TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014. “Ellen’s famous ‘most retweeted’ selfie from the 2014 Oscars has had its image restored, but most old tweets have broken short links instead of the media or links that should be there.”

Boing Boing: Twitter sinks in app store ranking and general findability after “X” rebrand. “Twitter, or “X” as it’s now supposed to be called, has suffered a ‘dramatic decrease’ in its popularity on app stores and in other measures of online findability. Searching for the old name, still in wide use among confused normies and indifferent users, now brings up ads from competitors and hinky SEO plays for the abandoned brand. Searching for X, if you’re even doing it? Good luck!”

TechCrunch: Pinterest rolls out new teen safety features, including wiping followers from users 15 and under . “Pinterest today introduced a series of new safety features aimed at better protecting teens using its service. The features — which include things like private profiles, more control over followers, and message safety controls — are similar to those introduced on other popular social media platforms with teens, like Instagram.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

North Shore News: One YouTuber is saving and sharing Vancouver TV from the 80s and 90s. “The nostalgia of 80s and 90s TV in Vancouver is being preserved on a YouTube channel. RetroVancouver, run by Dax Sorrenti, has become the home to commercials and clips from the pre-Internet decades that many remember but may not be able to find online. Sorrenti says he runs the account to give people a chance to relive memories and the feeling of being younger.”

Wall Street Journal: How Dozens of Websites Sell Knock-Off Drugs, No Prescription Required. “The Wall Street Journal identified more than 50 websites selling semaglutide and tirzepatide, the active ingredients in Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro. Nearly all of them include disclaimers that the substances are ‘not for human consumption.’ But several also include instructions for how to prepare human doses, or sponsor online forums where people explain how to inject the substances.”

Digital Library of Georgia: Digital Library Of Georgia Awards Digitization Subgrants To 7 Georgia Cultural Heritage Institutions Across The State. “The Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) announced today the 7 recipients of its latest set of digitization service awards. These awards expand the scope of the Georgia communities documented in the Digital Library of Georgia. Among the awardees are 5 new partners. Awardee projects include documentation of the Leo Frank trial and folk pottery of Northeast Georgia.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

San Francisco Chronicle: Hack of critical real estate tool upends Bay Area house showings. “A cyberattack on a software service used by real estate agents to track property listing data is in its second week, upending open house tours in San Francisco. ‘It is wreaking havoc everywhere,’ said David Bellings, an agent for 37 years. ‘It is disrupting and frustrating. Clients are asking for information and we just have to tell them we don’t have access.'”

Mashable: Which countries have banned TikTok?. “Beyond, across North America, Europe and Asia, several countries have implemented some level of restriction on the the app, largely over privacy and cybersecurity concerns connected to its parent company ByteDance, which has ties to the Chinese government. International government bodies including the European Commission and NATO have banned staff from using TikTok on their corporate phones, as have federal governments in countries across the globe. Here are the countries that have invoked partial or total bans on the app.”

The Register: Interpol arrests 14 who allegedly scammed $40m from victims in ‘cyber surge’. “An Interpol-led operation arrested 14 suspects and identified 20,674 ‘suspicious’ networks spanning 25 African countries that international cops have linked to more than $40 million in cybercrime losses.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: Social media algorithms warp how people learn from each other, research shows. “People’s daily interactions with online algorithms affect how they learn from others, with negative consequences including social misperceptions, conflict and the spread of misinformation, my colleagues and I have found.”

University of Wisconsin-Madison: Study Finds Teens, Young Adults Benefit From Clinician Advice About Safe Social Media Use. “Teens and young adults who received a brief social media counseling session during a health care visit remembered the lessons and reported safer online behavior six months later, according to a large new study from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.”

Vanderbilt University: Guidance on AI Detection and Why We’re Disabling Turnitin’s AI Detector. “In April of this year, Turnitin released an update to their product that reviewed submitted papers and presented their determination of how much of a paper was written by AI. … After several months of using and testing this tool, meeting with Turnitin and other AI leaders, and talking to other universities who also have access, Vanderbilt has decided to disable Turnitin’s AI detection tool for the foreseeable future.” Good morning, 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.