NEW RESOURCES

Wine Searcher: Australia Goes to War on Wine Fakes. “…the system called ELISS (Export Label Image Search System) is a step in the right direction, and it’s possible because Australia has a level of government control over exports that not every country has. The idea is to create a database of legitimate brand labels. Whenever you see an Australian wine in a store, you can use that database to check if it really was legally exported.”

NASA: NASA Unveils New Interactive Website Ahead of Landsat 9 Launch. “Landsat 9, a joint NASA and U.S. Geological Survey satellite mission, is scheduled to launch Thursday, Sept. 16, from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. To help the media and public learn more about the project and its near 50-year history, NASA has launched a new interactive website.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mashable: Remember Yik Yak? Well, it’s back and still anonymous.. “Buckle up, millennials. Remember Yik Yak, the anonymous app that, in effect, allowed gossip and shit-talking to run rampant during your high school or college years? Well, it’s back. Details on the relaunch remain relatively scarce. It just sort of showed up on Monday after being teased last week.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: How to Find the Hidden ‘Orphaned’ Files Eating Your Google Drive Storage. “While this is a rare phenomenon, Google Music’s recent shutdown has dramatically increased the possibility users have orphaned music and podcast files that weren’t properly deleted before the service closed, as users in this reddit thread have discovered. Luckily, there are ways to find and remove at least some of those unhoused files.”

Larry Ferlazzo: Resources For Teaching About The Afghanistan War. “As we watch the devastating images from the Kabul airport, and as those of us with Afghan students hear the worry and panic in their voices about their loved ones who are still in Afghanistan, teachers in session might want to teach about what is going on there – and how it reached this point.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

MSNBC: What the elusive RNC statement on Afghanistan actually said. “It’s important to emphasize at the outset that much of the RNC’s online archive has been removed, not just this single document. I went searching this morning for RNC press statements from 2020 regarding the COVID pandemic, the campaign, and Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation process. The links to all of the online statements from last year led to the same ‘404 error’ page. In other words, it appears the RNC scrubbed its online archive of effectively all pre-2021 statements, not just the press release about Trump and Afghanistan.”

Business Insider: Pictures of Swastikas temporarily replaced Wikipedia pages for Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck. “Dozens of Wikipedia pages were temporarily replaced with pictures of Swastikas Monday morning. The changes, which were only in place for a few minutes before the pages reverted to their usual contents, removed all the text and images from the pages and replaced them with a bright red background and large Swastika image, which is also the German Nazi Party’s flag.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

BBC: Social media fraud: The influencers promoting criminal scams. “On social media, there’s a new type of influencer. But instead of promoting clothing lines and lifestyle products, they promote fraud. They flash stacks of cash, hide their faces, and some even lure new recruits by selling guides on committing fraud. You’d think these scammers and their illegal products would be hard to find, and once upon a time, they were, hidden in the shadows of the dark web. But not any more.”

ZDNet: How to find and remove spyware from your phone. “This guide will run through what spyware is, what the warning signs of infection are, and how to remove such pestilence from your mobile devices.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Motherboard: This Tool Lets You Program an Entire App With One Voice Command. “A new tool for generating lines of code from natural speech can churn out programming language from just the sound of your voice. In a video demonstrating the application, Andrew Mayne, who works for OpenAI, says it’s a ‘voice and natural language code creation tool’ that works with Python and Javascript. When you’re done speaking to it, it runs a terminal to test that the code works.”

The Verge: Facebook shut down German research on Instagram algorithm, researchers say. “Researchers at AlgorithmWatch say they were forced to abandon their research project monitoring the Instagram algorithm after legal threats from Facebook. The Berlin-based project went public with the conflict in a post published Friday morning, citing the platform’s recent ban of the NYU Ad Observatory.”

OTHER STUFF I THINK IS COOL

Boing Boing: Brian Eno fan? Listen to ten straight hours of radio programming about his career and music . “In 1988, Bay Area public radio station KPFA dedicated ten straight hours of programming to the music and career of Brian Eno. You can listen to all of ‘Brian Eno Day’ ​on the Internet Archive.” Good morning, Internet…

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