NEW RESOURCES

Chicago Tribune / Elkin Courier-News: Thanks to grant and hours of museum volunteer work, old Elgin newspaper photos now available online. “Hundreds of old black-and-white photos capturing decades of Elgin’s past are now online for the world to view thanks to the work of Elgin History Museum volunteers and a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Negatives of photos taken by The Courier-News between 1936 and 1994 were donated to the museum in the 1990s, museum curator Beth Nawara said. The images are being digitized so they can be made available electronically.” This project has just started — they’re about 3,000 pictures in to a collection of 100,000 images.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Library of Congress: Library of Congress Releases Fourth Season of “America Works” Podcast. “The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress has released its fourth season of ‘America Works,’ an innovative podcast series celebrating the diversity, grit and creativity of American workers in the face of economic uncertainty. The new season, launched today, features stories from a cement plant worker, a grocery store cashier, a professional wrestler, a midwife, a herdswoman, and a neonatologist, among others.”

Ars Technica: Discord hops the generative AI train with ChatGPT-style tools. “Joining a recent parade of companies adopting generative AI technology, Discord announced on Thursday that it is rolling out a suite of AI-powered features, such as a ChatGPT-style chatbot, an upgrade to its moderation tool, an open source avatar remixer, and AI-powered conversation summaries.”

Engadget: Reddit is shutting down its Clubhouse clone on March 21st. “Pour one out for a Clubhouse clone. Reddit will shut down its live audio chats on March 21st. It debuted Reddit Talk less than two years ago in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the company isn’t necessarily killing off the feature due to a lack of interest.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Teen Vogue: Influencer Parents and The Kids Who Had Their Childhood Made Into Content. “Search Claire’s name online and this is some of what you will find: photos of her as a child, merchandise with her face on it available for sale, and a YouTube channel with millions of subscribers and hundreds of videos featuring Claire and members of her family. In the videos, Claire grows from a toddler to a teenager. On Instagram, fans comment they miss videos from the old days. In public, people sometimes recognize her and ask for photos. Altogether, the family’s YouTube channel has over a billion views but if it were up to Claire, none of the videos would exist.”

WIRED: Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone. “The company is now offering three levels of Enterprise Packages to its developer platform, according to a document sent by a Twitter rep to would-be academic customers in early March and passed on to WIRED. The cheapest, Small Package, gives access to 50 million tweets for $42,000 a month. Higher tiers give researchers or businesses access to larger volumes of tweets—100 million and 200 million tweets respectively—and cost $125,000 and $210,000 a month. WIRED confirmed the figures with other existing free API users, who have received emails saying that the new pricing plans will take effect within months.” I believe the technical term for those prices is “goony”.

WP Tavern: Toot the Word Survey Finds Mastodon Increasingly Important to WordPress’ Community of Tooters. “Nearly all participants of the survey expect Mastodon to have some kind of influence on the WordPress community in the future, a majority thinks Mastodon will be very influential or extremely influential. Most of the participants want to see more WordPress content and community discussions on Mastodon in the future.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

OCCRP: How a Montenegrin Gang Used Open-Source Intelligence to Kill. “Hitmen working for a criminal group active in Montenegro and Serbia used open-source intelligence techniques, poring over apartment listing sites, satellite images, and tourist photos posted online, to track down and kill the leader of a rival clan as he hid out in Greece.”

BuzzFeed News: Murderous Mexican Drug Cartels Are Thriving On Elon Musk’s Twitter. “Prominent members of Mexican drug cartels are using Twitter to recruit new members, send warnings to rival gangs, post gory images and videos, and glorify the narco lifestyle. Some of these accounts were banned by Twitter’s safety team between 2012 and 2015, but they have been reinstated since Elon Musk bought the company last year.”

Associated Press: Judge allows Google antitrust case to move ahead in Virginia. “A judge has rejected a request from Google to transfer a federal antitrust lawsuit against it from Virginia to New York. The ruling Friday from U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, is a victory for the Justice Department and several states, including Virginia, that sued Google earlier this year and wanted to keep the case in the commonwealth.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Massachusetts Amherst: Umass Amherst Research Professor Teams With National Weather Service To Build Database On Public Response To Severe Weather Hazards. “University of Massachusetts Amherst research professor Brenda Philips has received a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to work with National Weather Service forecast offices across the country to ascertain the factors that influence people’s responses to severe weather events. The goal of the two-year, $396,855 grant is to build a national multi-year database on human reactions to four types of weather hazards: flash floods, tornados, severe thunderstorms and winter weather events.”

UChicago News: UChicago, NYU team find online education tools pose privacy risks. “A group of researchers from the University of Chicago and New York University studied online learning and shared their findings in a paper that explored how educational technologies get into schools and what privacy risks these technologies pose to students. The paper, which will be presented at the upcoming ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, discloses that many of the technologies were unvetted before they were used with students, possibly leading to critical data security risks.” Good morning, Internet…

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