NEW RESOURCES

Smithsonian: Smithsonian American Art Museum Releases 10 New Digital Comics Exploring the Lives of Women Artists Represented in Its Collection. “The Smithsonian American Art Museum has published 10 new digital comics, each celebrating a woman artist represented in the museum’s permanent collection.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Axios: Supreme Court temporarily halts measure to restrict government communications with social media firms. “The Supreme Court on Thursday temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that restricts communication between the Biden administration and social media companies…. The move came hours after Justice Department officials asked the court to issue a stay on the ruling, arguing it violated the First Amendment.”

The Verge: Artifact’s new Links feature makes it much more than a news app. “Links is a new section in the Artifact app, and it’s for far more than news. It’s for, well, links. You can post a link in Artifact to just about anything — an article, a video, a recipe, a real estate listing, a game where all you do is move rocks around — along with a note, a few images, or an AI-generated summary.”

TechCrunch: Amazon updates visual search, AR search and more in challenge to Google. “Amazon is introducing new features that make it easier to search for products on mobile and is challenging other product search engines, like Google and Pinterest in the process. The retailer announced a handful of new search and discovery features, including multimodal search (searching with text plus images), an expansion of its AR efforts and a new ‘Find-on-Amazon’ feature that finds similar products to those in a photo you share directly with the Amazon app, among other things.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Bloomberg: X Unlikely to Win Back Advertisers Before Holiday Season. “Elon Musk picked Linda Yaccarino to be chief executive officer of X, the company formerly known as Twitter, with hope that the former NBCUniversal executive would convince advertisers who had stopped spending on the site to return. But so far, many major brands are remaining on the sidelines, and have already planned to deploy their budgets elsewhere during the holiday season — historically the most lucrative period for ad revenue.”

Boing Boing: Roblox wants to become a dating app. “Yes, you read that headline correctly. Roblox, one of the most popular children’s video games in the world, now wants to expand into “dating experiences” for its players, at least according to CEO David Baszucki in a keynote speech at the RDC 2023 conference for Roblox developers.” For some reason I’m thinking about the LEGO MMO which was cancelled because of a surfeit of user-generated penises. Blending grownup topics with a brand for children seems dangerous.

New York Times: Google Sheds Hundreds of Recruiters in Another Round of Layoffs. “Google conducted another round of layoffs on Wednesday, telling its recruiters that by the end of the day hundreds of them would be losing their jobs, three people with knowledge of the layoffs said. Google’s recruiting group, which at one point had more than 3,000 employees, has already been hit hard by layoffs this year.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Krebs on Security: Adobe, Apple, Google & Microsoft Patch 0-Day Bugs. “Microsoft today issued software updates to fix at least five dozen security holes in Windows and supported software, including patches for two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited. Also, Adobe, Google Chrome and Apple iOS users may have their own zero-day patching to do.”

Reuters: Google reaches $93 million privacy settlement with California. “Google will pay California $93 million to resolve a lawsuit accusing the search engine company of misleading consumers about its location tracking practices. The settlement announced on Thursday by California Attorney General Rob Bonta resolves claims that the Alphabet Inc unit deceived people into believing they maintained control over how Google collected and used their personal data.”

Unseen Japan: A True Tourist Trap: This Hotel in Japan Doesn’t Exist. “FNN Prime Online in Japan relates the story of a 19-year-old man who found a promising-looking hotel via the Website Booking.com for his trip to Chiba Prefecture. The listing said the hotel had just opened this summer. It contained convincing-looking photos of a terrace with BBQs, as well as interior pictures of the rooms. So the young man headed out for what he assumed would be a pleasant outing in the town of Ichinomiya. Ichinomiya bills itself as a seaside town, with much of its tourist advertising oriented towards surfers or people who want to learn surfing. Alas, whatever plans the 19-year-old had wouldn’t work out. Because when he got to his hotel, there was nothing but an empty grass lot.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Associated Press: Repurposing dead spiders, counting cadaver nose hairs win Ig Nobels for comical scientific feats. “Counting nose hairs in cadavers, repurposing dead spiders and explaining why scientists lick rocks, are among the winning achievements in this year’s Ig Nobels, the prize for humorous scientific feats, organizers announced Thursday.”

Techdirt: New Study: People Have A Negative View Of Advertisers Who Still Advertise On Platforms That Allow Hate Speech. “CCIA has released a report on the impact of harmful content on brands and advertising, done through creating surveys of users in hypothetical scenarios on social media where hate speech is and is not moderated Turns out, as we said, if you allow hate speech on your website it drives users and advertisers away (someone should tell Elon). It also makes users think poorly of the advertisers who remain.” Good morning, Internet…

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