NEW RESOURCES

Deadline: The Roddenberry Archive & OTOY Unveil New Virtual ‘Star Trek’ Experience Allowing Trekkies To Examine Every Evolution Of The Starship Enterprise Bridge & Even Walk Across It. “The web portal will allow fans to virtually explore the many dozens of evolutionary iterations of the famous Starship Enterprise bridge, across every epoch of Star Trek‘s history, with each bridge made accessible in the timeline as a 1:1 scale, ‘in-universe,’ 360 recreation.”

Motherboard: Two Fed Up Redditors Launched a Site to Anonymously Rate Your Landlord. “The site is anonymous; users just need to submit the name of their landlord or property management company and the city where they’re based. They’re prompted to leave a rating between 1 and 5 for Repair, Health and Safety, Rental Stability, Tenant Privacy and Respect, and a written review.”

Ghana Today: GSS develops online database for accessing census statistics. “The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has developed an online database for accessing disaggregated census statistics…. The online database called StatsBank allows users to generate customised tables and maps at the national, and sub-national levels at no cost. The GSS StatsBank, which was launched on Thursday in Accra contains over 300 million unique statistics from published 2021 Population and Housing Census (PHC) reports.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Brooklyn Public Library: BPL’s Viral Books Unbanned Initiative Celebrates New Milestone during National Library Week; Teens In All 50 States Checked Out 100,000 Books from Brooklyn Public Library’s Digital Collection Over Last Year. “Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) announced a new milestone today in the fight against censorship and book banning: more than 6000 young people, ages 13 to 21, have applied for a free BPL library card over the last year, providing them access to the Library’s entire digital collection of half a million items. In total, they have checked out 100,000 books via BPL’s Books Unbanned initiative.”

BBC: ChatGPT accessible again in Italy. “Access to the ChatGPT chatbot has been restored in Italy. It was banned by the Italian data-protection authority at the start of April over privacy concerns.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Mayor (EU): Berlin publishes a guide on dealing with ChatGPT in schools. “At the start of the week, Berlin’s Senate Department for Education, Youth and Family published guidelines for schools on dealing with ChatGPT. The new AI text tool has seen a massive rise in popularity over the last few months and one of the areas that are most significantly impacted in the initial phase of this new tech’s adoption is education.”

NPR: Hard times are here for news sites and social media. Is this the end of Web 2.0?. “The turmoil caused by a historic slowdown in digital advertising is sparking worries among staff at online media companies about further and possibly deeper cuts beyond the mass layoffs and abrupt closures over the last few months.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NBC News: ‘Mom influencer’ found guilty of lying about Latino couple trying to kidnap her kids at California store. “A white California ‘mom influencer’ was convicted of fabricating a story about a Latino couple trying to kidnap her children outside of a store. Katie Sorensen, 31, was found guilty of one count of making a false report of a crime, the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office said on Thursday. She was taken into custody on $100,000 bail.”

India Today: Google removes 3500 loan apps in India for misleading users, violating Play Store guidelines . “In order to safeguard users from falling for such apps, Google has taken action against more than 3,500 loan apps in India during 2022 for breaking the rules of the Play Store, as per Play protect report.This means that Google has removed these apps from its app store.”

City A.M. (UK): Wikipedia won’t comply with Online Safety Bill if passed, its charity warns. “Wikipedia will not comply with aspects of the Online Safety Bill if passed, the website’s charity has warned. The bill — currently sitting in the House of Lords — will compel social media platforms and tech companies to police and remove hateful content.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Fortune: The Google Brain-DeepMind merger is good for Google. It might not be for us. “At stake is Google’s main revenue and profit-driver—its dominance of internet search—as well as a bunch of other Google product lines, including its Workspace office productivity software and its cloud computing services. But, while merging Brain and DeepMind might be a winning combination for Alphabet, we all might wind up losing.”

University of Oxford: ‘Spectacular’ new find: Roman military camps in desert found by Oxford archaeologists using Google Earth. “Three new Roman fortified camps have been identified across northern Arabia by a remote sensing survey by the University of Oxford’s School of Archaeology. Their paper, published today [Thurs] in the journal Antiquity, reports the discovery may be evidence of a probable undocumented military campaign across south east Jordan into Saudi Arabia.” Good morning, Internet…

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