How Artists on Twitter Tricked Spammy T-Shirt Stores Into Admitting Their Automated Art Theft

Yesterday, an artist on Twitter named Nana ran an experiment to test a theory. Their suspicion was that bots were actively looking on Twitter for phrases like “I want this on a shirt” or “This needs to be a t-shirt,” automatically scraping the quoted images, and instantly selling them without permission as print-on-demand t-shirts. Dozens of Nana’s followers replied, and a few hours later, a Twitter bot replied with a link…

Facebook just dealt another potentially lethal blow to local journalism

Facebook will pay some publishers millions of dollars a year for access to their journalism. It will include an all-star lineup of what Facebook referred to as trusted sources, including CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Bloomberg, Fox Business, Business Insider, NPR, the Boston Globe and the LA Times, to name a few. (Facebook also deemed far-right web site Breitbart as a trusted source, which has sparked some controversy). […]…

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In July 1999, I was blogging about Dante’s ashes, Apollo 11, gender-neutral language, and e-books.

In July, 1999, I was blogging about: (July 19) Florence, Italy — Librarians stumble across a bag of Dante’s ashes, lying on a shelf. [more | Digital Dante (U.Va)] (July 20) “That’s one small step for [a] man“…one grammatical goof for mankind? [RealAudio] [transcript] Did Neil Armstrong flub the first sentence spoken on the soil of the moon? [more] (July 23) How does gender-specific language affect students? In a 1980 study, one group read chapters…

Viral App FaceApp Now Owns Access To More Than 150 Million People’s Faces And Names

Viral app FaceApp has been giving people the power to change their facial expressions, looks, and now age for several years. But at the same time, people have been giving FaceApp the power to use their pictures — and names — for any purpose it wishes, for as long as it desires. To make FaceApp actually work, you have to give it permissions to access your photos – ALL of…