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AP: Close the cover on the CIA World Factbook: “The spy agency announced Wednesday that after more than 60 years, it is shuttering the popular reference manual. The announcement posted to the CIA’s website offered no reason for the decision to end the Factbook, but it follows a vow from Director John Ratcliffe to end …
Internet Archive Blogs: “Digital journalists increasingly turn to web archives like the Wayback Machine to follow how things on the Internet break, change or disappear – from deleted posts to quietly edited pages. The web has become not only a source of information but also the subject of media investigations, prompting journalists, researchers and activists …
The dataindex.us team is excited to launch the Data Checkup – a comprehensive framework for assessing the health of federal data collections, highlighting key dimensions of risk and presenting a clear status of data well-being. When we started dataindex.us, one of our earliest tools was a URL tracker: a simple way to monitor whether a …
The New York Times Gift Article– “The Trump administration finalized a new policy on Thursday that would strip job protections from up to 50,000 federal workers, a move that would make it easier for President Trump to remove or discipline them, in his latest effort to dismantle the federal work force. Until now, the roughly …
TechCrunch: “The Internet Archive is a nonprofit that — as you might expect — is devoted to archiving the internet and preserving digital context for future generations. This week, the platform announced a new tool designed to expand on that mission by helping the world’s WordPress users keep their articles in peak digital health. The …
The Verge: “When ChatGPT launched, in November of 2022, it started a race that almost immediately consumed the tech industry. OpenAI didn’t invent the concept of AI, but most of the state-of-the-art technology was confined to research labs at companies and institutions around the world. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. And better than anyone expected. …
“The Cambridge Online Trust & Safety Index (COTSI) tracks the dynamics of the fake SMS-verifications market across different platforms and countries. The Index aims to answer the following questions: How easy (and cheap) is it to engage in online manipulation? Is the situation with fake accounts improving or worsening over time? Which online platforms are …
The Atlantic [no paywall]: Even the administration’s budget proposals read like Truth Social posts. “…No one better exemplifies the clicktatorship than the president himself. Trump routinely makes policy announcements via social media. Consider when, in August, he attempted to fire the Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook on Truth Social. When a government lawyer was …
ChatGPT is Eating the World: Elon Musk and Sam Altman are at war. “Musk’s two lawsuits against OpenAI could impair its defense in copyright lawsuits. Elon Musk’s tort lawsuit against Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI for alleged fraud (in soliciting his funds and help in starting a nonprofit only later to convert to a …
Ars Technica: “Nearly half of the databases that public health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were updating on a monthly basis have been frozen without notice or explanation, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The study—led by Janet Freilich, a law expert at Boston University, and …
Notus: The Trump administration has disrupted data collection on everything from homeland security, maternal mortality, hunger, drug use, education, disaster preparation and the economy. Joy Binion worked for the federal government collecting data on emerging substance abuse trends in emergency rooms across the country. Her work was part of the Drug Abuse Warning Network, which …
A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies – “Some 10,109 doctoral-trained experts in science and related fields left their jobs last year as President Donald Trump dramatically shrank the overall federal workforce. That exodus was only 3% of the 335,192 federal workers who exited last year but represents …
