SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: No Shop Sherlock
No Shop Sherlock is a Google filter designed to get cruft out of your search results. Options let you filter out general Web clutter, bookstore content, social media content, or video content.

NEW RESOURCES

New-to-me, from Boing Boing: Abandoned Republic is a website that archives vintage Banana Republic Catalogs. “I stumbled across this website the other day, Abandoned Republic, which describes itself as ‘A Journey Through the Vintage Banana Republic Catalog.'”

City of Philadelphia: Philadelphia Becomes First Large U.S. City to Track Social Progress Across Every Neighborhood. “ProgressPHL establishes a Social Progress Index that is supported by almost 50 data indicators including everything from public safety, nutrition and basic medical care, housing, education, environmental quality, Internet access, water and sanitation, personal rights, inclusiveness, and many others. The indicators provide granular and detailed information about what is going on in each of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods. The combined indicators create an overall index score for each neighborhood.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mashable: ‘Why has my Tweet been deleted?’: New Twitter bugs just dropped.. “Another week, another new plague of Twitter bugs and glitches. Over the past few days, Twitter users have reported a wide variety of issues that greatly affect the platform’s functionality. Here are the most pressing ones.”

Axios: DWAC fires its CEO amid stalled deal to buy Trump’s Truth Social . “Digital World Acquisition Corp., the blank check company seeking to buy Truth Social parent company TMTG, on Wednesday disclosed that it has fired chairman and CEO Patrick Orlando.”

VentureBeat: Adobe bets on generative AI with ‘Firefly’ tool to create images from text. “Adobe announced a series of AI initiatives at its annual conference, Adobe Summit, on Tuesday, including a new set of tools that can generate images on demand using only text prompts.”

USEFUL STUFF

Ars Technica: Making faces: How to train an AI on your face to create silly portraits. “In this walkthrough, I’ll show you how to install Stable Diffusion locally on your computer, train Dreambooth on your face, and generate so many pictures of yourself that your friends and family will eventually block you to stop the deluge of silly photos. The entire process will take about two hours from start to finish, with the bulk of the time spent babysitting a Google Colab notebook while it trains on your images.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

BuzzFeed News: Midjourney Allegedly Banned A Journalist After He Created AI Images Of Donald Trump Getting Arrested. “Many are envisioning — some gleefully — what a Trump arrest would look like. Among them is Eliot Higgins, best known as the founder of open-source investigative journalism website Bellingcat. This week, Higgins used the AI image generator Midjourney to depict Trump’s arrest. He shared 50 images on Twitter, and they quickly went viral. As a result, he said on Wednesday, Midjourney appeared to have banned him from the service. Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (The word ‘arrested’ is now banned on the platform.) ”

AFP: Across globe, women battle ‘gendered disinformation’. “Researchers say ‘gendered disinformation’ — when sexism and misogyny intersect with online falsehoods — has relentlessly targeted women around the world, tarnishing their reputations, undermining their credibility and, in many cases, upending their careers.”

The Construction Index: V&A acquires archive of Pugin drawings. “More than 700 drawings by 19th century architect Augustus Pugin have been acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London…. The 700 drawings – which range in date from the late 1830s until 1851 – are working design drawings in Pugin’s hand. Many are signed and dated by Pugin himself. They range from initial sketches in pencil to finished presentation designs rendered in watercolour.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNBC: SEC charges Tron founder Justin Sun, celebrities Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul with crypto violations. “The Securities and Exchange Commission has unveiled fraud and unregistered securities charges against crypto founder and Grenadian diplomat Justin Sun, alongside separate violations against the celebrity backers of his Tronix and BitTorrent crypto assets, which included Jake Paul, Lindsay Lohan and Soulja Boy.”

Bleeping Computer: North Korean hackers using Chrome extensions to steal Gmail emails. “Kimsuky (aka Thallium, Velvet Chollima) is a North Korean threat group that uses spear phishing to conduct cyber-espionage against diplomats, journalists, government agencies, university professors, and politicians. Initially focused on targets in South Korea, the threat actors expanded operations over time to target entities in the USA and Europe.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

UNESCO World Heritage Conservation: New online Guidance for Wind Energy Projects in a World Heritage Context. “UNESCO has launched a new guidance tool to enhance mutual understanding and achieve improved and constructive cooperation between the deployment of wind energy projects and the conservation of the world’s most precious heritage places.” Good morning, Internet…

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