TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Techdirt: Everything Stadia Is Now Officially Dead, Project Head Exits Google. “The tech industry is absolutely lousy with failure, of course. Ambitious projects and ideas are entertained all the time. Hell, that’s why we get so much actual cool stuff that works coming out of the industry. But for a company with the resources of Google to fail this hard, this fast, and this completely in an endeavor that really kinda should be at least partially in its wheelhouse is not a good look.”

Deadline: Elon Musk’s Twitter Wrongly Labels The BBC As Being “Government Funded”. “The BBC is not funded by the UK government. It is funded by the British public, through a system known as the license fee. The government plays a role in setting the level of the license fee, but the fee is collected by the companies contracted by the BBC through the TV Licensing authority. The BBC’s operations and editorial decision-making are entirely independent of the government.”

USEFUL STUFF

Slashgear: 12 Best iPhone Apps For Photo Editing (2023). “Apple coined the phrase, “There’s an app for that,” when marketing the iPhone 3g in 2009, eventually dedicating a whole section to the App Store for photo editing apps. We’ve compiled a list of the best photo editing apps for the iPhone. Some are more general, some are for specific tasks, but all are worthy of a place on your device.”

ZDNet: How to bookmark a Mastodon post (and why you should). “What is this feature? It’s very much like the bookmarks you use on your web browser — a convenient method of saving a post so you can easily refer to it later. You may not have used the bookmark feature on Twitter, but Mastodon is different. ”

Slashgear: 5 Tools To Convert JPG To PDF On Any Device . “When you think of JPGs, you likely think of the photos you capture with your phone camera or the pictures you download online. However, JPGs can actually be a lot of other things, such as a screenshot of a lasagna recipe or an image of your signature. In these cases, it might be better for your JPG images to be converted into PDFs instead. This way, you can readily send your PDF to anyone, and it will be more convenient for your recipients to view it.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Search Engine Land: 21 best ChatGPT alternatives. “An important thing to remember as you go through this list: these products are at very early developmental stages. Some will rapidly develop and improve, a few will be shut down, and others will pivot away entirely from what they’re doing now.”

Ars Technica: Artists astound with AI-generated film stills from a parallel universe. “Since last year, a group of artists have been using an AI image generator called Midjourney to create still photos of films that don’t exist. They call the trend ‘AI cinema.’ We spoke to one of its practitioners, Julie Wieland, and asked her about her technique, which she calls ‘synthography,’ for synthetic photography.”

Carlow Nationalist: Carlow Lecture Will Examine The Significance Of Church Interiors. (I am not putting this under “events” because it is not virtual and attendable.) “The talk will also include an introduction to a spin-off project Dr Roddy is leading entitled ‘PARISH’ (Preserving and Recording Ireland’s Sacred Heritage), a collaboration between Maynooth University and the University of Notre Dame in the USA. This project aims to produce an online database containing comprehensive photographic and other data records of the interiors of (initially) all Catholic churches on the island of Ireland.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

PC Magazine: MSI Confirms Breach as Ransomware Gang Claims Responsibility. “A new statement from MSI says users should avoid downloading firmware and BIOS updates from third-party sources, and instead only obtain such software from the company’s official website. The statement suggests MSI is worried hackers could circulate malicious versions of the company’s BIOS software when the ransomware gang, Money Message, claims it stole the PC maker’s source code.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Newswise: Internet access must become human right or we risk ever-widening inequality. “People around the globe are so dependent on the internet to exercise socio-economic human rights such as education, healthcare, work, and housing that online access must now be considered a basic human right, a new study reveals. Particularly in developing countries, internet access can make the difference between people receiving an education, staying healthy, finding a home, and securing employment – or not.”

Harvard Business Review: When Celebrity ‘Crypto-Influencers’ Rake in Cash, Investors Lose Big. “[Professor Joseph] Pacelli and his colleagues analyzed about 36,000 tweets in which 180 influencers touted cryptocurrencies over a two-year period. They found that, on average, mentions of cryptocurrencies in tweets are associated with a 1.83 percent return in the first day, but are subsequently associated with significant negative returns—an average loss of 19 percent after three months. ”

Search Engine Journal: Seven Free Open Source GPT Models Released. “Silicon Valley AI company Cerebras released seven open source GPT models to provide an alternative to the tightly controlled and proprietary systems available today. The royalty free open source GPT models, including the weights and training recipe have been released under the highly permissive Apache 2.0 license by Cerebras, a Silicon Valley based AI infrastructure for AI applications company.” Good morning, Internet…

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