Tech.eu: Introducing the Tech.eu Funding Explorer, free and open to everyone. “Today I am happy to share the Tech.eu Funding Explorer with you. We have taken Tech.eu’s database, built up over years, and given it an interface you can actually explore. It holds 51,352 funding rounds, 38,147 companies, 30,176 investors and 8,743 exits, along with around €692 billion in disclosed funding and a lot of finer detail underneath.” Ooo, it’s got an API too!

Museum of London Archaeology: Coasts in Mind Community Archive opens digital doors to public contributions. “Since our Coasts in Mind (CiM) mapping platform launched in autumn 2025, community groups and event participants from Poole Harbour, Swale, Sefton and North Devon have been adding records from their own collections and local archives. Now our Coasts in Mind team are asking members of the public to join in and share their memories of England’s vanishing coastlines…. The team are interested in recording all aspects of change, and value insights from people from all walks of life. From fishing and marine biodiversity, to water sports, sea defences, community heritage traditions, boats, coastal archaeology, and land erosion.”

Gizmodo: Cate Blanchett Launches ‘Human Consent Registry’ to Help Protect Your Likeness From AI Industry Scraping. “On Tuesday, multi-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett announced the release of the Human Consent Registry, a new tool designed to help people control their likeness and how it can be used by AI systems.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ars Technica: Disney agreed to $50M settlement over claims it made live-TV streaming expensive. “The Walt Disney Company has agreed to pay $50 million to subscribers of YouTube TV and DirecTV’s live TV streaming services to settle a lawsuit that claimed that Disney forced these services to raise their prices.”

AROUND THE SEARCH & SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Juneau Empire: Alaska Native communites condemn social media trend ‘mocking’ totem poles. “The Alaska Native Heritage Center, Ketchikan Indian Community, and Tlingit and Haida tribes have released a joint statement condemning alleged acts of disrespect towards Alaska Native totem poles and cultural symbols. Recent videos circulating on social media, particularly TikTok, depict tourists dancing and posing in front of totem poles in Southeast Alaska.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Deadline: YouTube & TikTok Compelled To Boost BBC & ITV Content Under UK Government Plans. “British ministers are pressing ahead with a new Media Bill that will require YouTube to make it easy to discover content from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Paramount-owned 5. In practical terms, that could mean boosting official clips from shows like Question Time in user feeds and search results.”

Engadget: Meta is ‘pausing’ employee tracking program after it let the whole company see sensitive data. “Meta has paused use of an AI training program that tracks its own employees’ keystrokes and mouse movements. The company has suspended the Model Capability Initiative, not because of workers’ understandable displeasure around being (almost) perpetually monitored or for potentially breaking privacy laws, but because it caused an internal data leak.”

BBC: How 100 hospitals switched to pen and paper to defeat a national cyber-attack. “Medical staff had to switch to pen and paper, improvising workarounds to protect patients while IT teams scrambled and the national cyber response centre tried to find out how the hackers had got in – and how they could stop them.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Daily Nous: Kant Studies Online: No Longer Online. “What happens to the articles published in an online-only journal when that journal not only ceases to publish, but ceases to exist? That question is raised by the case of Kant Studies Online, an online only, open-access philosophy journal that published articles between 2011 and 2016, the website of which is no longer accessible. The journal was founded by Gary Banham, who died in 2013.”

The Register: Boffin claims Microsoft’s supposed quantum leap does not compute due to ‘basic Python errors’. “Prestigious journal Nature has published a peer-reviewed critique of Microsoft’s claims to have made quantum computing breakthroughs – and the scientist who wrote the paper has essentially said Redmond got it wrong.”

The Conversation: What 20 million bans reveal about the strain on Wikipedia’s volunteers. “I’m a researcher who studies social media platforms. I analyzed two decades of the site’s moderation records to understand the effect of these conditions. I found changes in behavior that appear to prioritize content quality while weakening the project’s ability to recruit and retain new volunteers.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

PetaPixel: Elephant Seal Scolds Penguins in Superb Photo Shortlisted for Wildlife Award. “The 2026 Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year has unveiled its shortlist — and there are some real bangers on there. The contest takes entries from the majestic Australasian Realm, including the ANZANG bioregion consisting of Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica, and New Guinea.” Good morning, Internet…

This newsletter is free but most of the things that go into making it aren’t! Help me afford new socks and fancier bean stew by supporting ResearchBuzz on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Don’t have any money but still want to support? I know how that feels. Share this newsletter or tell a friend about it. I live at Calishat. See my other nonsense at SearchTweaks, RSS Gizmos, Local Search America, WikiTwister, and MiniGladys.

University of Reading: See the world of Stonehenge from your sofa this solstice. “Timed to release alongside the summer solstice, the new virtual version goes well beyond a simple recreation of the gallery. Users can go inside Stonehenge itself and watch it change through time, explore Neolithic flint mines at Grimes Graves, and discover rarely seen prehistoric objects through animation, soundscapes and interactive content. The experience is free to access via the British Museum website and works on desktop computers, tablets and phones.”

Nuclear Engineering International: IAEA launches used fuel database. “The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has released the first publicly available interactive database detailing the world’s used (spent) nuclear fuel (SNF), both stored and reprocessed by country and region. The data is based on what countries themselves report.”

New-to-me: the baseball walk up song database. Over 3000 players, almost 4000 songs, and over 2500 artists. You can search for the song on YouTube or play it on Spotify. Shoutout to Thomas Saggese.

