NEW RESOURCES

6 Sq Ft: Landmarks launches digital photo archive of NYC landmarks and historic districts. “The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission on Thursday launched the LPC Designation Photo Collection, a digital photo archive with high-resolution images of designated landmarks and historic districts.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Google brought back the timer, and it’s about time. “Google’s handy timer and stopwatch that you can use right from Search have returned. The tools have been unavailable for weeks, but Google public search liaison Danny Sullivan announced that the timer was back in a tweet on Wednesday.”

CNET: Snapchat Brings ‘House of the Dragon’ to Cities Across the World via AR. “Snap and HBO Max have partnered on a new Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon feature for Snapchat users. From Sunday, if you’re in the right place you’ll see Snapchat’s new ‘Landmarker Lenses’ starring dragons.”

NPR: Google workers sign petition asking company to protect people’s abortion search data. “About 650 Google workers have signed a petition asking the company to protect users’ abortion-related location data and search history. The move comes over concerns that law enforcement agencies will seek such data from Google to prosecute abortion seekers.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

MIT Technology Review: The fight for “Instagram face”. “‘Instagram face’ is a recognized aesthetic template: ethnically ambiguous and featuring the flawless skin, big eyes, full lips, small nose, and perfectly contoured curves made accessible in large part by filters. But behind every filter is a person dragging lines and shifting shapes on a computer screen to achieve the desired look. Beauty may be subjective, and yet society continues to promote stringent, unattainable ideals that—for women and girls—are disproportionately white, slender, and feminine.”

New York Times: Survivors of Partition Seek Closure Through an Unlikely Source: YouTube. “Mr. [Nasir] Dhillon is the driving force behind Punjabi Lehar, a six-year-old YouTube channel that posts regular interviews with survivors of that traumatic episode. He says it has enabled a number of Muslims and Sikhs — including some who live in North America — to visit their ancestral villages, and has led to about 100 in-person reunions. Partition led to communal violence, mass displacement and the deaths of as many as two million people. Some of the young people who survived were separated from their parents or siblings.”

Mashable SE Asia: Sabah landmarks on Google Maps get placed under the Philippines, Malaysians get pissed. “On August 18, 2022, a slew of news reports surfaced shedding light on a weird issue regarding Sabahan landmarks on Google Maps – somehow, someone had been altering the names of several iconic buildings and destinations within the East Malaysian state to place them under the ‘ownership’ of the Philippines.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Guardian: China ‘wild trip’ deaths put social media influencers under spotlight. “Chinese social media influencers and their platforms have come under fire for posts about ‘wild trips’ – or visits to off-grid locations – after a huge flood killed seven tourists in Sichuan province. The tragedy, on 13 August, left seven tourists dead and eight injured after a flash flood at a valley in Mengzhou, in the country’s south-west.”

Reuters: Trump’s Truth Social company ordered to turn over Devin Nunes information. “Former President Donald Trump’s media and technology company must turn over information about ex-Congressman Devin Nunes’ employment as its chief executive officer… The ruling stems from a $75 million defamation lawsuit brought by Nunes, a former Republican U.S. Congressman from California, against Hearst Magazine Media Inc and journalist Ryan Lizza.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Evening Standard: Roy Scheider to return to big screen in posthumous release completed using AI. “The American actor died in February 2008 during the filming of Beautiful Blue Eyes, which follows a New York police officer seeking revenge on a Nazi who he believes murdered his family during the Second World War. Despite the filming of Beautiful Blue Eyes commencing more than 14 years ago, filmmakers had to wait for artificial intelligence (AI) technology advances in order to release the movie as it was originally envisioned after Scheider’s death.”

Science Daily: Algorithm learns to correct 3D printing errors for different parts, materials and systems. “Engineers have created intelligent 3D printers that can quickly detect and correct errors, even in previously unseen designs, or unfamiliar materials like ketchup and mayonnaise, by learning from the experiences of other machines.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Codecat: Building an open source IRL livestreaming backpack. “This month I decided to build an IRL livestreaming backpack. Not with the desire to become an IRL streamer, but because I think it’s a very fun technical challenge. I gathered and set up all the hardware, reverse engineered some firmware images, and coded my own software to control it.” Good morning, Internet…

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