TWEAKS AND UPDATES
CNET: Google Adds Hotel Sustainability Info to Search Results. “Googling your next potential hotel stay? The search giant will now serve up information on a hotel’s sustainability and health and safety programs right there in the search results.”
New York Times: Celsius Network Plots a Comeback After a Crypto Crash. “At a meeting with employees on Sept. 8, Alex Mashinsky, the chief executive of Celsius, outlined an audacious plan to revive the firm, according to a recording of the event shared with The New York Times. He and Oren Blonstein, another Celsius executive, said they hoped to rebuild the company with a focus on custody — storing people’s cryptocurrencies for them, and then charging fees on certain types of transactions. They said the project was code-named Kelvin, after the unit of temperature.” Just wow.
USEFUL STUFF
Washington Post: Scams are showing up at the top of online searches. “Add one more to the list of online places bad guys are hiding: the very top of search results. Nasty scams and malware are preying on your trust by hiding behind the ads that sit on top of search pages. Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing are being paid to put them in front of us, and they haven’t figured out how to stop it.” The link I’ve put in this item is a gift article, so you’ll be able to read it even if you’re not a WP subscriber.
How-To Geek: 10 YouTube Features You Should Be Using. “YouTube has been around since 2005, and it’s one of the most visited websites in the world. Tons of features have been added to the YouTube website and apps over the years. We’ll share some you may not know about.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Slate: What if a Peasant From the Middle Ages Got a Fancy Influencer Account? I Have Good News for You.. “What would it be like if, in the Middle Ages, there was a peasant who made influencer-style videos about feast days, Lent, the bones of saints, and his coping mechanism for surviving the plague (buying hats)? Well, he exists on TikTok as @greedypeasant, the quarantine creation of costume designer Tyler Gunther, and he is delightful.”
Variety: YouTube Paid Over $6 Billion to Music Industry in Past 12 Months. “YouTube, the world’s largest streaming platform for music, announced that it has paid more than $6 billion to the music industry in the 12 months between July 2021 and June 2022 — some $2 billion more than it said it paid in the previous 12 months.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
Ars Technica: Twitter pranksters derail GPT-3 bot with newly discovered ‘prompt injection’ hack. “On Thursday, a few Twitter users discovered how to hijack an automated tweet bot, dedicated to remote jobs, running on the GPT-3 language model by OpenAI. Using a newly discovered technique called a ‘prompt injection attack,’ they redirected the bot to repeat embarrassing and ridiculous phrases.”
Washington Post: Trump team claimed boxes at Mar-a-Lago were only news clippings. “Months before National Archives officials retrieved hundreds of classified documents in 15 boxes from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, they were told that none of the material was sensitive or classified and that Trump had only 12 boxes of ‘news clippings,’ according to people familiar with the conversations between Trump’s team and the Archives.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
ZDNet: Google partners with the US government to supply chips and spur innovation. “Chips used to develop new nanotechnology and semiconductor devices oftentimes have a large price tag, posing a big obstacle for innovation. To solve this issue, the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has signed a cooperative research and development agreement with Google to develop and produce these chips.”
OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL
Hackaday: Inexpensive Reading Glasses Become Stereoscope. “It’s an unfortunate consequence of growing older, that no longer are you able to read the print on a SOT-23 package or solder a QFN without magnification. Your eyes inexorably start to fail, and to have any hope of continuing a set of reading glasses is required. We have this in common with [Niklas Roy], who noticed while shopping for cheap reading glasses that their lenses were of surprisingly good quality. The result of this observation was a stereoscope made from card and a few euros worth of eyewear.” Good afternoon, Internet…
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Categories: afternoonbuzz