USEFUL STUFF

Evan Hahn: Make ZIP files smaller with ZIP Shrinker. “I built ZIP Shrinker, a little browser tool to shrink ZIP files. It also works with formats that are secretly ZIPs underneath, like EPUB, JAR, and many more.”

AROUND THE SEARCH & SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

India Today: Google Maps changed UP village name, now govt work is literally lost in translation. “The village in Uttar Pradesh’s Firozabad’s district is called Akalabad Hasanpur, but Google Maps lists it as Akilabad Hanspur — a minor difference in spelling that residents say has created major confusion.”

Auto Evolution: Smugglers Create Fake Google Maps Car, Border Patrol Agents Actually Use Street View. “Smugglers carrying illegal aliens used an SUV disguised as a Google Maps Street View car in an attempt to skip the checks typically conducted by the US border patrol agents. Their idea made sense. Because it was a Google car only supposed to take photos of the surroundings, it wasn’t hiding any illegal stuff. The smugglers expected the agents to let it go through easily. It didn’t happen this time.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Euromaidan Press: Russia is manipulating global AI chatbot ecosystems with fabricated websites, leaked documents show. “Leaked internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg News reveal a large-scale Russian information operation aimed at reshaping online knowledge ecosystems, including search engines and AI chatbots, through networks of fabricated reference sites and coordinated ‘Wikipedia-style’ platforms.”

Reuters: New York’s top court says hate speech social media law likely passes muster. “New York’s top court told a ​federal appeals court on Tuesday that a state law regulating hate speech on social media does not run afoul ‌of free speech protections, as the federal court weighs a challenge brought by a blogger and a pair of content sharing platforms.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Yale Library: Library joins partners to support deep research into digitized maps in collections worldwide. “Yale Library and the IIIF Consortium (International Image Interoperability Framework) have partnered with Allmaps, an open-source ecosystem that provides tools to turn static digitized images into interactive maps. The free software allows anyone to explore, curate, and georeference the hundreds of thousands of IIIF-enabled digitized maps in the collections of libraries, archives, and museums worldwide.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

TechCrunch: Ribbie turns real-time baseball stats into arcade-like, pixel-art broadcasts. “Whether you’re a baseball fan or not, there’s a lot to love about Ribbie, a vibe-coded website that turns real-time Major League Baseball (MLB) data into 8-bit broadcasts with arcade-style, animated pixel art.” Remarkable. Good evening, Internet…

This newsletter is free but most of the things that go into making it aren’t! Help me afford new socks and fancier bean stew by supporting ResearchBuzz on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Don’t have any money but still want to support? I know how that feels. Share this newsletter or tell a friend about it. I live at Calishat. See my other nonsense at SearchTweaks, RSS Gizmos, Local Search America, WikiTwister, and MiniGladys.

Techdirt: ‘News’ Site Keeps Hallucinating EFF Staffers. “News-USA Today is hardly the only slagheap that’s hallucinating or fabricating EFF personnel and quotes; as we wrote last September, media companies large and small are using AI to generate news content because it’s cheaper than paying for journalists’ salaries, but that savings can come at the cost of the outlets’ reputations— assuming they care about reputation at all. But this many fake EFF sources in two months?”

ANTI-AI ACTIVISM

Louisiana Illuminator: Ordinary people fill information gaps when data centers come knocking. “Since discovering a data center proposed two miles from her parents’ home in Warrenton, [Änna] Farrar has worked to find and share all the information she can about data centers across Missouri. She now publishes her own newsletter, is an admin on Facebook and is working on a book, ‘The Data Center Next Door.’ She’s part of a brigade of residents battling the secrecy and speed with which mega-sized data centers have spread across the country, fueled by the growth of cloud computing and generative artificial intelligence.”

DATA CENTERS

New York Times: The Cloud Has Sound: The Unrelenting and Unseen Cost of A.I. Data Centers. This link goes to a gift article. “Today, nearly 40 percent of homes are within five miles of at least one operational data center, Pew found, and more of them are creeping closer. The humming of those cooling systems, the rumbling of the generators and the whirring of fans can be heard, and felt, for hundreds of feet and even up to a mile away.”

The Register: Texas lassoes massive Microsoft datacenter – and 20 years of gas turbine emissions. “Never mind the fact that datacenter environmental concerns have come under growing scrutiny across the United States. Microsoft has just inked a deal with fossil fuel giant Chevron to supply one of the largest single-capacity additions to its datacenter fleet with 2.67 gigawatts of natural gas power for a full two decades.”

Texas Tribune: Data centers not welcome: New poll shows most Texans oppose them in their communities. “A majority of Texans oppose the construction of data centers in their community, including nearly two-thirds of Texans living in rural areas, according to a new poll published Tuesday.”

AI IN EDUCATION

CalMatters: L.A. Unified superintendent resigns amid FBI probe into chatbot contract. “Alberto Carvalho, who won widespread praise for helping shepherd Los Angeles Unified out of the COVID-19 pandemic, resigned as the district’s superintendent Sunday amid an FBI probe apparently linked to a failed AI chatbot contract that he promoted.”

AI IN GOVERNANCE

NPR: AI and tech are trying to influence the midterm elections. “Around the country, groups associated with AI and tech are trying to influence elections from Senate races to local offices, even as Americans register increasing discomfort with the technology’s ramifications for jobs, energy bills and society. AI-focused super PACs have already spent $43.3 million on congressional races this cycle, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks campaign spending.”

AI IN WORK

404 Media: The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI. “Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. Across the industry Accenture is seeing ‘soaring token spend,’ according to the audio.”

