NEW RESOURCES

University College London: Students develop software to revolutionise computer use for millions. “The software could revolutionise the way that millions of people use computers by allowing those with mobility issues to easily interact with their PCs without the need to buy adapted computers and use pointer devices. It has already been endorsed by charities including the International Alliance of ALS/MND Associations, which supports people with Motor Neurone Disease (MND) around the world and is making a positive impact on people’s daily lives.” And it’s free for individual users.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Roundtable: DuckDuckGo On The Decline In 2022. “Looks like DuckDuckGo, the privacy focused search engine, is on the decline. In January 2021 it broke the 100 million searches per day mark but since April 2022 of this year, it has dipped below that mark each month. I plotted the average queries per day by month from DuckDuckGo’s traffic numbers and you can see, the big dip started to happen in March 2022 with April for the first time going below the 100 million mark since 2021.” When I saw they were allowing Microsoft trackers I DuckDuckWent.

USEFUL STUFF

Smashing Magazine: Adding Search To Your Site In 15 Minutes. “Do you need search for your site, but haven’t found the time to add it? Within 15 minutes, Leonardo Losoviz explains how you can add a super powerful search that also looks super good. In this article, you’ll learn how to go from 0 to 100 with search.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

NBC News: How one young history buff is preserving the Gullah Geechee community on TikTok . “The Gullah Geechee people make up one of the oldest and most extraordinary communities in the United States. But if you’ve never heard of them, it might be because their history is often sifted out of textbooks, and the longevity of their culture is now in danger. This distinctly African American community began on the eastern coastal islands — spanning from Florida all the way up to North Carolina in the 1600s. Slaves, mostly from West Africa, lived in complete isolation from the continental United States, separated by rivers, swamps and waterways that weren’t easy to cross.”

Times of India: E-archive To Collate Data On Ancient, Colonial Indian Laws For Easy Access And Awareness. “To make sources of legal history easily available to scholars, lawyers and judges, and to raise awareness among present and future generations about ancient and medieval Indian laws, the Centre for Studies In Legal History of the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS), Kolkata, will establish an electronic archive on legal history comprising ancient, medieval and colonial Indian laws up to 1947 that are still being used in the country.”

New York Times: Google Says It’s Time for Longtime Small-Business Users to Pay Up. “While the cost of the paid service is more of an annoyance than a hard financial hit, small-business owners affected by the change say they have been disappointed by the ham-handed way that Google has dealt with the process. They can’t help but feel that a giant company with billions of dollars in profits is squeezing little guys — some of the first businesses to use Google’s apps for work — for just a bit of money.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Japan set to fine Twitter, Meta, Google if they neglect domestic registry – Nikkei. “The Japanese government is set to levy fines against 48 tech companies… for failing to register their headquarters in the country, the Nikkei newspaper reported on Monday.”

CNBC: FBI says fraud on LinkedIn a ‘significant threat’ to platform and consumers. “Fraudsters who exploit LinkedIn to lure users into cryptocurrency investment schemes pose a ‘significant threat’ to the platform and consumers, according to Sean Ragan, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the San Francisco and Sacramento, California, field offices.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Google AI Blog: Scanned Objects by Google Research: A Dataset of 3D-Scanned Common Household Items. “Historically, deep learning for computer vision has relied on datasets with millions of items that were gathered by web scraping, examples of which include ImageNet, Open Images, YouTube-8M, and COCO. However, the process of creating these datasets can be labor-intensive, and can still exhibit labeling errors that can distort the perception of progress. Furthermore, this strategy does not readily generalize to arbitrary three-dimensional shapes or real-world robotic data.”

The Atlantic: Is Google Dying? Or Did the Web Grow Up?. “The internet has grown exponentially and Google has expanded with it, helping usher in some of the web’s greediest, most extractive tendencies. But scale is not always a blessing for technology products. Are we wringing our hands over nothing, or is Google a victim of its own success, rendering its flagship product—Search—less useful?” This essay made me swear out loud, shake my head repeatedly, and throw a pillow across the room. It posits arguments with which I do not agree. It is still worth reading. Good afternoon, Internet…

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