NEW RESOURCES

The Reminder: Edward Bellamy Association opens digital archive. “As an extension of their historical footprint, the Edward Bellamy Memorial Association announced a new digital archive on Nov. 29. The collection of historic remnants from author Edward Bellamy’s life joins the Edward Bellamy House as significant artifacts from the former author and Chicopee resident.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PC World: Opera’s new Lucid Mode makes older video look like new. “Opera today has added Lucid Mode to its browser—an automatic feature that will sharpen and clarify older video on a variety of sites. Opera didn’t say what version of its desktop browser Lucid would be added to, but you’ll be sure to get it if you keep Opera up to date.”

TechCrunch: Quora launches Poe, a way to talk to AI chatbots like ChatGPT. “Signaling its interest in text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT, Quora this week launched a platform called Poe that lets people ask questions, get instant answers and have a back-and-forth dialogue with AI chatbots.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Business Insider: Google’s management has reportedly issued a ‘code red’ amid the rising popularity of the ChatGPT AI. “Google’s management issued a ‘code red’ amid the launch of ChatGPT — the buzzy conversational AI chat bot created by OpenAI — as it’s sparked concerns over the future of the Google search engine, The New York Times reported.”

Hold the Front Page: Lockdown demand prompts weekly to escalate digital archive project. “The Herald Digital Archive Project was first launched by the Farnham Herald in November 2019, but its progress was stalled by the Covid-19 lockdowns. However, the lockdowns also prompted an increase in local interest for local newspaper archive material and the Herald has now got the project back on track. With the help of volunteers over the past year, 80pc of the Tindle-owned Herald’s physical paper archives – totalling some 785 volumes of newsprint – have now been inventoried, while 99,000 photo negatives have been indexed.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: ByteDance Inquiry Finds Employees Obtained User Data of 2 Journalists. “ByteDance, the China-based parent company of TikTok, said on Thursday that an internal investigation found that employees had inappropriately obtained the data of U.S. TikTok users, including two reporters.”

ProPublica: The IRS Hasn’t Released Nearly Half a Million Nonprofit Tax Records. “According to a ProPublica review of public IRS data, which powers our Nonprofit Explorer database, the agency is behind on releasing nearly half a million tax records, known as Form 990s, for tax-exempt organizations. The delays, which began two years ago, are stymying access to key financial information that governments, the public and grantmakers use to evaluate the nation’s tax-exempt companies.”

Bleeping Computer: FBI warns of search engine ads pushing malware, phishing. “The FBI warns that threat actors are using search engine advertisements to promote websites distributing ransomware or stealing login credentials for financial institutions and crypto exchanges.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

News@Northeastern: Twitter, Meta And Tiktok Dominated 2022. What Will The Social Media Landscape Look Like In 2023?. “Social media is such an integral part of modern life that any change on a platform can be seismic, and this past year was defined by change. TikTok’s star continued to rise, Meta struggled to maintain relevance as Mark Zuckerberg committed to the Metaverse and Twitter imploded under Elon Musk. Northeastern University experts say the social media landscape in 2023 will continue to be defined by these power players––but in ways that we might not expect.”

Boston University: Unearthing a Long Ignored African Writing System, One Researcher Finds African History, by Africans. “In the same way that the Roman alphabet has been adopted to write English, French, and Spanish languages, [Fallou] Ngom’s research revealed that people in Senegal, Guinea, Nigeria, and other parts of West Africa use a modified Arabic alphabet to write in a number of local languages: Wolof, Hausa, Fula, Mandinka, Swahili, Amharic, Tigrigna, and Berber among them. It was an enormous discovery. This writing system, called Ajami, dispelled the false notion peddled by European colonialists that large swaths of communities in sub-Saharan Africa were illiterate, with no native written languages of their own.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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