AROUND THE AI WORLD

Associated Press: AI stock slump raises the question if investors are just taking profits or getting very nervous. “Technology companies are spending big to incorporate artificial intelligence into their businesses and to build huge data centers. Investors who had jumped on the bandwagon appear to be having second thoughts.”

CNBC: Google’s online dominance is showing signs of cracking in AI era. “More than three years into the generative artificial intelligence boom, Google has defied the many skeptics who thought ChatGPT would be the search giant’s death knell. But cracks are forming in its core business. Search engine DuckDuckGo is seeing install rates jump by up to 40% a week. Microsoft’s Bing reached 1 billion users for the first time last quarter. And Google’s search engine traffic is down slightly over the past month, while ChatGPT is up a tick.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Tampa Free Press: New York Man Indicted For AI-Generated Cyberstalking Campaign Against Georgia Student. “A federal grand jury has indicted a New York man for allegedly running a relentless, three-month digital harassment campaign targeting a college student in Georgia. Anthony Belford, 21, appeared in federal court on June 10, 2026, following an indictment returned on June 3, 2026, that charges him with one count of cyberstalking.”

Gizmodo: Top Intel Agencies Say AI-Driven Cyber Catastrophes Are Imminent: ‘The Timeline Is Not Years, It Is Months’. “In a rare joint statement, the Five Eyes intelligence alliance—the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand—warned on Monday that the cybersecurity threats posed by advanced AI models are approaching a critical point.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: Anyone can fake a scientific image with AI, tricking even academic journals – and undermining trust in science. “The proliferation of AI-generated science images in public spaces is not simply a misinformation problem. As a researcher who studies visual science communication and public trust, I believe it also contributes to a crisis of trust in science in the age of AI, and the tools scientists have long relied on to establish visual credibility are losing their grip.”

TechSpot: Microsoft researcher builds a working neural network in Age of Empires II using goats. “The researcher said that Age of Empires II contains all the tools needed to replicate the most basic functions required by ChatGPT and other complex AI models to perform semantic tasks. Using Microsoft’s classic RTS is central to the study because it highlights the absurdity of treating neural networks as human-like entities.”

Dartmouth College: How AI-Generated Cartoons Reshaped Taiwan’s 2024 Protests. “Tracy Weener ’26 and Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science Herbert Chang ’18 set out to study the digital side of the protests. Their paper, published this month in Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, identifies a new tactic in political warfare: AI-generated images that look cute and harmless but function as partisan attacks.” Good afternoon, Internet…

This newsletter is free but most of the things that go into making it aren’t! Help me afford new socks and fancier bean stew by supporting ResearchBuzz on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Don’t have any money but still want to support? I know how that feels. Share this newsletter or tell a friend about it. I live at Calishat. See my other nonsense at SearchTweaks, RSS Gizmos, Local Search America, WikiTwister, and MiniGladys.

Carbon Brief: Introducing Project Cosmos: Carbon Brief’s ‘universe’ of climate science. “Carbon Brief’s Project Cosmos is a major collaborative effort to build the world’s largest and most complete database of climate change research. The Cosmos database – which features more than 1.8m individual publications linked by 40m citation relationships – captures the vast body of human knowledge about climate change that has accumulated over more than a century of academic study.”

The Royal Society: Historic weather data made available to scientists and public, spanning Antarctica to Greenland. “An archive of over 1,600 sets of meteorological, magnetic and tidal observations taken from 1706-1915 from across the globe has been digitised for the first time. The treasure trove of historic weather data and imagery is now available for scientists across the globe to study on the Royal Society’s Science in the Making portal.”

Southern Maryland Chronicle: Comptroller Lierman Launches New Quarterly Economic Dashboard. “The Maryland Economic and Fiscal Quarterly Snapshot features interactive dashboards that track employment trends, housing activity, business growth, state revenues, and government spending. The tool will be updated each quarter, with the first release covering data through the first quarter of 2026.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Random Thoughts: Over 1,000,000 Pages About Comics. “It’s another extremely important and major milestone for Mrs. Kwakk Wakk’s Comics Research Site: The number of digits in the page count has increased! One more digit! Whoho!”

Gulf News: Telegram restored on Google Play Store in India after week-long government block. “Telegram is back on the Google Play Store in India. After a week of being unavailable to Android users, the messaging app quietly reappeared on Tuesday, ending a temporary government block imposed during the country’s high-stakes medical entrance exam.”

AROUND THE SEARCH & SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

The Register: Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites tell welcome from unwelcome visitors. “Cloudflare, along with Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox, have committed to develop Private Access Control Tokens (PACTs), a way for websites to generate a digital token that asserts a given browsing session is being run by a human or bot with legitimate intent, as opposed to network requests from people or software deemed abusive or improper.”

Deadline: BBC To Test Streaming News Channel Live On YouTube Outside Of UK. “The BBC‘s experimentation on YouTube is set to increase, as the British broadcaster tests streaming its news network on the Google-owned video service. Deadline understands that the BBC is planning to make the 24-hour rolling news channel available on YouTube in select countries outside of the UK.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Mashable: BlackVue’s dashcams broadcast users’ live location and footage to public. “Dashcam company BlackVue is broadcasting real-time video feeds of its users’ cameras to all app users around the world, in a potentially concerning privacy issue. First reported by Australia’s Nine News, BlackVue’s official app includes a world map showing the location of many of its dashcams, which users can tap to watch real-time footage.”

