NEW RESOURCES

Motherboard: New Tool Shows if Your Car Might Be Tracking You, Selling Your Data. “A new tool that is free to use for consumers aims to better inform people about the types of data their particular car manufacturer might be collecting and sharing about their identity and driving patterns.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mashable: Public services will get free API access again, Twitter says. “Elon Musk has made a lot of controversial decisions at Twitter since taking over. But, perhaps none were more roundly criticized then the decision to cut-off important public service and safety accounts from Twitter’s API, unless they paid for its new exorbitant Enterprise pricing. On Tuesday, however, Twitter appears to have changed its mind.”

Stephen Wolfram: Instant Plugins for ChatGPT: Introducing the Wolfram ChatGPT Plugin Kit. “… what if you want to make your own special plugin, that does specific computations, or has access to data or services that are for example available only on your own computer or computer system? Well, today we’re releasing a first version of a kit for doing that. And building on our whole Wolfram Language tech stack, we’ve managed to make the whole process extremely easy—to the point where it’s now realistic to deploy at least a basic custom ChatGPT plugin in under a minute.”

USEFUL STUFF

Hongkiat: 5 Free AI Content Detectors (GPT / ChatGPT). “These detectors use machine learning models like GPT and ChatGPT to analyze text and determine the likelihood of it being generated by AI. In this article, we’ll introduce you to five of the best (and free) AI content detectors available online. With just a simple copy and paste, these tools can identify whether humans wrote your content or has gotten some help from AI writting tools.” Bear in mind that these tools aren’t perfect, and an assessment from one of them should not be treated as absolute truth.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

WA Today: Google quietly makes billions from Australia as Twitter hogs headlines. “Search giant Google pulled in a record $8.4 billion in revenue from Australia last year but channelled most of the money offshore via reseller agreements while the social network Twitter, which has dominated headlines, made $19 million.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Google, Microsoft CEOs called to AI meeting at White House. “The chief executives of Alphabet Inc’s Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic will meet with Vice President Kamala Harris and top administration officials to discuss key artificial intelligence (AI) issues on Thursday, said a White House official.”

Associated Press: Brazil orders Google to halt campaign against speech bill. “Brazil’s Justice Ministry on Tuesday ordered Google to stop conducting what it called a propaganda campaign against Brazilian legislation aimed at curbing misinformation, or face about $200,000 per hour in fines.”

Bloomberg: Instagram, Google See Surge in Reports of Online Child Abuse. “Reports of child exploitation online increased at many of the biggest tech and social media firms over the last year, including Meta Platforms Inc.’s Instagram and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. TikTok, Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch, Reddit Inc., and the chat apps Omegle and Discord Inc. also saw increases, according to a Tuesday report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Waterloo: Researchers explore why some people get motion sick playing VR games while others don’t. “Cybersickness is a form of motion sickness that occurs from exposure to immersive VR and augmented reality applications. A new study, led by researchers at the University of Waterloo, found that the subjective visual vertical – a measure of how individuals perceive the orientation of vertical lines – shifted considerably after participants played a high-intensity VR game.”

Engadget: US political parties’ views on Twitter have changed dramatically in two years. “Republicans’ and Democrats’ views of Twitter have moved in opposite directions since Elon Musk’s takeover last fall. A Pew Research poll published today found that Republicans are more likely to see the social platform in a positive light than two years ago, while Democrats’ views have moved on a divergent path.” Good afternoon, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute.