SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: MegaGladys
Your own personal Wikipedia-based nosy neighbor Gladys Kravitz. Enter a Wikipedia topic and get a brief overview, potential newsy days, and a list of official communication channels (when available) and external reference resources.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Crikey (Australia): ABC to continue using Twitter despite ‘government-funded media’ label. “The [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] will continue posting to its official ABC News account on Twitter despite carrying a ‘government-funded media’ label, as broadcasters in the United States plot exits from the social media platform in protest.”

Al Jazeera: New Zealand radio threatens to quit Twitter over ‘government’ tag. “New Zealand’s public radio broadcaster has threatened to leave Twitter following Elon Musk’s decision to label certain media accounts as ‘government-funded’. Radio New Zealand’s head of content Megan Whelan said on Monday that the label, which Twitter uses to describe outlets that “may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content”, does not reflect the broadcaster’s editorial independence.”

Search Engine Land: 10 minute TikTok videos are gone. “To be clear, users can still upload videos of up to 10 minutes in length. But the ability to record & capture 10-minute long videos within the app has been discontinued.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: How to Make, Set Up, and Manage a Discord Server. “Discord is a quickly growing text and voice chat application aimed at gamers—but not just for gamers. Its sleek and simple design makes it an excellent alternative to apps like Teamspeak and Skype. It’s easy and free to get started with your own Discord server.” Solid overview that links to a lot more Discord-related content.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals. “A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.” “Now with AI features” feels more and more like 1998’s “Now with a portal!” Not that AI isn’t important, but there’s so little coherence in what we’re seeing.

Fast Company: ‘Algospeak’ is helping social media users evade algorithmic detection. “A linguistic arms race is raging online—and it isn’t clear who’s winning. On one side are social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. These sites have become better and better at identifying and removing language and content that violates their community standards. Social media users are on the other side, and they’ve come up with coded terminology designed to evade algorithmic detection. These expressions are collectively referred to as ‘algospeak.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Wall Street Journal: Social-Media Account Overseen by Former Navy Noncommissioned Officer Helped Spread Secrets. “A purported Russian blogger known as Donbass Devushka, which translates as Donbas Girl, is the face of a network of pro-Kremlin social-media, podcasting, merchandise and fundraising accounts. But the person who hosted podcasts as Donbass Devushka and oversees these accounts is a Washington-state-based former U.S. enlisted aviation electronics technician whose real name is Sarah Bils.”

XDA Developers: Despite the best efforts of Google Play Protect, the Play Store is not as safe as it may appear. “Recently, a report from Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky’s Secure List detailed how much it costs for different types of malware to function on the Play Store. For example, it costs anywhere from $2,000 to $20,000 to pay for a ‘loader’ that injects an already existing app with malicious code while bypassing Google Play Protect.”

Washington Post: A new kind of leaker: Spilling state secrets to impress online buddies. “Although the Discord leaker was critical of some U.S. policies and trafficked in the same racist, antisemitic and anti-gay memes and slogans that many of his online buddies bandied about, he seemed to be driven not by ideology or political activism, but by a desire to prove himself to his online acquaintances.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: Want to be a social media influencer? You might want to think again. “As experts in social media and health outcomes, we recently examined the aspirations, desires and rationales of becoming a social media influencer among young adults. We asked 750 Canadians between 16-30 years old, who were mostly women, about their social media use and thoughts about social media influencers.”

NewsWise: How AI and a mobile phone app could help you quit smoking. “According to research conducted by the University of East Anglia, a groundbreaking mobile app that utilizes location and trigger sensing technology could assist individuals in quitting smoking. Known as Quit Sense, this app is the first of its kind to employ artificial intelligence (AI) to identify locations where users have previously smoked and provide targeted support to manage those specific triggers.”

UC San Diego: AI Chatbot ChatGPT Mirrors Its Users to Appear Intelligent. “In a new paper published in Neural Computation, Professor Terrence Sejnowski of the University of California San Diego and Salk Institute, author of The Deep Learning Revolution, explores the relationship between the human interviewer and language models to uncover why chatbots respond in particular ways, why those responses vary and how to improve them in the future. According to Sejnowski, language models reflect the intelligence and diversity of their interviewer.” Good morning, Internet…

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