NEW RESOURCES

Discovered on Mastodon: BluegrassArchive.com ( https://bluegrassarchive.com/ ). This Web site is plain as plain (just fine!) and filled with music. It’s a list of bluegrass music artists and live concerts for which you can get recordings. Click on the name of the artist and you’ll get a directory list of folders, one per concert. The folders I looked at had concerts divided up into songs. The audio files are in FLAC format. I looked up Carolina Chocolate Drops, and they had dozens of concerts available.

EVENTS

Library of Congress: Join Us for a Congress.gov Public Forum on September 13th!. “We are pleased to announce that we are holding a “Congress.gov Public Forum” in the Mumford Room, which is located in the Madison Building, on September 13th, 2023, from 1-3 p.m. EDT. If you are a professional or a concerned citizen who uses Congress.gov regularly to keep up with the latest federal legislative activity, we want to hear from you!” The event will also be available via Zoom.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: X tests removing headlines from links to news articles. “X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, is testing stripping headlines from articles shared on the site. The move was initially reported by Fortune, before X owner Elon Musk confirmed it directly. Posts would only include the lead image and the URL, unless the person or publisher posting the link adds their own text, per materials the outlet viewed.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNBC: Google executive turnover and role changes come as the company searches for new identity. “Key members of Google’s old guard have been shifting roles or leaving the company as it searches for its new identity. The changes encompass high-profile executives such as finance chief Ruth Porat, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and employee No. 8, Urs Hölzle, among others. Some say they have left their roles for a new challenge and others have left to seek opportunities in artificial intelligence.” I have a comment for this but my keyboard keeps catching fire. Oh well.

Gizmodo: ‘I Was Shadowbanned:’ How Hinge’s Algorithm Decides Who You Date . “A lot of online daters think Hinge and other dating apps are keeping them from seeing or matching with the most appealing singles. Anthony isn’t the only one. I talked to another man who said he an identical experience but asked not to be quoted, and it’s not just frustrated guys either. Five women who spoke to me for this story swore that Hinge and other dating apps withhold their most attractive prospects. Some said it’s their own accounts being hidden from other users. And social media is full of people across the gender spectrum describing dating app shadowbans, sometimes offering tips and techniques to escape the algorithm.”

Washington University in St. Louis: New Grant to Preserve Born-Digital Poetry. “The Washington University Libraries were awarded a two-year grant by the Mellon Foundation to support an exploration of essential questions surrounding the acquisition, discoverability, preservation, and use of born-digital poetry collections. The $250,000 award will enable the University Libraries to develop online resources and systems to process, preserve, and steward the collections of a new generation of digital-native poets.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

WIRED: Scammers Used ChatGPT to Unleash a Crypto Botnet on X . “Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington discovered a botnet powered by ChatGPT operating on X—the social network formerly known as Twitter—in May of this year. The botnet, which the researchers dub Fox8 because of its connection to cryptocurrency websites bearing some variation of the same name, consisted of 1,140 accounts. Many of them seemed to use ChatGPT to craft social media posts and to reply to each other’s posts. The auto-generated content was apparently designed to lure unsuspecting humans into clicking links through to the crypto-hyping sites.”

Techdirt: HP Fails To Dodge Lawsuit Over Blocking Users From Using Their Printer Scanner If Ink Cartridges Aren’t Installed. “In 2022 HP was also hit with a lawsuit (pdf) for preventing scanners from working without sanctioned ink cartridges installed, and not being transparent about this with customers. HP has spent a few years trying to wiggle out of the suit, but hasn’t had much luck. Last week, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman ruled that the case could proceed.”

TorrentFreak: ‘Z-Library ‘Fugitives’ Should Be Brought to Trial in The United States’. “The U.S. has responded to a motion to dismiss submitted a few weeks ago by two arrested operators of Z-Library. According to the prosecution, the Russian defendants are fugitives because they continue to protest their extradition to the United States. As such, they should not be allowed to request a dismissal from the U.S. judicial system they are trying to avoid.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Stanford University: Gauging the ‘subscription economy’ boon to companies. “A new study co-authored by Stanford economists Liran Einav and Neale Mahoney examines how much companies gain when customers aren’t paying attention… Einav and Mahoney find that business revenues are from 14 percent to more than 200 percent higher than they would be if consumers were more proactive about managing their unwanted accounts.”

The Conversation: How Ukraine’s savvy official social media rallied the world and raised the bar for national propaganda. “We decided to study all of the posts that the Ukrainian government and the city of Kyiv posted to their official Twitter accounts during the first days of the Russian invasion. We found that the governments strategically used the platform as a form of crisis communication and public diplomacy. While Ukraine was battling the Russian army on its land, it was also fighting for the hearts and minds of people following the conflict on social media from afar.”

Harvard Gazette: Mental health ills are rising. Do mood-tracking apps help?. “Jukka-Pekka Onnela is an associate professor of biostatistics and co-director of the Master of Science in Health Data Science program in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He studies how data collected from digital devices can help us understand our social interactions, behavior, and moods. The Gazette spoke with Onnela to better understand how the mood tracking works. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.” 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.