New Hampshire Bulletin: Ayotte signs law prohibiting the sale of children’s data . “New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte announced Friday that she signed House Bill 1460 into law, which prohibits the sale of data for a child under the age of 13. HB 1460 bans businesses from selling a child’s online personal data to a third party in New Hampshire. It alters the existing statute that outlines how businesses can use consumer data.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Bangor Daily News: For the first time, Maine is reporting climate pollution without federal data. “For decades, Maine and other parties have relied on the federal government to publish comprehensive data on greenhouse gas pollution, the foundation for national and local climate policy. The Environmental Protection Agency stopped publishing that data last year, when President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of international climate agreements…. Now Maine and other states are working with partners to compile and publish the data themselves.”

Museum für Naturkunde Berlin: Taking the collection into the future. “The aim is to safeguard the historically accumulated collection in the long term, to digitise it and to make it accessible worldwide. Until now, many objects have been stored in old cupboards and were only documented or available digitally to a limited extent. Through conservation measures, structured data collection and systematic digitisation, these holdings have been – and continue to be – gradually transferred into an open knowledge infrastructure.”

Research Information: Springer Nature divests Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft. “Springer Nature has announced the sale of its consumer media businesses, including the science publication Scientific American in the United States and Spektrum der Wissenschaft in Germany.” Good afternoon, Internet…

This newsletter is free but most of the things that go into making it aren’t! Help me afford new socks and fancier bean stew by supporting ResearchBuzz on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Don’t have any money but still want to support? I know how that feels. Share this newsletter or tell a friend about it. I live at Calishat. See my other nonsense at SearchTweaks, RSS Gizmos, Local Search America, WikiTwister, and MiniGladys.

Maps Mania: The Real-Time Rat Tracking Map. “Built using NYC Open Data, RATFLOW combines rodent-related 311 complaints with the locations of subway stations to create a city-wide rat-density model. The result is an animated map that is a hybrid of a transit dashboard, a rat surveillance system and rodent wildlife simulation.”

Found in my RSS feeds, I think: ObiStrip. “Open a long video. Find the moment at 14:36. Save the chop, not the upload. ObiStrip turns YouTube into a searchable crate.” As I understand it this site creates and organizes YouTube video metadata (clip metadata), NOT the audio sample itself.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

9to5 Google: New Google Search setting saves images and audio you upload; how to turn it off. “Google says it’s saving files and media uploaded during searches in user search history to train AI and improve the experience after announcing the change last month. Search history will include pictures, screenshots taken with Circle to Search, and audio files used in voice searches, but you can disable that.”

TechRadar: After 19 years, Google Street View has finally added a ‘beautiful’, long-awaited country — and Geoguessr fans are calling it a ‘great addition’ to the geography game. “Street View is still expanding, almost 20 years after Google first launched it, and the East European country of Georgia is the latest to be added to the platform — with some spectacular sites and landmarks included, besides all the roads and highways.”

USEFUL STUFF

Stefan Bohacek: Make your website or blog fediverse-ready. “In the fediverse, there is no central authority that can verify you. Instead, you link to your fediverse profile from your website, blog, or even some of the larger platforms, like GitHub, in a way that proves that these online identities are connected and controlled by you. This then serves as one of several signals about the authenticity and authority of your fediverse account.”

AROUND THE SEARCH & SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Tubefilter: Netflix just picked up a Hot Ones spinoff–and Will Ferrell is its first guest. “Called Hot Ones: Extra Heat, it’s specifically designed to tie into Netflix’s live events–an area the streamer has been pushing, both with IRL activations related to its IPs, with real-time programming like radio shows and daily podcasts, and with live sports. Like the original, Extra Heat will be hosted by Sean Evans, and will still feature him grilling celebs while they choke down increasingly spicy chicken wings.”

The Atlantic: First the Kennedy Center, Now the Smithsonian. This link goes to a gift article, though I’m not confident in how The Atlantic gift articles work. “The conflict has largely disappeared from the news in recent months—a partial reflection, perhaps, of [Lonnie] Bunch’s diplomatic finesse, as well as the general global and domestic chaos that is a feature of the Trump era. But as America approaches its 250th birthday, the Smithsonian is readying itself for the tensions over how it tells the story of the nation to resume, and potentially reach a climax.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Mezha: Russia forces universities to teach drone warfare from September 2026. “Russia is rapidly militarizing higher education, increasingly weaving universities into the country’s war machine…. The program covers 19 specialized universities and 86 of their campuses across the country.”

Politico: Ireland’s Big Tech presidency dilemma: Shaping the rules for companies it hosts. “As Ireland gets ready to engineer compromises between EU countries on tricky tech files in the latter half of this year, the very loud, trumpeting elephant in the room will be the country’s close relationship with U.S. tech giants.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Mark Nottingham: Web Feeds in 2026: A Survey. “In the top 500,000 web sites (per Tranco) seen by Common Crawl, the run analyzed 196,598 registrable sites and found 534,195 parseable feeds. 35.9% of sites exposed feed autodiscovery, and 19.7% of analyzed HTML responses had feed links. That’s huge – more than a third of sites advertising a feed is a big statement about the nature of the Open Web. … But a LOT of Them are Abandoned.” Good afternoon, Internet…

This newsletter is free but most of the things that go into making it aren’t! Help me afford new socks and fancier bean stew by supporting ResearchBuzz on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Don’t have any money but still want to support? I know how that feels. Share this newsletter or tell a friend about it. I live at Calishat. See my other nonsense at SearchTweaks, RSS Gizmos, Local Search America, WikiTwister, and MiniGladys.

