NEW RESOURCES

UNITED24: Monitoring rebuilding efforts — a joint project by UNITED24 and LUN. (This link is to a Google Doc.) “18 residential buildings in Kyiv Oblast are actively being rebuilt, funded by UNITED24. From now on, you can read the stories of their residents and observe the progress, thanks to the monitoring project of the IT company LUN.”

Berkeley Public Health: The data are clear: Racism harms health. “Our just-launched website, Racism Harms Health, compiles research data culled from more than 250 studies across the spectrum of American life—from workplaces and policing to education and housing—showing exactly how racism harms health. It makes the evidence clear and easily accessible to public health practitioners, policymakers, students, researchers, and anyone interested in an equitable, healthy society.”

EVENTS

Kyodo News: U.N. forum on internet governance begins in Kyoto, focus on AI. “A U.N. forum on public policy issues regarding the internet began in Kyoto on Sunday with focus on artificial intelligence and measures against disinformation. The results of the discussions at the Internet Governance Forum scheduled through Thursday will be utilized for the Hiroshima AI Process, in which the Group of Seven industrialized nations will establish rules on AI-related topics.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Decrypt: Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Creator Yuga Labs Confirms Layoffs. “Yuga Labs, the $4 billion startup behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club and other prominent NFT projects, announced Friday that it has restructured the company and eliminated certain roles as a result, leading to layoffs.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: The Easiest Ways to Access Your Computer Remotely. “FROM MUSIC STREAMING to video calling, the internet has given us so much. It has also made it much easier to get to your computer when you’re not actually sitting in front of it. There are now numerous remote access programs to choose from that will connect one computer to another across the web. What’s more, a lot of the basic tools are free to use.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Washington Post: Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen. “Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.”

Canadian Press: MuchMusic’s expansive physical videotape archive is finally going digital. “Decades of MuchMusic programming is being rescued from the sands of time. The music channel’s owner Bell Media says it’s on the final stretch of a years-long project to go through tens of thousands of videotapes and transfer pieces of pop culture history into a new digital archive.”

Chicago Tribune: Landmarks: A 200-year archive of maps faces uncertain future as 5-generation run of Chicago surveyors nears end. “A group of college students in Springfield was engaged in an ambitious project to digitize all the written records associated with court cases argued by Abraham Lincoln back when he was just an Illinois attorney. One name the students found that appeared in a couple of cases associated with Lincoln was Samuel S. Greeley, a prominent surveyor based in Chicago in the city’s early days.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Euromaidan: Texty: Russian museums refuse to return 110,000 Ukrainian looted treasures. “A new investigation by the Ukrainian media outlet TEXTY reveals that two of Russia’s biggest museums – the State Hermitage Museum and the State Historical Museum – hold over 110,000 artifacts that were taken from modern-day Ukraine. The study excluded icons, artwork, and weapons, as their origins are harder to trace. It also did not look at objects looted during the current war in Ukraine.”

ZDNet: Patch now: This serious Linux vulnerability affects nearly all distributions. “As security holes go, CVE-2023-4911, aka ‘Looney Tunables,’ isn’t horrid. It has a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 7.8, which is ranked as important, not critical. On the other hand, this GNU C Library’s (glibc) dynamic loader vulnerability is a buffer overflow, which is always big trouble, and it’s in pretty much all Linux distributions, so it’s more than bad enough.”

VN Express: Google Maps used to advertise illegal services in Vietnam. “People are trying to advertise illegal services anonymously using Google Maps’s tagging feature, the broadcast watchdog said. Le Quang Tu Do, head of the Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information, confirmed this on Thursday, saying his agency has received reports about tags not being properly displayed on Google Maps.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Tech Xplore: Study: Digital watermark protections can be easily bypassed. “Major digital media companies—OpenAI, Alphabet, Amazon, DeepMind—have promised to develop tools to combat disinformation. One key approach is the use of watermarking on AI-generated content. But a paper published Sept. 29 on the preprint server arXiv raises troubling news about the ability to curb such digital abuse. Professors at the University of Maryland ran tests demonstrating easy run-arounds of protective watermarks.” Good morning, Internet…

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