TWEAKS AND UPDATES

9to5 Google: Google Search gets ‘The Last of Us’ easter egg. “Searching ‘The Last of Us’ on both mobile and desktop today will show a red mushroom button at the bottom of the screen. Tapping will populate the screen with what’s presumably Cordyceps. It’s unfortunately animated with the slowness of the swaying somehow even more creepy.”

Search Engine Roundtable: Yahoo To Make Search Cool Again. “Yahoo posted on Twitter under its Yahoo Search account, ‘Just popping in to remind everyone that we did search before it was cool. BRB making it cool again.’ Is that some sort of tease that Yahoo is about to announce something big with web search?” I’m worried this is going to be some half-baked AI thing. I hope I’m wrong.

NiemanLab: Twitter will soon let news outlets lay visual claim to their staffers’ accounts. Should they?. “… it falls short of ownership, but a Twitter feature now in testing would visually tie journalists’ accounts to their employers more clearly than before. As Press Gazette reports, several staffers of the U.K. tabloid the Daily Mirror are the media industry’s guinea pigs. On these journalists’ personal Twitter accounts, there is now (next to the oft-debated blue checkmark) a small Mirror icon to indicate the affiliation with their employer.”

USEFUL STUFF

Lifehacker: This Setting Turns Your iPhone Into a Professional Video Camera. “Normally, iPhones shoot in either HEVC or H.264 video formats. HEVC files are smaller and more compressed, while H.264 are larger but supported by more apps and platforms. However, in your iPhone’s camera settings menu, there’s a third format called ‘Apple ProRes,’ which offers better color and less compression for a crisper, more professional look. The catch is Apple ProRes videos can be up to 30 times larger than HEVC files, so they take up large portions of your phone and iCloud storage space.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

News.com.au: Google worker documents ‘a day in my life getting laid off’ in viral TikTok. “The viral trend of young employees at tech firms like Google, Meta, Twitter and LinkedIn showing off their ritzy workplace benefits, while seemingly doing little actual work, has sparked debate online in recent months, with some blasting the companies as ‘adult daycare’. But with the once-unassailable tech sector facing a huge downturn, many of those same employees are now facing the axe.”

Outlook India: Koo Solves Everything That Annoys Twitter Users Today, Says Koo CEO . “In an exclusive interaction with Outlook Business, Koo’s CEO and co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna shares his views on the desi app’s global appeal, the larger Koo vs Twitter debate, and how the homegrown app is distinct from other competitors of Twitter.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Financial Times: Can Big Tech make livestreams safe?. “As well as self-harm and child sexual exploitation, livestreaming also featured in the racially motivated killing of 10 black people in Buffalo, New York, last year and the deadly mosque shootings of 51 in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. These issues are coming to a head in the UK in particular, as the government plans new legislation this year to force internet companies to police illegal content, as well as material that is legal but deemed harmful to children.” This article contains disturbing content including references to harm and self-harm.

BuzzFeed News: Meet The Three Artists Behind A Landmark Lawsuit Against AI Art Generators. “… last week’s lawsuit against Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DeviantArt is the first time that artists have challenged generative AI companies in court. Days after that lawsuit was filed, stock-image powerhouse Getty Images filed its own suit against Stability AI in London, claiming that the company ‘unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright and the associated metadata’ to train its AI model.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: Public Programs Are Only as Good as Their Data. “Bad data is why people in the UK have been wrongly deported and accused of being illegal immigrants, as happened during the Windrush scandal. Bad data was behind a childcare benefits scandal in the Netherlands, where benefit claimants were wrongly accused of fraud because a government algorithm had been programmed to identify people with dual nationalities as more likely to commit the crime.The reality is, when it comes to collecting and analyzing national statistics, many governments around the world are severely underresourced.”

Euractiv: EU Commission to create common oncology imaging database. “The European Commission launched its European Cancer Imaging Initiative on Monday (23 January), which aims to create a common digital infrastructure across the EU to facilitate data sharing on the disease.” Good afternoon, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you.