Futurism: Google’s AI Overviews Feature Is Telling Users That SCP Horror Fiction Entities Are Real. “As the lore goes, the SCP Foundation is a non-government organization that collects and contains supernatural discoveries. Writers catalogue these fictional phenomena — which range from the terrifying to the downright bizarre — in the form of fake records, studies, research documents, and logs, all of which are indexed in a sprawling archive. The key word, of course, is ‘fake.'”

AI IN EDUCATION

Gizmodo: Norway Says AI Ain’t for Education. “There will be no tokenmaxxing happening in Norwegian classrooms. According to a report from Reuters, the nation’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere announced Friday that the government will impose restrictions on the use of AI tools in schools in an effort to combat what it sees as a negative impact on learning.”

New York Times: Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era. This link goes to a gift article. “Humanizers rewrite A.I.-produced text to make it sound less robotic, formulaic and trite. Autotypers slowly drip words and sentences into documents, making it appear as if papers were typed at a human pace when in fact, they were produced by A.I. They even fabricate typos, deletions and revisions. Both tools can help students evade software designed to detect A.I.”

Local News Matters: Cal State faculty push to prevent AI tools from replacing them as schools experiment. “THE NATION’S LARGEST public four-year university may soon be barred from replacing faculty with generative AI as a bill backed by a union of professors comes nearer to reaching the governor’s desk.”

AI IN GOVERNANCE

Reuters: At G7, Macron says he expects progress on broadening access to Anthropic’s Mythos. “French President Emmanuel Macron ​said on Wednesday he believed progress would be made in coming weeks on broadening access to leading U.S. AI ‌models, as G7 leaders pledged closer coordination on the risks and opportunities of frontier AI.”

NPR: AI and tech are trying to influence the midterm elections. “Around the country, groups associated with AI and tech are trying to influence elections from Senate races to local offices, even as Americans register increasing discomfort with the technology’s ramifications for jobs, energy bills and society. AI-focused super PACs have already spent $43.3 million on congressional races this cycle, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks campaign spending.”

AI IN WORK

Engadget: Amazon is investigating three employees who spoke out against building more AI data centers . “Five members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ) previously testified at Seattle city council meetings about AI data centers. Now, three of them are apparently under investigation by the company.”

AROUND THE AI WORLD

Reuters: UN chief calls on AI firms to come clean on environmental costs. “The United Nations called on major artificial intelligence companies on Tuesday to publicly disclose the full environmental cost of their ‌data centres and use renewable power, as he launched a transparency initiative for ‌the sector.”

Search Engine Journal: Google Loses Two Top AI Researchers To OpenAI & Anthropic. “Two senior Google AI researchers, Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer and AlphaFold’s John Jumper, are leaving for OpenAI and Anthropic within the same week.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Schneier on Security: Embedding Forbidden Text in Spyware to Discourage AI Analysis. “At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis.”

Waxy: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows. “The polished site includes everything you’d expect from a publisher’s promotional book site: an author biography, press mentions, and links to buy the book on Amazon…. The book’s original photo-collage illustrations made by Koenig and several other artists are conspicuously missing. Instead, each word has an AI-generated image made with DALL-E 2, riddled with the errors and artifacts typical of that model.”

The Guardian: California drivers sue gas stations for allegedly using AI to inflate prices. “Gas ⁠station ​operators including BP, Circle K, Marathon, 7-Eleven, Walmart and Albertsons were sued on Monday by California drivers ⁠who accused them of using artificial intelligence to boost prices at the pump.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Jordan Fulghum: I built a private ChatGPT for my family. “My wife and kids do not want to SSH into anything, manage prompts, pick models, or learn the difference between a tool call and a RAG query. They want the box. I wanted that same shape at home, but private, grounded in our actual family documents, and steerable toward our values instead of some global average. So I built a private ChatGPT for our family.”

Nicolas Bouliane: AI is killing All About Berlin. “This is the traffic to All About Berlin, the website that I run since 2017, and live from since 2020. After 7 years of growth, it has lost 70% of its traffic to Google AI Overviews. When you Googled something, you used to get a link to my website. Now you get a page of ads, then an AI-generated answer trained on my content, then finally a link to my website. This has a devastating impact on traffic.” Google is in my opinion strip-mining the Web.

PsyPost: AI voice clones are easier to understand in noisy environments than real humans. “Artificial intelligence voice clones tend to be easier to understand in noisy environments than the actual human voices they mimic. This finding provides evidence that synthetic speech technology could significantly improve assistive communication devices for individuals with speech impairments.” Good afternoon, Internet…

This newsletter is free but most of the things that go into making it aren’t! Help me afford new socks and fancier bean stew by supporting ResearchBuzz on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Don’t have any money but still want to support? I know how that feels. Share this newsletter or tell a friend about it. I live at Calishat. See my other nonsense at SearchTweaks, RSS Gizmos, Local Search America, WikiTwister, and MiniGladys.

India Today: Atomberg creates India-wide map of water quality, anyone can check TDS with PIN code. “The trick? Atomberg is using data collected from sensors in its RO machines and after anonymising this data is allowing anyone to search it using a PIN code. The result? Through the Atomberg water quality tool, anyone can go to their website, use a PIN code and get the quality of water in their area, complete with overall water rating and TDS level.”

Azernews: Gilavar Photo Club presents digital archive project for country’s heritage sites. “Currently, the website contains information on more than 200 historical, architectural, and archaeological monuments across nine regions of Azerbaijan, along with over 2,600 photographs.”

