NEW RESOURCES

WKMS: Kentucky think tank launches tool to track state incarceration. “The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy is tracking the increase and causes of incarceration in the state through a newly launched website. UnlockKY shows the steady increase of incarceration in Kentucky, using a collection of data spanning back more than 30 years.”

EVENTS

Vanderbilt University: Lab-to-Table Conversation: ‘Social Media and Addiction’ May 9. “The complicated nature of social media is that while it provides space for visibility and community, it can also contain triggers for the brain that are related to where addiction activity is housed. How is social media creating needed conversations about addiction and recovery? How is it building broader community? And how is it a complex space to engage with as someone in recovery?”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

TechCrunch: Microsoft makes its AI-powered Designer tool available in preview. “Announced in October, Designer is a Canva-like web app that can generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics and more to share on social media and other channels. It leverages user-created content and DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s text-to-image AI, to ideate designs, with drop-downs and text boxes for further customization and personalization.”

Fader: DatPiff archives library, announces “next generation”. “After DatPiff’s servers crashed in mid March, operators of the beloved mixtape hub mitigated rumors of its demise by tweeting that the site was ‘still here’ and would ‘still be supplying you with all the mixtapes you love.’ Since then, they’ve updated their YouTube channel regularly and their Twitter feed sporadically. But until this week, there were no further updates on the fate of DatPiff.com itself.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNBC: Jack Dorsey criticizes Elon Musk’s leadership at Twitter: ‘It all went south’. “Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey openly criticized Elon Musk’s leadership of the company in a series of social media posts Friday, writing that ‘it all went south’ and Musk ‘should have walked away’ from the acquisition.”

Washington Post: Inside a private portal from GOP campaigns to local news sites. “The top Republican campaigns in Illinois used a private online portal last year to request stories and shape coverage in a network of media outlets that present themselves as local newspapers, according to documents and people familiar with the setup.”

Stony Brook University: “Dan’s Papers” Archive Donated to Stony Brook University Libraries. “Stony Brook University has received a donation of the archive of Dan’s Papers, the East End of Long Island’s weekly lifestyle publication, which has been gifted by publication founder Dan Rattiner.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

WIRED: Brace Yourself for the 2024 Deepfake Election. “As AI is democratized, democracy itself is falling under new pressures. There will likely be many exciting ways it will be deployed, but it may also start to distort reality and could become a major threat to the 2024 presidential election if AI-generated audio, images, and videos of candidates proliferate. The line between what’s real and what’s fake could start to blur significantly more than it already has in an age of rampant disinformation.”

Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Dutch archives on accused Nazi collaborators to open to the public in 2025. “The Dutch government is planning to throw open information about 300,000 people investigated for their collaboration with the Nazis, in a move that could accelerate a reckoning with the Netherlands’ Holocaust record. For the past seven decades, only researchers and relatives of those accused of collaborating with the Nazis could access the information held by the Dutch archives. But a law guarding the data is set to expire in 2025.”

Cointelegraph: Google Ads data: $4M stolen through crypto phishing URLs. “According to Web3 anti-scam service provider ScamSniffer, malicious adverts for phishing websites have been prevalent on Google ads searches in recent weeks. The URLs lead to fraudulent websites that prompt wallet login signature requests that compromise users’ addresses.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Nature Careers Podcast: How to keep Ukraine’s research hopes alive. “Ukrainian scientists reflect on their country’s invasion, the risk of a postwar brain drain, and stalled collaborations with Russian colleagues.” Downloadable podcast with a transcript available.

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Tom’s Hardware: Steam Deck Controls a Real Ukrainian Army Machine Gun Turret: Report. “Valve’s Steam Deck is making headlines in Ukraine as the a new tool for the Ukrainian army. To clarify: a recent posting demonstrated a remote-controlled machine gun turret that seems to be powered (or at least controlled by) the popular portable PC gaming handheld device.” Good morning, Internet…

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