TWEAKS AND UPDATES

How-To Geek: These Features Are Coming to Mastodon in 2023 And Beyond. “Mastodon is the open-source and federated social media network that shot up in popularity in 2022, largely thanks to Elon Musk’s messy purchase of Twitter. Now the project has an official roadmap for upcoming features.”

BGR: Telegram update lets you blur sensitive info in photos and videos. “Popular chat app Telegram recently got a new update that introduced several interesting features. One is the ability to blur elements of an image or video when sharing it on Telegram. The feature will let people conceal sensitive details when sharing content on Telegram. You can even use it to hide away photobombers.”

USEFUL STUFF

Digital Inspiration: Upload Files from Google Drive to Google Cloud Storage with Google Apps Script. “This tutorial describes how you can upload files and folders from your Google Drive to a bucket in Google Cloud Storage using Google Apps Script. You can even set up a time-based trigger, like a cron job, that watches a folder in your Google Drive and automatically upload new incoming files to Google Cloud Storage. The same technique can also be used to upload files from Google Drive to Firebase Storage.”

International Journalists’ Network: How to track digital mercenaries behind disinformation. “t is just as important to identify the actors who perpetuate disinformation as it is the false facts themselves: if a journalist is able to target the source of false information, they can expose and neutralize it. During an ICFJ Disarming Disinformation masterclass, held in partnership with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, award-winning data journalist and director of Columbia University’s Master of Science Data Journalism Program, Giannina Segnini, discussed these ‘digital mercenaries’ and how to stop them.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Librarians Are Meeting Younger Readers Where They Are: TikTok. “The pandemic wiped out decades of progress in children’s reading skills. So what’s a librarian hoping to engage children and teenagers with books and reading to do? ‘Meet them where they are,’ said Sara Day, a teen services librarian at the Woodland Public Library in Woodland, Calif. And that, she said, is on TikTok.”

CNN: The year that brought Silicon Valley back down to earth. “On the first trading day of 2022, Apple hit a new milestone for the tech industry: the iPhone maker became the first publicly traded company to hit a $3 trillion market cap, with Microsoft and Google not far behind. As eye-popping as that valuation was, there were headlines speculating about how long it would be before Apple and its rivals topped $5 trillion.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TechCrunch: India to explore prohibition of unbacked crypto in its G20 presidency. “India said on Thursday that under its ongoing G20 presidency, it will prioritize the development of a framework for global regulation of unbacked crypto assets, stablecoins and decentralized finance and will explore the ‘possibility of [their] prohibition’ in a potentially large setback for the nascent industry.”

Engadget: Google will pay $9.5 million to settle Washington DC AG’s location-tracking lawsuit. “Google has agreed to pay $9.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Washington DC Attorney General Karl Racine, who accused the company earlier this year of ‘deceiving users and invading their privacy.’ Google has also agreed to change some of its practices, primarily concerning how it informs users about collecting, storing and using their location data.”

Indian Express: Govt proposes to ban online betting ads on social media platforms. “The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) has proposed to ban advertisements of online betting sites on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, as per draft rules for online gaming released Monday. The Indian Express was the first to report, in October, on how these social media platforms were rife with such advertisements and that the government could soon intervene to curb them.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNET: Her Inner Child Found Healing, Through an AI Chatbot. “Via the chatbot, which the artist calls ‘Young Michelle,’ Huang, 26, has been able to offer her past self loving, comforting words Young Michelle always wanted and needed to hear. These include reassurances that Huang’s childhood hardships were formative to the person she is today, and that she wouldn’t rewrite the past even if she could.”

One India: No war record with NAI shocks historians. “The assertion of National Archives of India (NAI) that it does not have the records of India’s three major wars – one with China in 1962 and two with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971 – has shocked the nation, especially the historians. For any civilized country, the records of wars are an important repository of historical facts. But the governments of that time failed in their duty to hand over the records to NAI.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Phys .org: Researchers use quantum mechanics to see objects without looking at them . “Imagine that you have a camera cartridge that might contain a roll of photographic film. The roll is so sensitive that coming into contact with even a single photon would destroy it. With our everyday classical means there is no way there’s no way to know whether there’s film in the cartridge, but in the quantum world it can be done.” Good morning, Internet…

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