NEW RESOURCES
Doug Beeferman sent me a note about CivicSearch months ago and unfortunately it sank to the bottom of my email. But I recovered it yesterday and I encourage you to check out CivicSearch, especially if you're a local government wonk. From the front page: "CivicSearch is a search and discovery tool for everything that is said in local government meetings, texts, and laws. It covers 545 cities and towns in the US and Canada. Included is recent content from LocalView, a data set of transcripts from city councils and other local government bodies around the US. The data is organized into 75 frequently-discussed local policy topics, and it can also be searched by keyword and location."
University of Michigan: U-M launches interactive website documenting war crimes in Ukraine. "The University of Michigan's Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia has created a new website that serves as a digital archive of testimonies from witnesses and victims of documented human rights violations, war crimes and atrocities in Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022."
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
CNBC: OpenAI says in memo that Musk's claims 'stem from Elon's regrets' that he's not part of company. "OpenAI executives disputed claims Elon Musk laid out in a lawsuit on Thursday, and said the Tesla CEO is upset that he's no longer part of the artificial intelligence startup."
NDTV: Google Agrees To Restore Indian Apps After Centre's Intervention: Sources. "Google has initiated the process to restore Indian mobile apps which had been dropped from the Play Store over a dispute over service fees. The decision was taken after the company's officials held a meeting with IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, sources said. On Friday, Google had removed apps belonging to 10 Indian companies, sparking controversy in one of its fastest-growing markets. Google dominates the Indian market as 94% of phones are based on its Android platform. The list included well-known names such as Bharatmatrimony and Naukri."
BBC: New technology to show why images and video are genuine launches on BBC News. "Visitors to the BBC News site will now see a new button saying 'how we verified this' underneath images and videos on BBC Verify content. Clicking on this will show what our journalists do to verify the authenticity of images and video."
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Asharq Al-Awsat: Google Maps Sends UNIFIL Patrol into Hezbollah Trap. "UN peacekeepers from the Indonesian battalion were 'briefly detained' on Thursday night by locals associated with Hezbollah in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon's capital.... 'The patrol was traveling from the south to Beirut and relied on Google Maps, which directed them through the suburb due to traffic,' a Lebanese security source, who requested anonymity, told Asharq Al-Awsat."
Muscat Daily: Explore Oman virtually through Google Street View soon. "The Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology has joined forces with Google to introduce Google Street View across Oman. The project, under the guidance of National Survey Authority and Ministry of Defence, aims to map the sultanate's roads and cities, offering panoramic imagery to users globally."
Associated Press: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley CEOs blasted in veteran tech reporter's memoir Burn Book, as it warns about AI and the future. "Swisher skewers many of the once-idealistic tech moguls who, when she met them as entrepreneurs decades ago, promised to change the world for the better, but often chose a path of destructive disruption instead. And along the way, they amassed staggering fortunes that have disconnected them from reality. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who broke into a sweat during an onstage interview with Swisher in 2010, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who once talked to her regularly before cutting off communications after he bought Twitter in 2022, are painted in the harshest light."
SECURITY & LEGAL
Politico: Elon Musk's X could face EU antitrust crackdown under new DMA rules. "X, TikTok-owner Bytedance and travel website group Booking told the Commission on Friday that they run digital services that could make them qualify as so-called gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act, the Commission said late Friday. The DMA imposes strict guardrails around the world's largest technology companies like Apple and Meta in an effort to level the digital playing field and make it easier for companies that rely on them to operate online."
The Verge: Elon Musk's legal case against OpenAI is hilariously bad. "My friends, Musk is straightforwardly alleging that OpenAI breached a contract that does not exist. It is simply not a thing! The complaint makes reference to a 'Founding Agreement,' but no such Founding Agreement is attached as an exhibit, and the breach of contract claim admits that the 'Founding Agreement' is basically a vibe everyone caught in some emails."
RESEARCH & OPINION
IEEE Spectrum: A Few Social Media Influencers Are Shaping AI. "Mainstream interest in AI and machine learning is at an all-time high, and the industry is responding—churning out thousands of AI and ML works for conferences and journals. The AI/ML community is also particularly active in posting non-peer-reviewed preprints via online platforms like ArXiv. Given this glut of work, what rises to the top and receives attention? The answer, at least in part, is: the research that a pair of highly influential users of X (formerly Twitter) choose to highlight, according to a new preprint from researchers at University of California at Santa Barbara."
Bloomberg: Google's AI isn't too 'woke.' It's too rushed. "We know about Gemini's diversity bug because of all the tweets on X, but the AI model may have other problems we don't know about—issues that may not trigger Elon Musk but are no less insidious. The female popes and Black founding fathers are products of a deeper, years-long problem of putting growth and market dominance before safety. Expect our role as guinea pigs to continue until that changes." Good morning, Internet...
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