Day archives: December 10th, 2024

We’re about to enter the Digital Dark Ages

The Business Insider – Online archives are vanishing — and they’re taking our history with them. “The long-promised digital apocalypse has finally arrived, and it was heralded by a blog post. Published on July 18, the post’s headline sounded pretty arcane. “Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available,” it declared. I know, I …

Subjects: Courts, E-Records, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Search Engines

Guide to Abortion Privacy – Digital Defense Fund

Keep Your Abortion Private & Secure –  This page is organized into different security-related threats. You can jump to the ones that most concern you. Along with each scenario is a list of digital security tips to neutralize the threats. These are possible concerns you might have: Seeing advertisements related to pregnancy/abortion Tech companies like …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, E-Records, Health Care, Internet, Legal Research, Medicine, Privacy, Social Media

Washington Post Leverages ‘AI’ To Undermine History And Make Search Less Useful

TechDirt: “While “AI” (language learning models) certainly could help journalism, the fail upward brunchlords in charge of most modern media outlets instead see the technology as a way to cut corners, undermine labor, badly automate low-quality, ultra-low effort, SEO-chasing clickbait, and rush undercooked solutions to nonexistent problems to market under the pretense of progress.  For example, …

Subjects: AI, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Search Engines, Social Media

Oceanic Impunity

Cody, Stephen, Oceanic Impunity (July 31, 2024). Southern California Law Review, Vol.97, No.3, p.637, 2024, Suffolk University Law School Research Paper No. 24-10, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4912229 – “Ocean protection is essential to avoid climate disaster. Phytoplankton,seaweeds, and sea grasses produce more than half of Earth’s oxygen—exceeding all terrestrial forests and plants combined—and absorb about …

Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law, Government Documents, Legal Research

Arctic tundra becoming source of carbon dioxide emissions

NOAA: “After storing carbon dioxide in frozen soil for millennia, the Arctic tundra is being transformed by frequent wildfires into an overall source of carbon to the atmosphere, which is already absorbing record levels of heat-trapping fossil fuel pollution.  The transition of the Arctic from a carbon sink to a carbon source is one of …

Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law, Government Documents

Location data firm helps police find out when suspects visited their doctor

Ars Technica: “A location-tracking company that sells its services to police departments is apparently using addresses and coordinates of doctors’ and lawyers’ offices and other types of locations to help cops compile lists of places visited by suspects, according to a 404 Media report published today. Fog Data Science, which says it “harness[es] the power …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Defense, Health Care, Legal Research, Medicine, Privacy, Search Engines

Quits and layoffs

Data is Plural: “Minneapolis Fed–affiliated economists Kathrin Ellieroth and Amanda Michaud have constructed a new dataset on monthly quits and layoffs. Using Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata going back to 1978, the dataset estimates the proportions of employees who, after quitting or being laid off, transition to unemployment versus exiting the labor market. In a …

Subjects: Economy

Dow Jones negotiates AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 news publishers

NiemanLab: “…Last month, Factiva announced it had signed generative AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 publishers around the world. The agreements are for the business intelligence platform and news database, which houses articles by online outlets, newspapers, magazines, and transcripts of radio shows. Among the thousands of publishers who signed the agreements are The Associated …

Subjects: AI, Economy, Financial System, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries, Search Engines

6 Gmail Mistakes That Can Get You Fired (and How to Avoid Them)

How To Geek: “Whether you’ve used email a lot in your personal life, or if your first encounter with emails is in the workplace, you need to take special care with this fundamental web communication format, or you could find yourself in hot water!” Sending Sensitive Files Without Encryption Hitting “Reply All” to a Mass …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Mail, E-Records