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Links for 2018-09-13

  • Google spent $60 million on building Content ID

    That’s how much it costs to build a not-particularly-accurate UGC copyright filter:

    Google’s new report takes aim at this claim. It asserts that Content ID is a highly effective solution, with over 98 percent of copyright management on YouTube happening through Content ID, and just 2 percent coming from humans filing copyright removal notices. Google also says the music industry opts to monetize more than 95 percent of its copyright claims, meaning they leave the videos up on the service. It claims a whopping half of the music industry’s YouTube revenue comes from fan content — covers, remixes, dance versions, etc. — claimed via Content ID. The report also puts a hard figure on how much Google has spent so far on Content ID: $60 million.

    (tags: filtering copyright eu article-13 copyfight content-id google web ugc)

  • A definitive blood test for post-infectious irritable bowel syndrome?: Expert Review of Gastroenterology & Hepatology: Vol 10, No 11

    Very interesting! This paper and the one at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0126438 discuss the increasing evidence that some kinds of IBS may be caused by post-infection autoimmune activity triggered by a gastroenteritis infection — this matches the thing which put me on a restricted diet a few years ago.

    (tags: digestion ibs medicine health diet fodmap gastroenteritis papers)

  • Notes on some artefacts

    Five or six years ago, around the time most people seemed to be spending almost all of their time on the internet, I began to notice a particular kind of online phenomenon, one that I did not have a terminology for. I started to call these moments “artefacts”, borrowing a term from photography that describes the machine-created distortions and ghosts that corrupt digital imagery. “An unintended alteration in data” is one definition, but this new kind of “artefact” was expanding beyond sporadic instances and becoming a persistent sub-theme in discourse at large. The result was a type of semiotic collapse, one that first found its fullest expression in the absurdity of the 2016 presidential campaign, when news stories fabricated in Macedonia found a wider reach than The Washington Post. Countermeasures to interference in the coming 2018 congressional election look ineffectual, perhaps deliberately so.

    (tags: artefacts fake-news bots weird 2018 trump politics)