (Mis)represents Publisher Content

Columbia Journalism Review – “ChatGPT search—which is positioned as a competitor to search engines like Google and Bing—launched with a press release from OpenAI touting claims that the company had “collaborated extensively with the news industry” and “carefully listened to feedback” from certain news organizations that have signed content licensing agreements with the company. In… Continue Reading

Best Business Journalism of the Year

Bloomberg: “In Catholicism, envy is one of the seven deadly sins. In professional journalism, it’s a virtue, albeit too seldomly expressed. Which is why every year, Bloomberg Businessweek commits this cardinal act for all to witness, with our annual Jealousy List. Below, we’ve asked our editors and contributors to identify that one story in 2024… Continue Reading

FTC – Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services

Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services, September 2024. In December 2020, the Federal Trade Commission issued 6(b) Orders to nine of the largest social media and video streaming services—Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Snap, ByteDance, Discord, Reddit, and WhatsApp (“Companies”). At the time, a bipartisan group of Commissioners issued a joint… Continue Reading

The Great Scrape: The Clash Between Scraping and Privacy

Solove, Daniel J. and Hartzog, Woodrow, The Great Scrape: The Clash Between Scraping and Privacy (July 03, 2024). 113 California Law Review (forthcoming 2025), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4884485 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4884485   Artificial intelligence (AI) systems depend on massive quantities of data, often gathered by “scraping” – the automated extraction of large amounts of data from… Continue Reading

52 things I learned in 2024

Tim Whitwell: Just a preview: When writing a sentence, don’t keep your reader waiting. [David Crystal via The Browser] Millions of free bikes have been given to children in rural India, doubling the number of girls cycling to school, increasing attendance and reducing dropouts. [Rachita Vora] On 30 September 2024, the UK became the first… Continue Reading

The Beautiful Ludlow Typography Specimen Books c. 1958

Letters are beautiful. From specimens of chromatic woodtype to the groovy letter people and 16th Century writing templates typography and calligraphy turn visual language into something beautiful. Beginning in the early 20th Century, the Ludlow Typograph Company (1906 to late 1980s) gave its sales staff specimen books to advertise fonts and ornaments that could be… Continue Reading