“PimEyes is an online face search engine that goes through the Internet to find pictures containing given faces. PimEyes uses face recognition search technologies to perform a reverse image search. Find a face and check where the image appears online. Our face finder helps you find a face and protect your privacy. Facial recognition online… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Search Engines
New web crawler launched by Meta last month is quietly scraping the internet for AI training data
Fortune [no paywall]: “Meta has quietly unleashed a new web crawler to scour the internet and collect data en masse to feed its AI model. The crawler, named the Meta External Agent, was launched last month according to three firms that track web scrapers and bots across the web. The automated bot essentially copies, or… Continue Reading
Invisible Rulers – What Really Drives Online Content
Mark Scott, Digital Bridge, Politico: “After years of tracking online disinformation, propaganda and other digital nastiness, Renée diResta sees patterns where others see chaos. In her new book, “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality,” the former Stanford University researcher tries to parse together a theory about why, seemingly out of the blue,… Continue Reading
Don’t trust Google for customer service numbers. It might be a scam.
Washington Post [unpaywalled]: “Scams just keep popping up when you Google. On Monday, I found what appeared to be impostors of customer service for Delta and Coinbase, the cryptocurrency company, in the “People also ask” section high up in Google. A group of people experienced in Google’s intricacies also said this week that it took… Continue Reading
Rejecting Dogmas Around AI, User Privacy, and Tech Policy
Via LLRX – Rejecting Dogmas Around AI, User Privacy, and Tech Policy – The Markup’s Ross Teixeira had a virtual discussion with Jonathan Frankle, Chief Scientist at DataBricks, about the the ethics of companies using customer data to train models, the growing trend of integrating AI models into our personal devices and lives, and how people can… Continue Reading
OpenTheBooks.com – Every Dime. Online. In Real Time.
“At OpenTheBooks.com, we work hard to capture and post all disclosed spending at every level of government – federal, state, and local. In 2022, we filed 50,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and captured 25 million public employee pension and salary records. We also broke open the California state checkbook for the first time… Continue Reading
An exercise to make you better at using GenAI/LLMs
Brainyacts – Reasoning Engines, Not Search Engines – “For most people, it is still too easy to fall into the trap of viewing Large Language Models (LLMs) or GenAI tools as merely advanced search engines. After all, these models will produce answers to almost any question at the drop of a hat, making them seem… Continue Reading
Exploring Goodreads Data: An Analysis of 10 Million Books
Ammar Alyousfi’s Blog: “Goodreads is one of the largest book websites on the internet. It has data about millions and millions of books from different genres and in many languages. It’s hard not to find a book on Goodreads whether it’s published hundreds of years ago or just a few days ago. Today, I present… Continue Reading
NationalPublicData.com Hack Exposes a Nation’s Data
Krebs on Security: “A great many readers this month reported receiving alerts that their Social Security Number, name, address and other personal information were exposed in a breach at a little-known but aptly-named consumer data broker called NationalPublicData.com. This post examines what we know about a breach that has exposed hundreds of millions of consumer… Continue Reading
Google quietly opens Imagen 3 access to all U.S. users
VentureBeat: “Google has quietly made its latest text-to-image AI model, Imagen 3, available to all U.S. users through its ImageFX platform and published a research paper detailing the technology. This dual release marks a significant expansion of access to the AI tool, which was initially announced in May at Google I/O and limited to select… Continue Reading
Microsoft Tweaks Fine Print To Warn Everyone Not To Take Its AI Seriously
The Register – “Microsoft is notifying users that its AI services should not be taken too seriously, echoing prior service-specific disclaimers – an update to the IT giant’s Service Agreement, which takes effect on September 30, 2024, Redmond has declared that its Assistive AI isn’t suitable for matters of consequence. “AI services are not designed,… Continue Reading
The new Google AI Overview layout is a small win for publishers
Mashable: “Google’s AI Overviews got off to a rocky start, but it hasn’t deterred the tech giant from charging ahead with foisting AI-generated summaries upon your search results, like it or not. On Thursday Google announced new updates to AI Overviews, some of which might make publishers a little happier. As of today, Google is… Continue Reading
