NEW RESOURCES

NASA: NASA Releases Small Spacecraft Reliability Knowledge Base Tool v3.0. “The [Small Satellite Reliability Initiative] Knowledge Base is a free, pubicly available, comprehensive and searchable online tool that consolidates and organizes resources, best practices, and lessons learned from previous NASA small satellite missions and missions sponsored by other organizations. The SSRI Knowledge Base is updated on a regular cadence with best practices, lessons learned, and unique resources for the 58 topic pages.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Eyerys: Google Introduces ‘AR One Sans,’ A Font Meant For Augmented Reality Headsets. “A font is those stylized characters for text information. And Google has just introduced what it calls the ‘AR One Sans’, which is a type family purposefully designed for AR environments and user interfaces. What makes it unique, is its high-readability on user interface with busy backgrounds.”

USEFUL STUFF

Make Tech Easier: 7+ Ways to Extract Text From an Image. “There are many reasons to copy the text you see in an image. You may have a screenshot with instructions or a photo of a billboard with details. This guide includes several ways to extract text from an image, depending on your platform or device.”

PC World: 22 awesome open source programs that do everything you need. “Good software is the basis of all PC use, but many professional programs are too expensive for private use. This is where the free software-based applications step in, which, including their source code, are available free of charge on the internet. This immediately raises the question of quality and functionality. Don’t worry, open source software is often a real competitor to professional products. In this guide, we present the best open source tools for typical areas of application — from Office, to media editing, to file management and backup.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

404 Media: AI Images Detectors Are Being Used to Discredit the Real Horrors of War. “A free AI image detector that’s been covered in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal is currently identifying a photograph of what Israel says is [too graphic for me to mention in a summary] as being generated by AI. However, the image does not show any signs it was created by AI, according to Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading experts on digitally manipulated images.” This story is extremely disturbing and graphic.

Washington Post: A flood of misinformation shapes views of Israel-Gaza conflict. “Social media has long played a critical role in battles in the area. During the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in 2021, posts of carnage in Gaza rallied the public to the Palestinian cause. Researchers say increased internet access and the spread of smartphones enabled a watershed moment, revealing how tech platforms could show the horror and human toll of such events. But now, a volatile, months-long fight over Israel’s democratic future has primed conspiracies and false information to spread within its borders.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Hindu: All of Google’s eyes, now on Madras High Court. “The court will decide the fate of civil suits filed against service fees levied on owners of mobile apps featured on Google Play. The litigants have accused Google of abusing its dominant position in the market to impose ‘unconscionable and arbitrary’ conditions.”

Associated Press: Australian safety watchdog fines social platform X $385,000 for not tackling child abuse content. “Australia’s online safety watchdog said on Monday it had fined X — the social media platform formerly known as Twitter — 610,500 Australian dollars ($385,000) for failing to fully explain how it tackled child sexual exploitation content.”

BBC: Inside the deadly instant loan app scam that blackmails with nudes. “A blackmail scam is using instant loan apps to entrap and humiliate people across India and other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At least 60 Indians have killed themselves after being abused and threatened. A​ BBC undercover investigation has exposed those profiting from this deadly scam in India and China.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog: Cataloguing the Cotton charters. “A new project is underway to examine one of the British Library’s oldest and most important collections. The Cotton charters and rolls are being catalogued as part of the Library’s Hidden Collections initiative. Begun by the antiquarian and politician Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631), and augmented by his son and grandson, the Cotton collection was the first library to be presented to the nation, in 1702, and it has been part of the British Library and its predecessor, the British Museum Library, since the latter’s foundation in 1753.”

New York Times: Wearables Track Parkinson’s Better Than Human Observation, Study Finds. “An Oxford University researcher and her team showed that digital wearable devices can track the progression of Parkinson’s disease in an individual more effectively than human clinical observation can, according to a newly published paper.”

Truth or Fiction: So Long, and Thanks for All the Facts. “Visibility and visits are the lifeblood of digital publishing, and the absence of fact checks to an audience is the absence of sustaining revenue to a site or project; this is how efforts like ours are slowly starved into silence. It’s not just counterdisinformation that is under attack. Related services and fields have been chronically starved away for decades and replaced with distortions and outright lies.” Yup. Good morning, Internet…

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