Google Blog: Explore Colonial Williamsburg with Google Arts & Culture. “This year marks a monumental milestone: the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America. To celebrate this moment, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Google Arts & Culture have partnered on a new project that pulls back the curtain on early American history. It makes the varied daily realities of the 18th-century colonial capital accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world.”

Found in my Calishat Snaps: CycleArchive.com. From the About page: “This project began because I kept stumbling across fascinating old cycling magazines in dusty corners of the internet and university libraries — titles from the 1860s through to the 1940s, back when bicycles were still called ‘wheels’ and people were genuinely unsure whether this whole cycling thing would catch on.”

USEFUL STUFF

AllAboutKen: Eye-tracking heatmaps in your browser, no lab needed. “Stop guessing whether users will notice your CTA. Foveacast predicts attention from a screenshot, entirely in your browser, nothing uploaded.”

AROUND THE SEARCH & SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

MakeUseOf: 6 search engines that find the internet that Google forgot. “To discover those quaint little corners of the internet that don’t make it onto page one of Google, I tried these lesser-known search engines, and what I discovered was a completely different internet.”

Brennan Day: Floating Up: An Interview with the creator of Bubbles.town, Benjamin Behnke. “Think Hacker News or Reddit, but exclusively for the indie blogosphere. You sign in with a Fediverse account to vote, and posts bubble up based on community upvotes combined with recency. It has categories like Writing, Tech, Culture, Life, Science, History, Gaming, etc., and recently added a daily ‘Briefing’ that presents top posts in a newspaper-style format.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Hill: House unveils bipartisan kids online safety deal. “House lawmakers announced a bipartisan deal on a package for protecting kids online on Monday, months after negotiations on digital and social media regulation fell apart between the two parties.”

Reuters: India ‘proactively monitoring’ Telegram over concerns about illegal content, government report shows. “An Indian investigation found that Telegram is being used extensively to ​share child sexual abuse material and perpetrate financial scams, according to a report by the government, which ‌added it was ‘proactively monitoring’ groups on the messaging app.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Sameoldstory.co: I’ve “gone viral” before and I don’t recommend it!. “Occasionally people will read my post, assume I made that point I just described, and argue about how just because you’re old enough to remember the moon landing doesn’t make you an expert on politics, or fashion, or television or whatever. Which I totally agree with, but they’re misreading me. It’s not even misreading, really. The post has escaped me too, and it represents its own idea now, as a meme. It’s got my face and name on it though, so it’s hard not to feel a kind of way about it.”

WTVR: New tool helps Alzheimer’s families find clinical trials. “The Alzheimer’s Disease Registry Initiative, known as ADRI, is a virtual research platform that connects people with Alzheimer’s or dementia and their caregivers to researchers. The goal is to match patients with clinical trials to accelerate breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s treatment.”

JMIR Publications: The Future of Online Misinformation Research: Tackling the Landscape With Integrity and Urgency. “Since early 2025, the scientific research and funding landscape has faced tremendous changes and challenges in the United States. In this News and Perspectives article, health communication scholar, former program official of the National Cancer Institute, and JMIR Correspondent Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou discusses the impact on—and future of—online misinformation research in this politicized context.” Good morning, Internet…

This newsletter is free but most of the things that go into making it aren’t! Help me afford new socks and fancier bean stew by supporting ResearchBuzz on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Don’t have any money but still want to support? I know how that feels. Share this newsletter or tell a friend about it. I live at Calishat. See my other nonsense at SearchTweaks, RSS Gizmos, Local Search America, WikiTwister, and MiniGladys.

McGill University: Digitization of centuries of Canadian weather records promises to improve climate understanding. “Researchers have uncovered and digitized nearly two million 18th and 19th century weather observations from across Canada that offer new insights into how the country’s climate has changed over time. The international project draws on handwritten records dating from 1768 to 1884. The data include temperature, precipitation, wind and detailed descriptions of such events as storms and floods.”

The Verge: The Atlantic created a searchable database of the music used to train AI. “Atlantic reporter Alex Reisner recently uncovered four datasets of music being used to train AI models and made them fully searchable for the public. Two of the sets are absolutely enormous at 12 million and 9 million tracks. The other two are much smaller, but still represent a significant amount of training data at over 100,000 songs each.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bubbles Blog: Introducing Bubbles Briefing . “So here it is: Bubbles Briefing. A finite edition of the top posts on Bubbles, published once a day at 06:00 Europe/Berlin. Same view for everybody. When you reach the end, you’re done. There’s no page 2.”

PressGazette: Biggest UK local newsbrands: Reach sites worst hit after Google algorithm changes. “The majority of the UK’s largest local news websites have seen a decline in audience and minutes spent with their content in the past year, according to Ipsos iris data. Among the 75 biggest local news titles in the UK, just 16 grew their audience year on year in April while 15 increased the monthly time spent on their platforms.”

USEFUL STUFF

Coywolf: AI Alt Text for the Fediverse: Chrome extension for generating image alt text on Mastodon. “A privacy-first Chrome extension (Manifest V3) that adds an AI alt-text button to the Mastodon web composer (any instance, including self-hosted). When you open the image description (alt-text) modal, the extension can send the image to Anthropic’s Claude API — using your own API key — and autofill a concise, screen-reader-friendly description that follows established alt-text accessibility best practices.” This extension is currently undergoing review for inclusion in the Chrome Web store.

