India Today: US Embassy launches website to document cultural heritage of tribes in Arunachal Pradesh. “The United States Mission in India launched a website to celebrate the intangible cultural heritage of the indigenous tribes of Arunachal Pradesh as part of the celebrations of 75 years of bilateral relations between Washington and New Delhi.”
CNN: Twitter CEO and Elon Musk depositions did not begin Monday, despite earlier filings in acquisition dispute. “Billionaire Elon Musk and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal did not sit for depositions Monday as part of an ongoing merger lawsuit despite earlier scheduling notices filed in a Delaware court, marking another twist in a closely watched case about the future of one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.”
Mashable: Content moderation is changing how we speak — and dictating who gets heard. “It’s not surprising that language changes with the influence of online content. New forms of communication have that effect. But content moderation, with all its fluidity and platform-specific nuances, has the potential to force our language to evolve at an accelerated rate, often silencing marginalized communities.”
MakeUseOf: The 6 Best Authenticator Apps for 2FA and Other Enhanced Account Security. “Even if you use a unique username and password combination for all your accounts (which is unlikely), it could still be compromised through brute-force hacking, social engineering, or phishing. That’s why you should use a two-factor authenticator (2FA) app. But with so many options out there, which should you use? Let’s check out the six best 2FA apps for securing your online accounts.”
Electronic Frontier Foundation: Study of Electronic Monitoring Smartphone Apps Confirms Advocates’ Concerns of Privacy Harms. “Researchers at the University of Washington and Harvard Law School recently published a groundbreaking study analyzing the technical capabilities of 16 electronic monitoring (EM) smartphone apps used as ‘alternatives’ to criminal and civil detention.”
MIT Technology Review: There’s no Tiananmen Square in the new Chinese image-making AI. “The new text-to-image AI developed by Baidu can generate images that show Chinese objects and celebrities more accurately than existing AIs. But a built-in censorship mechanism will filter out politically sensitive words.”
The Verge: How platforms turn boring. “At first, TikTok was exciting because there was culture that could only happen there. Now that on-platform culture is being overwhelmed by viral arbitrage, and the actual content is getting closer to what you see on every other network. As the platform gets bigger, it gets more generic, and there’s less to distinguish it from every other mass-market social network. This dynamic is larger than just TikTok.”
Erasing 76 Crimes: Activists launch website to document trans and intersex African history. “A group of activists has launched an initiative to document and preserve the history of trans and intersex Africans and their struggle for equal rights. The web site Trans and Intersex History Africa is a labor of love for the four principal curators, who come from South Africa and Uganda.”
TechRadar: 100TB cartridges set to rival tapes, hard drives, DNA for data archiving domination. “Optical storage (think DVD and Blu-ray) has been in the shadows as tape, exotic media (like silica or DNA) and hard disk drives vie for supremacy in the hotly contested area of archiving. However, one newcomer, Folio Photonics, aims to deliver the goods faster than everyone by taking a new spin on existing optical technology.”
PetaPixel: Getty Images Ban AI-Generated Pictures, Shutterstock Following Suit. “Getty Images has announced it will not accept submissions that were created with AI-image generators and will remove all such artworks. The world’s largest repository of images shared with PetaPixel the note sent to contributors stating that images generated from artificially intelligent (AI) image generators such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney will not be allowed on the site.”
New-to-me, via Awesome Archives: Marginalia. From the About Page: “Remember when you used to explore the Internet, when you used to discover cool little websites made by people and it wasn’t just a bunch of low effort content mill listicles and blog spam? I want to show you that the Internet you used to go exploring is still very much there. There are still tons of small personal websites, and a wealth of long form text from both the past and the present.” I see there’s an API too… hmm…
The Clare Herald: Clare invite to Dublin Festival of History online. “Now in its eighth year, the festival will take place largely online as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, but will still play host to an international and domestic line up of speakers and panels. The festival will shine a light and fresh perspective on topics such as the construction of the notion of race, Ireland’s last great pandemic and the history of Ireland’s partition.” Events are free but registration is required.
Spotted in about four different places at once: the new EU initiative Open Web Search. “14 renowned European research and computing centers have joined forces to develop an open European infrastructure for web search. The project will be contributing to Europe’s digital sovereignty as well as promoting an open human-centered search engine market.” Sounds good to me!
NPR: Google celebrates NASA’s DART mission with a new search gimmick. “Tech giant Google took it upon itself to launch its own type of celebration following NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully crashing into an asteroid on Monday evening.”
9to5Google: Some Google Photos users finding that old images have been ‘corrupted’ [Updated]. “In recent days, Google Photos users scrolling back several years through their library have found pictures that can be best described as ‘corrupted.’ Update 9/26: Google shared the following this afternoon: ‘We’re aware of the issue and are rolling out a fix. The original photos are not impacted.’”
