TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: Waffle Is Just Like Wordle but at Least Five Times Better. “Everybody was playing Wordle because Wordle gave us 15 minutes in every day to ourselves. Sure, we wanted to beat our mates and show off our Galaxy Brains and, yeah, we wanted to avoid losing our streaks, but it was more than that. It broke up our never-ending doomscrolling with cute little emoji grids for a while there. It ruled! It’s still the best. All hail. I’ll be playing it for the next five years. At least, that’s what I thought. Until I came across Waffle.”

Search Engine Land: Pinterest prohibits climate misinformation in ads, content . “Pinterest wants to remove any traces of climate misinformation from its platform. The company announced it will now remove any ads or content from its platform that violates its new policy.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Search for Google Drive Files Directly From the Chrome Address Bar. “Search engine shortcuts are a great way to optimize your browsing experience. When you’re urgently looking for a file from Google Drive, you might not have enough time or patience to open the Google Drive web app and search for your file. Luckily, there’s a quicker way to find your files stored in Google Drive. In this article, you’ll find out how to search for Google Drive files directly from your Chrome address bar.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Reuters: Musk proposes Twitter Blue subscription shake-up days after revealing stake. “Elon Musk, Twitter Inc’s biggest shareholder, on Saturday suggested a raft of changes to the social media giant’s Twitter Blue premium subscription service, including slashing its price, banning advertising and giving an option to pay in the cryptocurrency dogecoin.”

New York Times: Former New Yorkers Are Networking Through WhatsApp. “New Yorkers have been seeking one another out in other American cities for decades. How else could they complain about the lack of public transportation, the difficulty in finding a decent slice or the fact that most neighborhood bodegas are not open 24/7? The only difference is now, apps and social media have made it easier for them to find their kindred spirits instantly.”

The Next Web: Google says it classifies AI-generated content as ‘spam’. “All the publishers and editors out there thinking of replacing their journalists with AI might want to pump their brakes. Everybody’s boss, the Google algorithm, classifies AI-generated content as spam.” I’m putting this statement next to my experiences running into the scrape-and-spit copycat sites that have taken over Google News and giving myself a bit of a headache trying to reconcile them.

SECURITY & LEGAL

SiliconANGLE: Fox News database with 13M records found exposed online. “Security researcher Jeremiah Flower and the Website Planet research team discovered that the exposed database included about 58 gigabytes of data in just short of 13 million records. The records included Fox News content, storage information, internal Fox emails, usernames, employee ID numbers, affiliate station information and more. One folder is said to have contained 65,000 names of celebrities, cast and production crew members and their internal Fox identification reference numbers.”

Ars Technica: Ransomware sent North Carolina A&T University scrambling to restore services. “North Carolina A&T State University, the largest historically black college in the US, University was recently struck by a ransomware Group called ALPHV, sending university staff into a scramble to restore services last month.”

Sacramento Bee: Students ‘terrorized’ by ‘panic-inducing’ YouTube pranks at CA university, lawsuit says. “The University of Southern California has sued two YouTubers over a series of ‘panic-inducing’ pranks the pair staged during university lectures and recorded for their YouTube channel, the lawsuit says. A Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge issued a temporary restraining order Friday, April 8, that bans Ernest Kanevsky and Yuguo Bai from campus and other university-owned buildings because of their involvement in the YouTube stunts, according to City News Service.” They are not students.

RESEARCH & OPINION

Agência Brasil: Amazon to have database on greenhouse gases. “A free-access platform with a wide diversity of data on greenhouse gas emissions in the Amazon is being built by the Research Center for Greenhouse Gas Innovation (RCGI), at the University of São Paulo (USP). The platform will combine variables that control the carbon cycle, in addition to providing assistance in analysis and studies into the region’s role in the global climate.”

The National Academies: Ensuring Human Control over AI-Infused Systems. “Human control over technology was a concern thousands of years ago when early humans sought to ensure safe use of fire. Later, control over horse-drawn wagons and eventually steam engines led to debates about how to make the most of their benefits while limiting dangers. Now questions of control are central in the design of AI-infused technologies, for which some advocates envision full machine autonomy while others promote human autonomy (Shneiderman 2020).”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Engadget: 3D CT scans make even ketchup caps look cool. “See that picture up there? It may look like something out of Tron or Blade Runner, but it’s actually a CT scan — of a Heinz ketchup cap. A group of ‘deeply curious engineers’ is scanning different types of items every month to give us a deeper appreciation of various engineering marvels surrounding us in every day life. The latest batch of scans includes a Heinz squeeze-bottle cap that took its inventor 185,000 hours and 45 prototypes to finalize.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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