The Business Insider – Online archives are vanishing — and they’re taking our history with them. “The long-promised digital apocalypse has finally arrived, and it was heralded by a blog post. Published on July 18, the post’s headline sounded pretty arcane. “Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available,” it declared. I know, I… Continue Reading
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Category Archives: Search Engines
Washington Post Leverages ‘AI’ To Undermine History And Make Search Less Useful
TechDirt: “While “AI” (language learning models) certainly could help journalism, the fail upward brunchlords in charge of most modern media outlets instead see the technology as a way to cut corners, undermine labor, badly automate low-quality, ultra-low effort, SEO-chasing clickbait, and rush undercooked solutions to nonexistent problems to market under the pretense of progress. For example,… Continue Reading
Location data firm helps police find out when suspects visited their doctor
Ars Technica: “A location-tracking company that sells its services to police departments is apparently using addresses and coordinates of doctors’ and lawyers’ offices and other types of locations to help cops compile lists of places visited by suspects, according to a 404 Media report published today. Fog Data Science, which says it “harness[es] the power… Continue Reading
Dow Jones negotiates AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 news publishers
NiemanLab: “…Last month, Factiva announced it had signed generative AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 publishers around the world. The agreements are for the business intelligence platform and news database, which houses articles by online outlets, newspapers, magazines, and transcripts of radio shows. Among the thousands of publishers who signed the agreements are The Associated… Continue Reading
Verification and Digital Investigations Resources
Mike Reilley – Maintained by Craig Silverman of ProPublica (@CraigSilverman). This is by no means a totally comprehensive list, but it covers what I consider to be essential plugins and tools for general OSINT/online research work. There are also links to other resources to go deeper. Continue Reading
CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool
The Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool CREAT is a data tool from the Center for Economic Studies (CES) at the US Census Bureau that uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence tools to analyze, categorize, and sort the economic research contained in the CES working paper series. The goal of this project is to… Continue Reading
Searchable archive of DOJ Civil Rights Division reports and findings letters
Tyler McBrien. DOJ Police Department Pattern or Practice Reports and Findings Letters. A searchable archive of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division reports from investigations into patterns and practices of excessive force, biased policing, and other unconstitutional practices by law enforcement. Continue Reading
CFPB Orders Federal Supervision of Google Following Contested Designation
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) today published an order establishing supervisory authority over Google Payment Corp. The CFPB is responsible for supervising a wide range of financial firms to ensure they are complying with federal consumer financial protection laws. The CFPB has supervised nonbank entities in certain industries like mortgage and payday lending, service… Continue Reading
New EDGAR advanced search gives you access to the full text of electronic filings since 2001
What is Full-Text Search? Full-Text Search will allow you to search the full text of all EDGAR filings submitted electronically since 2001. The full text of a filing includes all data in the filing itself as well as all attachments (such as exhibits) to the filing. What kinds of searches can I do on Full-Text… Continue Reading
Stop using generative AI as a search engine
The Verge – A fake presidential pardon explains why you can’t trust robots with the news – ChatGPT, it turns out, is a woefully bad way to explore the historical record…Whatever happened in this case, there’s a running pattern of people relying on ChatGPT or other AI services to provide answers, only to get hallucinations… Continue Reading
100 million places
Data is Plural: “Foursquare has released an open dataset describing more than 100 million points of interest across 200+ countries. For each place, the dataset includes its name, address, latitude/longitude, date entered, date updated, date marked closed, telephone number, website, email address, and relevant categories. Among the many possible labels: casino, comedy club, 300+ kinds… 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
