If you’re a Mastodon user and you want an easy way to follow Mastodon accounts while Web browsing, check out this bookmarklet I made: https://github.com/ResearchBuzz/Mastodon-Follow-Bookmarklet .

NEW RESOURCES

Library of Congress: Tens of Thousands Join 2023 Library of Congress National Book Festival. “Tens of thousands of book lovers joined the Library of Congress National Book Festival in person on Aug. 12 at the Washington Convention Center, including capacity crowds on numerous stages. Videos of select stages are now available, and individual presentations will be made available on demand on the festival’s website beginning the week of Aug. 21.”

National Center for Appropriate Technology: Farmer Funding Opportunities Database Launched . “Community Alliance with Family Farmers has launched a new Farmer Funding Opportunities Database, available online in English and Spanish. The database offers listings for grant programs and cost-share opportunities for farmers and local food systems.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: One surviving Reddit app plans to charge based on how much you use it. “The developer Relay for Reddit, of one of the remaining third-party Reddit apps for Android, detailed the potential prices for planned subscriptions for the app in a new post on Thursday. The costs of a subscription will go up based on a user’s daily average number of API calls, essentially meaning that the more things a person does in the app, the more they might have to pay.”

Google Blog: Announcing the new Transparency Center. “Today, we’re launching the Transparency Center — a central hub for you to learn more about our product policies. The Transparency Center collects existing resources and policies, and was designed with you in mind, providing easy access to information on our policies, how we create and enforce them, and much more.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Federal News Network: As free press withers in El Salvador, pro-government social media influencers grow in power. “[Douglas] Guzmán is part of an expanding network of social media personalities acting as a megaphone for the millennial leader. At the same time [Nayib] Bukele has cracked down on the press, his government has embraced those influencers. As the president seeks to hold onto power, he has harnessed that flood of pro-Bukele content slowly turning his Central American nation into an informational echo chamber.”

Public Radio of Armenia: 32 films to be digitized on 100th anniversary of Armenian cinema. “Five full-length feature films, 10 documentaries and 17 animated shorts will be digitized on the 100th anniversary of Armenian cinema and 85th anniversary of Armenian animation, the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport informs.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Hollywood Reporter: AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable, Judge Says in Ruling That Could Give Hollywood Studios Pause. “A federal judge on Friday upheld a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that a piece of art created by AI is not open to protection. The ruling was delivered in an order turning down Stephen Thaler’s bid challenging the government’s position refusing to register works made by AI.”

WIRED: How an Iowa School District Used ChatGPT to Ban Books. “Using ChatGPT’s guidance, the Mason City Community School District removed 19 titles—including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Toni Morrison’s Beloved—from its library shelves. But there is another truth: Educators who must comply with vague laws about ‘age-appropriate’ books with ‘descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act’ have only so many options.”

Bleeping Computer: WinRAR flaw lets hackers run programs when you open RAR archives. “A high-severity vulnerability has been fixed in WinRAR, the popular file archiver utility for Windows used by millions, that can execute commands on a computer simply by opening an archive. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2023-40477 and could give remote attackers arbitrary code execution on the target system after a specially crafted RAR file is opened.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

PLOS Absolutely Maybe: How Is Science Twitter’s “Mastodon Migration” Panning Out?. “This mid-year activity surge at Mastodon is driven, like surges before it, partly by people joining, and partly by people returning to their dormant accounts. They’re joining, or returning to, a Mastodon that’s changing, and not just because there’s more people and more activity.”

The Conversation: How ChatGPT might be able to help the world’s poorest and the organisations that work with them. “We are associated with Friend in Need India Trust (FIN), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) based in an isolated fishing village named Kameswaram in Tamil Nadu state. FIN wages a daily battle against women’s lack of empowerment, pollution and a lack of functioning sanitation. These problems and others act as key obstacles to local economic development. Recently a FIN colleague, Dr Raja Venkataramani, returned from the US keen to discuss ChatGPT. He wondered whether the AI chatbot could help to create awareness, motivation and community engagement towards our sustainability goals in Kameswaram.”

NoCamels: New Web App Gives A Voice To People With Speech Impairment. “Voiceitt 2, developed by Voiceitt, lets people with speech disabilities speak spontaneously and be understood by others. It translates their non-standard speech into standard speech, and enables them to transcribe their conversations. It also integrates with AI assistants like ChatGPT and can even be added to video meetings to provide captioning and real time transcriptions.” Good morning, Internet…

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