TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNET: You Can Now Listen to Podcasts on Twitter. “Podcasts are now available to stream directly from the Spaces tab on Twitter, the social media giant said in a blog post Thursday. Starting today, you can head over to your Spaces tab, which is essentially Twitter’s answer to audio-chat app Clubhouse, and listen to popular podcasts from around the world.”

TechCrunch: Heroku announces plans to eliminate free plans, blaming ‘fraud and abuse’. “After offering them for over a decade, Heroku today announced that it will eliminate all of its free services — pushing users to paid plans. Starting November 28, the Salesforce-owned cloud platform as a service will stop providing free product plans and shut down free data services and soon (on October 26) will begin deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Niche internet micro celebrities are taking over the internet. “Niche internet micro celebrities are people online who are known to a small but often dedicated group and they represent a growing variant of the attention economy. Online fame is a consequence for a niche internet micro celebrity, never the goal. They rarely make money from their social accounts, choosing instead to post for the fun of it. The term is often used in a tongue in cheek way.”

Clemson University: Summer institute to reconstruct South Carolina’s “Black Archive”. “Clemson English professors Susanna Ashton and Rhondda Thomas will join Furman faculty members Gregg Hecimovich and Kaniqua Robinson to lead a summer institute entitled ‘Reconstructing the Black Archive: South Carolina as Case Study, 1739–1895.’ The three-week residential institute is designed for more than 20 higher education faculty to study ways of reconstructing Black histories, using South Carolina as a case study. The institute is supported by a $198,317 grant from the NEH.”

Wall Street Journal: How Google Remapped the World: The Tech Behind. “Google Maps has transformed the way that we navigate the world, make decisions, and think about our privacy in the 17 years since its launch. Here’s an inside look at how it works and what’s next.” 8:31 video, captioned.

SECURITY & LEGAL

WIRED: Inside the World’s Biggest Hacker Rickroll. “The elaborate high school graduation prank—dubbed The Big Rick by its architects—was one of the largest rickrolls to ever take place, taking months of planning to pull off.”

Inside Imaging: Copyright bot wrongly attacks White House photographer. “Former White House photographer, Pete Souza, who spent two terms documenting US president Barack Obama, has been threatened with copyright litigation for publishing his own public domain pictures.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Newswise: Scientists want to bridge public divide. “There’s a disconnect between the goals and the delivery of scientific outreach and its actual impact. In recent years, communication around diseases like COVID-19 and a growing mistrust in science have made that gap even more apparent. To better understand where these disconnects occur, Northwestern University scientists conducted a survey of 530 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty and staff at U.S. academic institutions to examine their motivations and barriers to participation in science outreach.”

Google Blog: Join us in the AI Test Kitchen. “One of our most promising models is called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), and as we move ahead with development, we feel a great responsibility to get this right. That’s why we introduced an app called AI Test Kitchen at Google I/O earlier this year. It provides a new way for people to learn about, experience, and give feedback on emerging AI technology, like LaMDA. Starting today, you can register your interest for the AI Test Kitchen as it begins to gradually roll out to small groups of users in the US, launching on Android today and iOS in the coming weeks.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

CogDogBlog: Do Look at Don’t Look At My Photos. “The idea is to do the opposite of flickr’s Explore or Interestingness, to try to find some of the obscure photographers in the mix. The whole thing is a bit of duct tape JavaScript tapping into the flickr API. Every hour a server script updates the site’s single page to find a new photographer to feature.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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