NEW RESOURCES

The Conversation: Our mapping project shows how extensive frontier violence was in Queensland. This is why truth-telling matters. “For seven years, we have been reconstructing the activities of the Native Mounted Police in order to help Queenslanders begin to understand this history…. We have organised all of our findings – nearly 20,000 documents in total – in an online database to shed light on the lives of the 450 officers and over 1,000 Aboriginal troopers who made up the Native Mounted Police, and the violence they administered.”

San Francisco State University: SF State launches comprehensive online archive of historic student strike. “As social movements across the globe are more active than ever, San Francisco State University just upgraded its own archives of the historic student strike of 1968 – 1969. Now, anyone can do their research easily through one comprehensive website, the San Francisco State Strike Collection. It is home to hundreds of historical photos, news footage, posters and flyers, documents and oral histories.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

WordPress: Introducing Twenty Twenty-Four. “Unlike past default themes, Twenty Twenty-Four breaks away from the tradition of focusing on a specific topic or style. Instead, this theme has been thoughtfully crafted to cater to any type of website, regardless of its focus. The theme explores three different use cases: one designed for entrepreneurs and small businesses, another for photographers and artists, and a third tailored for writers and bloggers.”

Search Engine Journal: Google Adds New Documentation For Mystery Crawler. “Google updated the list of their official crawlers by adding the name and information for a relatively unknown crawler that publishers have been seeing now and then but no documentation for it previously existed. Although Google added official documentation for this crawler the information provided seems to encourage more clarification.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNBC: X, formerly Twitter, being ‘overrun by trolls and lunatics’ after Musk takeover, Wikipedia founder says. “Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales slammed X, formerly known as Twitter, after its takeover by Elon Musk, saying the social media service is losing users and has been ‘overrun by trolls and lunatics.’ The comments continue a war of words between the two high-profile technology figures that goes back to last year.”

Engadget: Popular AI platform introduces rewards system to encourage deepfakes of real people . “Civitai, an online marketplace for sharing AI models, just introduced a new feature called ‘bounties’ to encourage its community to develop passable deepfakes of real people, as originally reported by 404 Media. Whoever concocts the best AI model gets a virtual currency called “Buzz” that users can buy with actual money.”

Reuters: Exclusive-Yandex NV could sell Russian assets all at once. “Yandex’s Dutch holding company is considering selling all its Russian assets at once, rather than just a controlling stake, three people close to the matter told Reuters, as the parties race to finalise a deal before the end of the year.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Axios: Exclusive: New Zealand’s Ardern drafts AI in the fight against extremist content. “AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have signed up to suppress terrorist content, joining the Christchurch Call to Action — a project started by French President Emmanuel Macron and then New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in the wake of the 2019 mass killing at a Christchurch, N.Z. mosque.”

Reuters: Google fined $164,000 for failing to store user data inside Russia. “Google was fined 15 million roubles ($164,000) on Tuesday for repeated refusal to store Russian users’ data on servers inside Russia, a Moscow court said. Russia has repeatedly clashed with foreign technology companies over content, censorship, data and local representation in a simmering dispute that intensified after Moscow sent its armed forces into Ukraine in February 2022.”

Denver 7: New research shows your car is spying on your every move, including your sex life. ” If you thought your cell phone, Alexa or Google device were the worst about spying on you — think again. It turns out your car is one of the worst offenders when it comes to protecting your privacy. Mozilla, the company that built the Firefox internet browser and is now a leading watchdog for consumer privacy data, found cars are the worst product category they have ever reviewed for privacy.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: Poachers beware: New online tool traces illegal lion products back to source. ” A new conservation tool from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is helping protect lions across Africa, where populations have plummeted in recent decades due to poaching and other factors. With the Lion Localizer and a simple DNA test, authorities can examine the geographic origin of illegally traded teeth, claws, bones, and other body parts from the poached animals.”

Imperial College London: New tool to help AI track animals could boost biology research. “Biologists often study large numbers of animals to collect data on collective and individual behaviour. New machine learning tools promise to help scientists process the huge amount of data this work generates more quickly while lessening workload. Now, a new tool called replicAnt simplifies and streamlines the way the training images for these machine learning tools are created, making it quicker and easier to record observations about lots of animals at once, starting with insects.” Good morning, Internet….

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