NEW RESOURCES

PR Newswire: Sustainable fashion search engine, Ethical Clothing, launches in the US & Canada with thousands of searchable, ethically produced clothes (PRESS RELEASE). “An uptick in the importance of brand values and consumer consciousness has resulted in not only large high street brands taking sustainable fashion seriously, but also a significant increase in new smaller brands that have sustainability baked into their DNA. Studies in the US show that more than two thirds of Americans are willing to pay more for sustainable products, but most (74%) don’t know how to identify them. The launch of Ethical Clothing’s sustainable fashion search engine in North America aims to resolve this problem.”

KSL: Utahns can now easily track crime in their area. “The Utah Department of Public Safety has a new tool that helps people track the crime happening in their counties. By choosing a county and police jurisdiction, for example, Cottonwood Heights, the Crime in Utah Dashboards will display data and allow anybody using the dashboard to search it.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: How to Spot Content Marketing in Search Results. “Until recently I was employed, full-time, by a software company where I wrote articles designed to rank highly in Google results, where they’d get millions of clicks. More and more of your search results are like this. It’s called content marketing, and it’s somewhere between the editorial content you read on sites like this one and straight-up advertising. At its best, content marketing blends a certain amount of useful information with something that serves specific marketing aims. At its worst, content marketing is a way for marketers to get blatant sales pitches to rank highly in search results while also ruining your day.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Honi Soit (University of Sydney): The art of campus & the campus of art. “Artworks on campus are a rather ominous mainstay of our University; an omnipresent monolith we engage with inside every building, hallway, street and alcove. But with questions such as: ‘where does it come from?’, ‘who put it there?’ and ‘who owns it?’ mostly going unanswered, the influence art exerts over our academic and recreational environments remains uninterrogated.” Excellent deep dive into something I’d never thought much about.

ZDNet: What’s the most popular web browser in 2022?. “Historically, it’s been challenging to get hard data on which browsers really were the most popular web browsers. True, many companies claimed to have good numbers, such as NetMarketShare and StatCounter, but their numbers are massaged. The US federal government’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP), however, gives us a running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits. That doesn’t tell us much about global web browser use, but it’s the best information we have about American web browser users today.”

Rolling Stone: Parents Are Freaking Out Over Huggy Wuggy, a Janky Blue Bear With Razor-Sharp Teeth. “There’s nothing that parents of small children love more than giving kids unfettered access to phones and iPads — then freaking out over what kinds of age-inappropriate content they may be seeing on such devices. Case in point: the recent panic over Huggy Wuggy, a character from a video game franchise who is the subject of hysterical reports posted in police and mom Facebook groups.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Bleeping Computer: Malicious web redirect service infects 16,500 sites to push malware. “A new traffic direction system (TDS) called Parrot is relying on servers that host 16,500 websites of universities, local governments, adult content platforms, and personal blogs. Parrot’s use is for malicious campaigns to redirect potential victims matching a specific profile (location, language, operating system, browser) to online resources such as phishing and malware-dropping sites.”

The Verge: Vevo to ‘review’ security after YouTube feeds for Lil Nas X, Justin Bieber, and others were hacked. “On Tuesday morning, YouTube channels for some of the world’s biggest stars showered fans with strange music videos. Vevo channels for artists like Lil Nas X, Eminem, Drake, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Harry Styles, The Weeknd, Michael Jackson, Kanye West, and many others were affected. The channels in question have subscriber counts that add up to hundreds of millions. Before the videos disappeared, viewers saw bizarre clips of Paco Sanz, a Spanish conman sentenced to two years in jail after being convicted of fraud for lying about having terminal cancer, and rapper Lil Tjay.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechCrunch: Is social media (re)traumatizing you? . “What happens when you’re out of content to scroll through and react to on the internet? What’s there to keep you engaged whether the content makes you angry, sad, happy or all of the above at once? What can a company like Facebook, Google or Twitter do to keep their hooks in so you keep coming back like a zombie begging for more? A new feature? An algorithm tweak? Nope. It all comes back to you. You’re the one who’s going to keep you engaged when there isn’t enough out there to rope you back in. Not only are these companies making us chase our own tails, and by design I might add, it might be doing actual damage to our psyche. That’s what has happened to mine, and it took me quite a while to realize it.”

Daily Beast: We’re a Big Step Closer to Full Color Night Vision. “In a new study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, researchers at the University of California, Irvine used machine learning to transform what you see through a night vision scope or camera into a veritable rainbow of colors. This game-changing development could benefit not just the military, but also medical technologies, healthcare, and even more niche tasks like art restoration.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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