NEW RESOURCES

Brennan Center for Justice: Brennan Center Launches State Court Report, Website Dedicated to State Constitutions and Courts. “Today the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law launched State Court Report, a nonpartisan website devoted to state constitutions and courts. … State Court Report also offers a database of decisions and briefs from 550 significant state supreme court cases since 2021 across the fifty states, as well as materials from major pending cases.”

MuckRock: Browse thousands of additional FOIA requests with the new FOIA Log Explorer. “MuckRock’s users have already shared almost 90,000 public requests you can search, browse, follow or refile, but that is still just a small segment of the broader world of all Freedom of Information requests. The FOIA Log Explorer expands that view by importing data on thousands of requests from dozens of agencies at the state, local and federal level, making it easier to search through and see what kinds of materials agencies are and are not releasing, as well as helping you craft more targeted requests of your own.”

State of Delaware: Celebrate Delaware’s LGBTQ+ history with a new online resource. “This September, the Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs is proud to offer a sneak-peek introduction to the LGBTQ+ History of Delaware: We Have Always Been Here project!”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

BBC: YouTube suspends Russell Brand from advert income. “YouTube has suspended Russell Brand’s channels from making money from adverts for ‘violating’ its ‘creator responsibility policy’. The video platform said it was taking action ‘to protect’ its users. It comes after the Metropolitan Police received a report of an alleged sexual assault in 2003, in the wake of further allegations about the star.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: How to Make Reddit Suck Less on Your Phone. “IT’S BEEN A few months since Reddit shut down the vast majority of third-party clients, and the protests have mostly died down. But using Reddit on mobile is a nightmare—it’s slow, riddled with prompts, and constantly asks if you want notifications. … There is one simple workaround: Use the web version instead. But Reddit also goes out of its way to make this annoying: There are constant pop-ups encouraging you to install the Reddit app, and they take up half the screen. Let’s talk about how to avoid these pop-ups on Apple devices and then go over a few third-party apps—including one still working on Android.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Chortle: Velvet Onion vanishes. “Alternative comedy website The Velvet Onion has disappeared from the internet. The site covered the scene from 2010 to 2018 – but now even the cost of maintaining its archive as a permanent presence has proved too much for founder Didymus Holmes.”

CNBC: Elon Musk says Twitter, now X, is moving to monthly subscription fees and has 550 million users. “Elon Musk discussed his plans for Twitter, now called X, on Monday during a livestreamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Among other things, Musk said the social network is ‘moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system’ in order to combat ‘vast armies of bots.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

New York Times: Sam Bankman-Fried’s Parents Sued by FTX. “”On Monday, FTX filed a lawsuit in federal court in Delaware accusing Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, longtime Stanford law professors, of using their ‘access and influence within the FTX enterprise to enrich themselves.’ The lawsuit seeks to claw back millions of dollars the couple received from their son.”

The Register: Sonos secures a victory in audio patent fight against Google . “The years-long legal drama resulting from a brief fling between Google and smart speaker maker Sonos has resulted in another loss for the Chocolate Factory, which had its claims of copyright infringement tossed out by a US International Trade Commission (ITC) judge Friday.”

Ars Technica: How Google Authenticator made one company’s network breach much, much worse. “A security company is calling out a feature in Google’s authenticator app that it says made a recent internal network breach much worse. Retool, which helps customers secure their software development platforms, made the criticism on Wednesday in a post disclosing a compromise of its customer support system. The breach gave the attackers responsible access to the accounts of 27 customers, all in the cryptocurrency industry.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

George Washington University: Social Media May Be Used to Combat COVID Vaccine Hesitancy in Nigeria. “A social media campaign launched in 2022 helped encourage some Nigerians to roll up their sleeves for a COVID vaccine, according to a study published today in PLOS ONE. ‘Our research suggests that a social media campaign can reduce vaccine hesitancy and increase the vaccination rates in Nigeria and possibly other low-income countries,’ said Doug Evans, the lead author of the paper and a professor of prevention and community health at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.”

The Register: ChatGPT’s odds of getting code questions correct are worse than a coin flip . “ChatGPT, OpenAI’s fabulating chatbot, produces wrong answers to software programming questions more than half the time, according to a study from Purdue University. That said, the bot was convincing enough to fool a third of participants.” Good morning, Internet…

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