Archive Page 10 – Graphic Chatter

News and information culled from the internet

January 2025

AI INTELLIGENCE

January 13, 2025: I have a Google TV and it is linked to my Google account, so that the You Tube channel is consistent across my phone use, desktop computer use, and the Google TV. Lately it is awash in AI generated video content on the home screen. These videos vary but they have that same smooth-tonal generated look and are very easy to spot, and though they were interesting and curious at first, they've quickly become monotonously the same in showing off the same visual tricks.

Trying to find a simple way to block this sort of content has proved elusive, short of one-by-one going to the video itself and "down voting" it.

I suspect this problem is going to metastasize quickly as AI generated videos become easier to produce. If online services like You Tube don't get a handle on this, there is the risk of it destroying YouTube's online prominence as the main super digital-channel in America.

AI INTELLIGENCE

January 8, 2025: I asked ChatGPT to show me a profile image of Mount Parnitha in Greece - - I wanted to identify a mountain range in a distant part of a photograph image and just needed to compare the "humps" across the outline. This is what ChatGPT showed me - not even remotely correct.

This is Parnitha (click images to enlarge):

WOLVES

Stabilizing the wolf population on Mount Parnitha – eKathimerini [English]

RUNNING THE INTERNET

Apple and Google move to have website certificates expire every 47 days instead of the average of 398 days – Computerworld

Dismissed as a "cash grab" for IT departments, but then there's this:

The official reason for speeding up the certificate renewal cycle is to make it far harder for cyberthieves to leverage what are known as orphaned domain names to fuel phishing and other cons to steal data and credentials...

...Nevertheless, it seems clear that sharply accelerated certificate expiration dates are coming."

I've seen this many times, its almost ubiquitous: a website loses its owner (did they die? Just no longer care?) and the site slips into someone else hands who uses the sometimes years of accumulated history as a background to distribute computer spam, viruses, etc.

PUBLIC DOMAIN

Wikipedia Public Domain list 2025 – Wikipedia

PUBLIC DOMAIN

Major works sliding into Public Domain in 2025 – Mental Floss

Some of the items are: Popeye, Tintin, Marx Bros The Cocoanuts (the film), The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

See the Public Domain resource list

FLAGS

"It has taken only 248 years"

President Biden signed a bill making the American Bald Eagle the National Bird on Christmas Eve. Most people, including professional politicians who are in charge of the country itself, had no idea that it hadn’t been done before.

Article at Washington Post about the effort to get this bill through Congress and onto the President's desk.

Government websites called bald eagles the national bird. Textbooks and newspaper articles agreed. But when Cook searched high and low for any official documentation cementing the bird’s status, he found nothing. Flabbergasted, in 2011 he wrote to his senator — Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California — asking whether her staff could investigate this mystery at the National Archives... "It turns out that the documentation wasn’t missing — it didn’t exist. We’ve never had a national bird," Cook told The Washington Post. "The senator sent me back a letter saying it’s assumed to be our national bird, but it has never been declared our national bird."

ENERGY

Solar power from space? Demonstration in Iceland set for 2030 – Space.com

British company has plan for satellite to "beam to Earth 30 megawatts of clean energy — enough to power about 3,000 homes."

MEDICINE

Fluctuating cholesterol and triglyceride levels linked to Alzheimer's – Phileleftheros [Greek] [Use Google Translate to turn to English]

Oregon Beach sand along Pacific coast with patterns from fresh water flows – click photo to enlarge

Original page February 15, 2025