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Monthly Archives: May 2024

5 Ways to Access Onion Sites Without Tor Browser

MakeUseOf: “Key Takeaways

  • Onion sites are unindexed web addresses on the dark web with “.onion” suffixes.
  • Compared to other methods, using the Tor Browser is the safest way to visit onion sites. Accessing onion sites using everyday browsers poses significant security risks.
  • You can use Tor proxies, browser extensions, or Proton VPN to access onion sites on a regular browser. Brave and Firefox have native support for onion sites, albeit with a little bit of tweaking.

If you’ve ever snooped around on the internet, you may have encountered the term “onion sites” or “Tor.” Onion sites are unindexed websites on the dark web that can be accessed using the Tor Browser. That said, using Tor can be a little intimidating, if not technically challenging. If you’d still like to visit onion sites and see what the other side of the internet has to offer, there are alternative ways you can try.”

AI in Finance and Banking, May 15, 2024

Via LLRX – AI in Finance and Banking, May 15, 2024 – This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government documents, NGO/IGO papers, industry white papers, academic papers and speeches on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. The chronological links provided are to the primary sources,… Continue Reading

Generating Harms II: Generative AI’s New & Continued Impacts

“Today, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) released Generating Harms II: Generative AI’s New & Continued Impacts, a follow-up report that expands on the harms detailed in last year’s Generating Harms report. The new report includes a deep dive into four new issue areas and explores the different remedies and enforcement actions that are being… Continue Reading

Even if you think AI search could be good, it won’t be good

Pluralistic: “The big news in search this week is that Google is continuing its transition to “AI search” – instead of typing in search terms and getting links to websites, you’ll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web: https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/ – Google bills this as… Continue Reading

The effects of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020 election: A deactivation experiment

PNAS – The effects of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020 election: A deactivation experiment. Crossref DOI link: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2321584121, Published Online: 2024-05-13. Published Print: 2024-05-21 Significance – We provide the largest-scale evidence available to date on the effect of Facebook and Instagram access on political knowledge, attitudes, and behavior in a presidential election season. This… Continue Reading

Webinar – Environmental Law and the Things We Need to Build

Join the Witkin State Law Library and Professor Dave Owen for a free live webinar on “Environmental Law and the Things We Need to Build” on Tuesday, June 11, 2024 at 6PM. Is environmental law keeping us from building important things—and from building things that would be good for the environment? Recently, that question has… Continue Reading

Greenhouse gas giants

Data is Plural: “Carbon Majors, run by the UK-based InfluenceMap, “is a database of historical production data from 122 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal, and cement producers.” It attributes to these producers 1,421 metric gigatons of CO2-equivalent emissions from 1854 through 2022. Launched last month, the database provides downloads at several levels of… Continue Reading

1 million ChatGPT conversations

Via Data Machina via Data is Plural – 1 million ChatGPT conversations. “The WildChat Dataset, constructed by Wenting Zhao et al., “is a corpus of 1 million real-world user-ChatGPT interactions, characterized by a wide range of languages and a diversity of user prompts.” The researchers, primarily affiliated with Cornell and the Allen Institute for AI,… Continue Reading

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

500 songs – “For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”. This week we take a short look at the song’s writers,… Continue Reading

How to prepare for another season of wildfire smoke

Vox: “Several US states are again experiencing an influx of wildfire smoke as Canada’s summer fire season gets underway. Due to the scale of the wildfires and natural weather patterns, enormous amounts of smoke are drifting southward — much like last year. North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota are among the earliest states to… Continue Reading