NEW RESOURCES

Mississippi State University: MSU anthropologist hopes to crack Mississippi cold cases with help from new online database. “The Mississippi Repository for Missing and Unidentified Persons… opens access to important forensic information and biological profiles—from physical makeup to trauma assessments and estimated times of death—used by law enforcement in finding missing people and identifying remains. The website features a searchable portal with access to public case information.”

Bay State Banner: Black Teacher Archive reveals untold stories of the fight for education justice . “Old journals and bulletins chronicle the acts of resistance in places like Mississippi, Louisiana and North Carolina, where Black educators fought against injustice in education under Jim Crow. Those stories are now preserved in the Black Teacher Archive, a groundbreaking new digital portal that was unveiled at Harvard University last month.”

EVENTS

Poynter: This year’s United Facts of America will feature top-flight voices on elections, AI, vaccines. “The three-day virtual festival of fact-checking, running Nov. 6 to Nov. 8, will cover the Republican presidential field, GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump’s trials, Israel-Hamas war misinformation and Spanish fact-checking. The event coincides with big political events, including the Nov. 7 general election in Kentucky and the Nov. 8 Republican presidential primary debate in Miami, which NBC and Rumble will broadcast and PolitiFact will cover.” The event is free.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Register: Google bins integrity API that looked more than a bit like horrible DRM for websites. “Google intended its Web Environment Integrity API, announced on a developer mailing list in May, to serve as a way to limit online fraud and abuse without enabling privacy problems like cross-site tracking or browser fingerprinting.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: How to Take Long Exposure Photos With an iPhone. “Although Apple doesn’t let you access your iPhone camera’s shutter speed, there are still ways to recreate long exposure shots on it. We’ll discuss your options for taking long-exposure photos on an iPhone. You can use a built-in iOS feature or a third-party app that specializes in long exposure shots for impressive light trails.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Library of Congress: Library of Congress Opens Award Nominations for Outstanding Federal Libraries, Librarians and Library Technicians . “To honor the innovations and successes of federal libraries, librarians and library technicians in meeting the information demands of government, businesses, scholarly communities and the public, the Federal Library and Information Network (FEDLINK) in the Library of Congress has opened nominations for its national awards for federal librarianship in fiscal year 2023.”

WIRED: Greece’s New Political Star Is a TikTok Creation. “[Stefanos] Kasselakis didn’t speak much about policies, but his message resonated with a public tired of political families and the ruling elite, particularly the shipping class—that small group of mostly family-run businesses that retain a significant influence on Greek public life. His opposition, fresh off their summer holidays, did not have time to respond. An estimated 40,000 people signed up to join Syriza after Kasselakis announced his candidacy.”

Anchorage Daily News: German museum hopes to reconnect Alaska Native communities to artifacts collected in 1880s. “Staff from a museum in Germany traveled to Anchorage this month to stoke interest in reconnecting Alaska’s Indigenous communities to artifacts in its archives. Two representatives from the Berlin Ethnological Museum spoke at the Alaska Federation of Natives conference about its work with Chugach Alaska Corp. and nonprofit Chugachmiut to make accessible hundreds of items removed from the region in the 1880s.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Verge: AI companies have all kinds of arguments against paying for copyrighted content. “The US Copyright Office is taking public comment on potential new rules around generative AI’s use of copyrighted materials, and the biggest AI companies in the world had plenty to say. We’ve collected the arguments from Meta, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Hugging Face, StabilityAI, and Anthropic below, as well as a response from Apple that focused on copyrighting AI-written code. There are some differences in their approaches, but the overall message for most is the same: They don’t think they should have to pay to train AI models on copyrighted work.”

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: Canada poised to create public company registry to curb financial secrecy. “The Canadian parliament has paved the way for the creation of a national register of company owners… Unlike the United States’ long-awaited beneficial ownership registry, the Canadian database will be publicly searchable and include a mechanism for whistleblowers to discretely flag incorrect or fraudulent information.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Johns Hopkins University: AI Image Generators Can Be Tricked Into Making NSFW Content . “Most online art generators are purported to block violent, pornographic, and other types of questionable content. But Johns Hopkins University researchers manipulated two of the better-known systems to create exactly the kind of images the products’ safeguards are supposed to exclude.”

PsyPost: New research explores why college students overuse short-video platforms. “Short-video applications like YouTube and TikTok have become increasingly popular among college students. While these platforms offer entertainment and social interaction, a study in Computers in Human Behavior highlighted that excessive use could lead to behavioral addiction symptoms, such as emotional depression, reduced learning and work efficiency, and poor time management.” Good morning, Internet…

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