TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CBC: Still unsatisfied with Online News Act, Google says it expects to remove news links this year. “Google says it still expects to remove news links from its search engine at the end of the year. The company has been a part of the regulatory process for the Online News Act, which will require tech giants to pay media outlets for news content that is shared or repurposed on their online platforms. Google says draft regulations to implement the bill don’t address the company’s concerns.”

Mashable: Reddit just made some big updates to its search function. “Reddit has launched a slew of updates to its search functionality. The app broke down the latest additions, which include a media search tab, a media search within subreddits, and accessibility features, in a blog post on Wednesday.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

BBC: AI: Voice cloning tech emerges in Sudan civil war. “A campaign using artificial intelligence to impersonate Omar al-Bashir, the former leader of Sudan, has received hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok, adding online confusion to a country torn apart by civil war.”

VietnamNet: Online cuisine map to bring Vietnamese foods to the world. “The Vietnam Cuisine Culture Association (VCCA) is working to develop a national online cuisine map with a view to introducing Vietnamese cuisine quintessence to the world through helping those who want to explore the country’s food.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

404 Media: People Exploited YouTube Bug to Upload “Undeletable” Porn Videos. “A small community of people who search for adult content on YouTube has discovered a bug that allows them to continue hosting porn on YouTube, even if their channels are deleted.”

Europol: Europol and TikTok collaborate to bolster efforts against terrorist content. “On 28 September, a large-scale voluntary Referral Action Day between TikTok, Europol’s European Counter Terrorism Centre (ECTC) and 11 countries took place targeting suspected terrorist and violent extremist content online. In collaboration with the video sharing platform TikTok, investigators from the participating countries, together with the ECTC’s European Union Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU), performed an exercise to detect material glorifying past terrorist attacks or terrorist perpetrators.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Defense One: Taiwan is using generative AI to fight Chinese disinfo. “As Taiwan approaches a pivotal presidential election in January, Tang said that both the government and a wide network of volunteers are preparing for China to increase efforts to manipulate Taiwanese civilians. Taiwanese civil society has developed new organizations to combat it. A group called Cofacts allows users to forward dubious messages to a chatbot. Human editors check the messages, enter them into a database, and get back to the user with a verdict.”

City University of New York: A call for ethical guidelines for social media data use in public health research. “Three studies by CUNY SPH investigators highlight the need for stronger guidance on research ethics for using data from social media platforms in public health research, especially the use of personal identifiers.”

Harvard University: Undoing Empire, One Plant at a Time. “This summer, the Davis Center’s Imperiia team partnered with the Harvard Map Collection on the “Undoing Empire” project. The project was awarded a Harvard Library Advancing Open Knowledge grant to sustain work across a six-month period. It has three goals: 1) create a database of biodiversity in 19th-century Ukraine, 2) create an inclusive strategy for mapping historical places, and 3) develop best practices for producing data that can be preserved via the Harvard Geospatial Library and the Harvard Library (HOLLIS) catalog.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Yale Library: In the cards: Library partners work together to solve mysteries of rare tarot deck. “For the past five years, and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the library has collaborated internally and partnered internationally to study the world’s three earliest 15th-century Italian tarot (or tarocchi) decks. One of these decks is the Visconti di Modrone deck, held in the Cary Collection of Playing Cards at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Dating from ca. 1440–45, it is one of the oldest of the three.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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