AROUND THE SEARCH & SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Futbol Chronicle: Fake Photos and AI Crowds Have Turned the World Cup Into an Information War. “He was an electrician, some said. A bus driver who played football on the weekends, said others. It was a beautiful story, the amateur who walked off a building site to stun a superpower, and it was shared hundreds of thousands of times. It was also completely false.”

SouthPole Blog: Why Artists Are Running Their Own Data Centers. “There is a server humming in Linz, Austria, that has quietly hosted net art, free software experiments, and community broadcasts since the mid-1990s. It belongs to servus.at, a cultural association that treats infrastructure the way other artist collectives treat darkrooms or kilns: as a medium. In 2024 they published a small book, Artists Running Data Centers, edited by Davide Bevilacqua: 96 pages, English, ISBN 978-3950420036.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Tom’s Hardware: Acoustic mapping app uses thousands of networked old Android phones to hunt Shahed drones — crowd-sourced microphone network spots small, low-RCS military targets. “A Lithuanian startup developed an Android app that lets verified users monitor the general area for the acoustic signature of Shahed-type drones used by Russia to strike targets and report their approximate location. According to state broadcaster Lithuanian National Radio and Television, the app uses an embedded algorithm to isolate and analyze targets from environmental noise.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Kirsten the Librarian: The Big List of Google Scholar Alternatives (and the Big Librarian Existential Crisis). “I started writing this in summer of last year, intending it to be a nice little list of tools that would be handy if Google Scholar disappeared or got substantially worse, as a follow up to my LSE Impact blog post.[1] The more I wrote the more I realised that I needed to caveat all my recommendations, and that actually those caveats are the important bit. As time went on that developed into a full-blown existential crisis over, amongst other things, the dependence of the academic knowledge system on profoundly unethical companies and the precarity of information infrastructure.”

David Bushell: Google just spat in my face. “AI peddlers like Google have made one thing abundantly clear: their product will take your skills. It will take your profession. It will dehumanise you and you’ll pay for it.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Hackaday: When A Favicon Becomes The Entire Website. “Putting hidden data in places where few expect it can be a fun hobby or even a professional career. In the case of [Tim Wehrle] it’s just the former. His most recent project in this area uses a favicon image for storing a HTML-based website and rendering its contents within the browser after the favicon has been downloaded.” Good evening, Internet…

This newsletter is free but most of the things that go into making it aren’t! Help me afford new socks and fancier bean stew by supporting ResearchBuzz on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Don’t have any money but still want to support? I know how that feels. Share this newsletter or tell a friend about it. I live at Calishat. See my other nonsense at SearchTweaks, RSS Gizmos, Local Search America, WikiTwister, and MiniGladys.

Rural Jersey: Two Centuries Of Jersey’s Rural History Now Just A Click Away!. “The Royal Jersey Agricultural and Horticultural Society (RJA&HS) has launched a new digital archive… The archive, available on the Society’s website, contains more than 15,000 historic images and documents, including annual reports, magazines, newsletters, photographs and records documenting the Island’s agricultural and horticultural life from the 1830s to today.”

Northwest Georgia News: Walker County Messenger archive opens window to past . “Ready for a trip through local history? Now you can explore more than 7,400 issues of the Walker County Messenger, from 1880 through 2025, and see everything from hometown headlines to vintage ads with prices that might make you do a double take.”

Big Island Now: State releases first comprehensive children, youth fiscal map. “The fiscal map examines state, federal and federal relief funding dedicated to children and youth ages 0 to 24 years old during fiscal years 2019 through 2023. The analysis provides a detailed look at how public investments support specific outcomes, services, age groups and populations throughout Hawaiʻi.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Harvard Graduate School of Education: Black Teacher Archive Launches Revamped Website. “The Black Teacher Archive (BTA) announced the launch of a new website featuring a number of new ways to share and highlight its growing collection in the classroom and beyond.”

Search Engine Roundtable: Bing Tests Updated News Design In Search. “Microsoft Bing is testing a new updated design for the news section within Bing Search. The updated news box, honestly, is easier to understand and makes it clearer that these are news sources – so I kind of like it.”

AROUND THE SEARCH & SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Indy: After Local Drag Queen and Business Owner Banned From Instagram, More Questions Than Answers. “Community members, including Drag Queen Stormie Daie and Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam, have called on Instagram users to tag Meta in posts asking the company to reinstate [Naomi] Dix’s accounts. While Meta did not supply Dix with a reason for the ban, the posts it flagged—one of which was from a year ago—included an image of a shirtless dancer and a harness strapped to a person’s chest, with accompanying text advertising a queer kink party and drag show.”

The Register: Telegram founder accuses Meta of sabotaging access in India with BGP hijacks. “The founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has suggested Meta might be using its investment in Indian telco Jio to sabotage the messaging service. Durov dropped his theory on X, writing: ‘Indian telecom Reliance is sabotaging access to Telegram for millions of users OUTSIDE India (including the UAE) via a rogue method called BGP hijacking.'”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Mashable: Older iPhones are vulnerable to a flaw Apple likely can’t fix. “The issue exists within SecureROM, the code that runs when an iPhone turns on, which is embedded in certain chips. Apple can’t fix these flaws, as the code can’t be extracted from the chips.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Tech.eu: Ukraine launches TrophyLab, turning captured Russian weapons into a battlefield R&D platform. “Since the beginning of the full-scale war, Ukrainian military personnel, scientific institutions, and research centres have been analysing captured equipment. They study components, technological solutions, and vulnerabilities to develop effective countermeasures more quickly. That knowledge is now being made available to those working to strengthen defence capabilities.” Good evening, Internet..

