NEW RESOURCES

City of Boston: Boston Archaeology Program Announces Completion Of NEH-funded Digital Archaeology Project. “In March 2019, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the City of Boston Archaeology Program a $350,000 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant to re-process, re-catalog, digitally photograph and place online in a database the complete archaeological assemblages excavated from five important Boston historical sites…. With this project, the collections are fully documented and anyone from anywhere in the world can see these collections online or study them in person at the City Archaeology Program.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Land: Google allows Election Ads on YouTube and updates its Political Content Policy. “Next month the Google Ads Political Content Policy will be updated and advertisers will be required to further clarify the ‘Paid for by’ disclosure directly in the ad.”

Mashable: #BookTok rejoice: TikTok launches official Book Club . “In the cluttered world of TikTok, #BookTok emerged as a favorite long ago: a cozy, sprawling community with a hashtag that has over 64.3 billion views and counting. The social media giant is well aware of this popularity, seizing upon that long-embedded love for literature with by launching an official book club on the platform. The TikTok Book Club will be open to everyone, much like #BookTok is, but with an organized structure.”

WIRED: Twitter Has Entered the Elon Musk Twilight Zone . “Manu Cornet joined Twitter last year after 14 years at Google, where he used his hobby of drawing cartoons to poke fun at his employer’s culture and scandals. His latest three-panel drawing depicts an anthropomorphized version of Twitter’s bird logo delivering a monologue. ‘Your strategy is a model of hypocrisy and bad faith,’ it says, seemingly addressing Musk. ‘You’ve trashed me, disrupted my operations, and destroyed shareholder value.’ The angry bird then pivots to a plaintive question: ‘Will you now finally agree to adopt me?’ Cornet’s cartoon gets to the heart of the illogical situation that has ensnared Twitter.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Vice: MetaMask Co-Founders: ‘We Can’t Stop People From Making Ponzis on Blockchains’. “With tens of millions of users, the digital wallet system has become the main access point to Ethereum, the blockchain that has given rise to stablecoins like Tether, play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity, metaverses like Decentraland, and NFT projects like the Bored Ape Yacht Club. But after a precipitous crypto crash that has affected projects and people alike, the co-founders of MetaMask are now warning that the crypto ecosystem they helped create is currently an unsafe casino prone to Ponzi-like operations and exploitation.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CBS News: Report finds online campaign of “widespread targeted harassment” against supporters of Amber Heard. “[Ella] Dawson was one of many Heard supporters on the receiving end of an organized campaign of ‘widespread targeted harassment,’ according to a report published Monday by the research firm Bot Sentinel. The firm analyzed more than 14,000 tweets that included at least one of four viral anti-Heard hashtags seeking to characterize Heard as a liar or an abuser, and found that nearly 1 in 4 accounts tied to the tweets, 24.4%, were created in the last seven months.”

HackRead: Hackers can spoof commit metadata to create false GitHub repositories. “Checkmarx security researchers have warned about an emerging new supply chain attack tactic involving spoofed metadata commits to present malicious GitHub repositories as legit.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

BBC: Microsoft launches simulator to train drone AI systems. “Microsoft has launched a platform to train the artificial intelligence (AI) systems of autonomous aircraft. Project AirSim is, in effect, a flight simulator for drones, which companies can use to train and develop software controlling them.”

IEEE Spectrum: Does MetaHuman’s Digital Clone Cross the Uncanny Valley?. “Creating your virtual clone isn’t as difficult as you’d think. Epic Games recently introduced Mesh to MetaHuman, a framework for creating photorealistic human characters. It lets creators sculpt an imported mesh to create a convincing character in less than an hour.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

News@Northeastern: Can Listening To The Beatles Improve Your Memory? New Research Says Music Just Might Stir The Brain. “Published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, Loui found that for older adults who listened to some of their favorite music, including The Beatles, connectivity in the brain increased. Specifically, [Psyche] Loui—and her multi-disciplinary team of music therapists, neurologists and geriatric psychiatrists—discovered that music bridged the gap between the brain’s auditory system and reward system, the area that governs motivation.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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