NEW RESOURCES

Detroit Free Press: Ford adds vintage pickup truck images to public website for free downloading. “Ford Motor Co. unveiled images so rare and popular for public viewing in June that its website crashed. Now, a batch of coveted vintage photos of the best-selling F-Series trucks has just posted online to recognize the 75th anniversary of the iconic pickup. The company hopes to avoid drama this time by doubling computer server capacity of the Ford Heritage Vault site.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Washington Post: Hate speech rises on Twitter in its largest markets after Musk takeover. “Musk has fired or accepted resignations from about three-fourths of Twitter’s employees since his $44 billion takeover at the end of October. He has also terminated thousands of contractors who were monitoring the site for slurs and threats. Those cuts went deepest outside North America, where more than 75 percent of the company’s 280 million daily users live and where Twitter already had fewer moderators who understood local languages and cultural references and where the political landscape could be chaotic and prone to violence.”

Entrepreneur: Twitter Is Offering Free Ads to Bring Advertisers Back. “The WSJ cites emails it reviewed in which Twitter said it would match ad spending to the tune of $250,000, with the catch that the full half-million dollars worth of ads run by the end of February. While Twitter has yet to comment, the deal is consistent with other efforts to stimulate ad revenue on the platform.”

Engadget: Your Google Stadia controller won’t be a paperweight after the service shuts down. “Google is giving Stadia users some consolation prizes before the game streaming service shuts down on January 18th. To start, it’s planning to release a tool that will enable Bluetooth support on the Stadia controller. You’ll have to wait until next week to download it, but this should make the device useful for just about any title that has gamepad support, so long as the platform recognizes the hardware in the first place.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 7 Ways to Compress and Optimize Your Videos. “These tools work on a video to compress it to a smaller size while retaining its quality. Of course, there are lots of factors that define a video’s quality and size, but these tools help you to minify videos as easily as possible. Here’s my recommendation for seven video compression tools to optimize your videos.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Futurism: CNET Is Quietly Publishing Entire Articles Generated By AI. “CNET, a massively popular tech news outlet, has been quietly employing the help of ‘automation technology’ — a stylistic euphemism for AI — on a new wave of financial explainer articles, seemingly starting around November of last year. In the absence of any formal announcement or coverage, it appears that this was first spotted by online marketer Gael Breton in a tweet on Wednesday.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Global News (Canada): Kraken, Elon Musk and dead Canadian doctors: Disinformation surges 3 years into the pandemic. “The bogus theory – promoted by a small group of Canadian doctors who have spent the pandemic falsely claiming or suggesting that the vaccine kills or harms people – insists, without proof, that the vaccine may have played a role in the death of an ever-growing number of physicians. Global News has spent months investigating the list of doctors and speaking to their families and has found no link of the COVID vaccine to any of their deaths.”

Ars Technica: Vulnerability with 9.8 severity in Control Web Panel is under active exploit. “Malicious hackers have begun exploiting a critical vulnerability in unpatched versions of the Control Web Panel, a widely used interface for web hosting.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Leiden University: ROBUST AI programme receives 25 million euros from Dutch Research Council. “The ROBUST consortium, which is the initiative of the Innovation Center for Artificial intelligence (ICAI), has received 25 million euros from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to strengthen fundamental AI research. The Leiden interdisciplinary research programme SAILS is part of ROBUST.”

Western University: Western researchers develop new open-source app for precise brain mapping. “The hippocampus is a small, complex, folded brain structure that holds clues to several brain disorders. It is also one of the most difficult-to-map regions of the brain. After developing a successful technique to digitally unfold the hippocampus, researchers at the Western Institute for Neuroscience have now built a new app using artificial intelligence (AI) to precisely map the structure. As part of a team led by Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry professor Ali Khan, former PhD student Jordan DeKraker has developed an open-source app, HippUnfold, which uses state-of-the-art AI to digitally unfold the hard-to-reach areas of the hippocampus.”

Daily Beast: Way Too Many Government Documents Are Classified. “One of the reasons so many officials have feared the circumstance in which Biden now finds himself is because so many encounter classified documents in their day-to-day work. Classifying so many documents makes the likelihood of errors higher. But it also makes it harder to share or find information necessary to policymakers…. Experts have sounded the alarm about this problem for decades, and every few years there is even a call to fix it—but it never happens.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Boing Boing: New Yorker documents every pizza slice he’s eaten for past nine years, shares hard data. “Since 2014, New Yorker Liam Quigley has been documenting and then consuming pizza slices and keeping track of their prices and quality. He’s currently got data on 464 slices.” Good morning, Internet…

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