This newsletter is free but most of the things that go into making it aren’t! Help me afford new socks and fancier bean stew by supporting ResearchBuzz on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Don’t have any money but still want to support? I know how that feels. Share this newsletter or tell a friend about it. I live at Calishat. See my other nonsense at SearchTweaks, RSS Gizmos, Local Search America, WikiTwister, and MiniGladys.

Mountain Journal: How Some Montanans are Taking Data Center Regulation Into Their Own Hands. “In Montana, where the state offers little in the way of oversight, citizen-led initiatives in Butte-Silver Bow and Yellowstone counties are forging a potentially new regulatory path: a grassroots approach that, if successful, would put the power to approve new or expanded data centers in the hands of voters.”

Ithaca Voice: Petition opposing Lansing AI data center garners over 20,000 signatures. “A proposed data center in Lansing has met its latest wave of backlash this week after over 20 thousand people signed a petition against the development.”

DATA CENTERS

Planet Detroit: Google data center in Van Buren Township would destroy 13 acres of wetlands. “Michigan regulators are reviewing a wetland permit for Google’s planned data center in Van Buren Township, which would destroy 13.55 acres of wetlands in a county that has already lost 90% of them to development.”

Cleveland.com: Fire chief concerned about emergency planning for data center power plants. “If something goes wrong at a power plant being built next to an Amazon data center outside Columbus, Norwich Township firefighters will be the first to respond. But Fire Chief David Baird hasn’t seen or been allowed to see or help develop American Electric Power’s emergency response plans.”

Nevada Current: Las Vegas data center expansion approved as officials ponder need for future regulations. “The Clark County Commission, in its capacity as the zoning board, unanimously approved a proposal to expand the largest data center campus in Southern Nevada on Wednesday, but not without adjustments and acknowledging the need for future data center regulations.”

AI IN GOVERNANCE

Ars Technica: Pentagon boasts of using AI to write reports mandated by Congress. “The US Department of Defense has a lot of congressionally mandated homework to do every year involving hundreds of required reports on various national security topics. But Pentagon officials have been proudly describing a new shortcut—using generative AI tools to write such reports for Congress.”

The Oaklandside: Who’s behind the AI-generated social media posts targeting Oakland’s mayor?. “The website and social media account allude to alleged scandals in the mayor’s past and lay blame for virtually all the city’s problems on her while posting AI-generated images depicting Lee in imagined scenarios, dining on lobster in a German mountain resort and drinking champagne with a local businessman who was indicted on corruption charges last year.”

The Baltimore Banner: AI put Wes Moore and Dan Cox in a very unlikely — possibly illegal — embrace. “Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and his Republican rival Dan Cox have never hugged, and definitely not in the State House. But a fake image circulating on social media shows the two men in a warm embrace in the Governor’s Reception Room. Cox, facing the camera, is grinning. Moore’s eyes are closed.”

AI IN WORK

Workday Magazine: FOIA Documents Show “Intrusive” AI System is Monitoring Rochester Bus Drivers. “Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show that bus drivers for Rochester, Minn., are being monitored by ‘artificial intelligence’ technology for alleged actions like distracted driving and running red lights, and at least one city official acknowledged the system feels ‘intrusive’ to workers.”

AROUND THE AI WORLD

Search Engine Land: USA Today vs. Google AI Overviews: A World Cup battle for breaking news traffic. “USA Today Co. is using AI-assisted shell files to publish breaking sports coverage faster. The strategy is designed to capture search traffic before Google’s AI Overviews summarize the news. The publisher tested the approach during the 2026 Winter Olympics and is now using it for coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Digiday reported.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Trump administration backs Musk’s xAI in NAACP data center lawsuit. “President Donald Trump’s administration has asked a federal judge to block ​an NAACP lawsuit over emissions tied to data centers ‌powering Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, in a case the government said pits executive power against limits on citizen enforcement of environmental laws.”

Courthouse News Service: Investors sue Adobe execs over AI copyright statements. “A group of investors claim Tuesday Adobe executives didn’t fully disclose the software company’s prioritization of artificial intelligence and the risks involved in training and utilizing generative AI.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

BBC: ChatGPT can be made to generate sexualised and violent images, researchers find. “The latest public version of ChatGPT can be made to generate sexualised images or depict scenes of graphic violence with a simple prompt, researchers have told the BBC. British AI security startup Mindgard figured out how to make ChatGPT create graphic pictures by slightly altering a widely-shared instruction, or prompt, which was originally designed to produce humorous results.”

Missouri S&T: Missouri S&T researcher combines lessons from ants and birds to improve AI. “One of the approaches, known as ant colony optimization, is inspired by the way ants collectively find the most efficient routes to food. The other, called particle swarm optimization, draws inspiration from the way birds and other groups share information and adjust their behavior based on successful neighbors.”

Mashable: Report: AI can perpetuate anti-LGBTQ hate. “AI has stoked many fears: The demise of entire industries, mass exploitation of vulnerable online denizens, a widespread crisis of literacy and critical thinking. Included in that long list is the fear that these systems can reinforce discrimination and bias levied against already marginalized groups. And according to a new report from LGBTQ nonprofit GLAAD, it’s already a problem.” Good evening, Internet…

This newsletter is free but most of the things that go into making it aren’t! Help me afford new socks and fancier bean stew by supporting ResearchBuzz on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Don’t have any money but still want to support? I know how that feels. Share this newsletter or tell a friend about it. I live at Calishat. See my other nonsense at SearchTweaks, RSS Gizmos, Local Search America, WikiTwister, and MiniGladys.