NEW RESOURCES

WMUK: The Western Activist, a 1960s-era student newspaper published at WMU, is now online. “In the 1960s, students at Western Michigan University published an anti-war, countercultural newspaper. Now the Western Activist, as it was known, has been digitized. The paper covered the Black Panther movement and protests against the Vietnam War among many other topics.”

New-to-me (launched in October) from New Zealand Herald: Ocean photography project Project Kahurangi launched to give non-profit conservation groups a boost. “The library, which has over 1200 professional-quality images and videos, launched in October with the help of Live Ocean Foundation, another conservation-focused non-profit started by America’s Cup champions Peter Burling and Blair Tuke. The content is free for fellow non-profit advocacy groups, as well as iwi, governments and education institutions looking to promote ocean conservation.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Interesting Engineering: ChatGPT premium rolls out at $42 a month, Google still catching up. “The premium edition will offer additional features with less unpredictable availability, better response times, and priority access for a $42 monthly membership, according to a LinkedIn post on Saturday by Linas Beliūnas, a financial technology specialist.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 10 Useful Kindle Sites You Should Know About . “Kindles have dramatically longer battery lives than smartphones and tablets and allow you to carry around thousands of books everywhere you go. Ultimately, owning a Kindle can help you read more books in less time. However, as awesome as Kindles are out of the box, there are a collection of websites that you should use to get even more out of your Kindle. The following Kindle websites are the perfect companions to your e-reader.” This is a nice list but the Kindle/RSS tool is the one which grabbed my eyeballs.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Rest of World: Indian teenagers from small towns are taking YouTube Shorts by storm. “Indian teenage creators like [Rohit] Gupta have drawn millions of views by producing Hindi voice-over Shorts on Western and Asian memes and skits. These creators describe, explain, and provide additional context to the videos, often in the style of boisterous news-anchors, as part of a growing genre known as ‘fact channels.’ In January, four of the top 10 fastest-growing channels on YouTube were fact channels, according to SocialBlade.”

Washington Post: Cine2Nerdle is a remarkably fun Wordle-like game for movie obsessives. “…if you love the movies — and come on, who doesn’t? — Cine2Nerdle may feel like a breath of fresh air. The game looks like Wordle and has a name that’s similar to Wordle, but the main underlying mechanic is quite different. Cine2Nerdle presents players with a four-by-four set of tiles, each with a word or phrase on it that corresponds to a movie.”

Honolulu Star-Advertiser: Hawaii’s new poet laureate finds solace in verse. “Hawaii’s new poet laureate, Brandy Nalani McDougall, sees poetry as a way to heal…. As poet laureate, she will spend the next three years encouraging the people of Hawaii to follow her on that path of healing…. She also plans to launch an indexed online archive for poets to post their own poetry.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TechCrunch: A hack at ODIN Intelligence exposes a huge trove of police raid files. “Detailed tactical plans for imminent police raids, confidential police reports with descriptions of alleged crimes and suspects, and a forensic extraction report detailing the contents of a suspect’s phone. These are some of the files in a huge cache of data taken from the internal servers of ODIN Intelligence, a tech company that provides apps and services to police departments, following a hack and defacement of its website over the weekend.”

The Marshall Project: The Many Ingenious Ways People in Prison Use (Forbidden) Cell Phones. “…most of what I knew about illicit electronics came from press releases and news stories that offered example after example of all the bad things people could do with contraband phones, things like trafficking drugs, making threats and running scams. While it’s true those things can happen, over the past three years I’ve also seen a lot of people use their phones for good. Some use them to self-publish books or take online college classes. Others become prison reform advocates, teach computer skills, trade bitcoin or write legal briefs.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: How to Spot AI-Generated Art, According to Artists. “The public release of AI art tools, like Midjourney and DALL-E 2, has ignited contentious debates among artists, designers, and art fans alike. Many are critical of the fact that the technology’s rapid progress was fueled by scraping the internet for publicly posted art and imagery, without credit or compensation to the artists who had their work stolen.”

Washington Post: Attacks on U.S. Jews and gays accelerate as hate speech grows on Twitter. “New research to be released later this month by the misinformation tracker Network Contagion Research Institute suggests a connection between real-world incidents and variations of the word ‘groomer,’ often aimed at gays and suggesting that they are adults bent on seducing children. Although polls indicate a significant minority of the population believes otherwise, gay people are not more likely to be predators than straight people.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Hackaday: Running Cray OS And UNICOS On Your Own Cray Simulator Instance. “This simulator allows you to run software written for the Cray X-MP (1982), Y-MP (1988), J90 (1994) and SV1 (1998), which covers essentially all major Cray systems after the Cray 1 and up till when Cray had become part of SGI in 1996.” Good morning, Internet…

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