Wired [unpaywalled]- This Machine Exposes Privacy Violations. A former Google engineer has built a search engine, WebXray, that aims to find illicit online data collection and tracking—with the goal of becoming “the Henry Ford of tech lawsuits.”…It’s a search engine for rooting out specific privacy violations anywhere on the web. By searching for a specific… Continue Reading
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Category Archives: Search Engines
Meta releases its biggest ‘open’ AI model yet
TechCrunch: “Meta’s latest open source AI model is its biggest yet. Today, Meta said it is releasing Llama 3.1 405B, a model containing 405 billion parameters. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters. At 405 billion parameters, Llama 3.1 405B isn’t… Continue Reading
A week of nonstop breaking political news stumps AI chatbots
Washington Post [unpaywalled]: “In the hour after President Biden announced he would withdraw from the 2024 campaign on Sunday, most popular AI chatbots seemed oblivious to the news. Asked directly whether he had dropped out, almost all said no or declined to give an answer. Asked who was running for president of the United States,… Continue Reading
The FOIA.gov Search Tool Updated
“FOIA.gov, the government’s central resource for information about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) now includes additional functionality to help users locate commonly requested law enforcement and related records. The FOIA.gov Search Tool was updated to add a “Law Enforcement records” pre-defined user journey that helps the public more quickly locate commonly requested information. This user journey… Continue Reading
Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available
Yet another reason to stop using google via Google for Developers: “In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time.… Continue Reading
How to remove court records from Google: 3 effective strategies
Search Engine Land: “Legal issues can drag on for ages. That’s the simple, unfortunate truth. Worse, once a legal matter is filed in court, the case is highly likely to become visible on the web. Hundreds of websites now aggregate public court records and publish them for the world to see. The issue I commonly… Continue Reading
Maripedia online database of hundreds of Marimekko print patterns
“Explore prints [browse by designer, decade or style or search by image] – Since the early 1950s, Marimekko designers have created some 3,500 prints. At the moment, the number of patterns in Maripedia is limited. We’re constantly adding more designs to our virtual print library.” Continue Reading
Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content
Vincent Schmalbach: “…The New Reality – Selective Indexing: This brings us to the current state of affairs: Google is no longer trying to index the entire web. In fact, it’s become extremely selective, refusing to index most content. This isn’t about content creators failing to meet some arbitrary standard of quality. Rather, it’s a fundamental… 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 best train travel guide is run by one man, all for free
BoingBoing: “I’ve not found a more accurate or thorough guide to international train travel than the website The Man in Seat 61. It’s the long-running passion project of one die hard train enthusiast, Mark Smith, who writes, updates, and aims to sample all the locomotion this good earth has to offer. While bus and train… 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
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
