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This Christmas, don’t let tech take over. Turn off the screens and spend real, quality time with your kids — it’s the best gift you can give.
📸 Saving memories: A North Carolina woman is using Instagram to reunite families with photographs lost during Hurricane Helene. Taylor Schenker has collected hundreds of photos from the debris and shares them on her page, Photos from Helene. Folks can reach out to claim them or have them mailed back. Only about 15% have been returned. Spread the word if you can.
Have disappeared since 2013. Where’d they go? Websites got shut down, URLs changed and articles were deleted. About one-third of local news sites may be gone by next year. This is just the beginning; AI will only speed things up by deciding what’s important on the web.
Shady streaming: Spotify is filling playlists with “ghost artists” so they don’t have to pay so much in royalties. Just 20 songwriters are behind over 500 artists and thousands of tracks. The genres most affected? Classical, jazz, ambient and lo-fi hip-hop.
Is Netflix going to tick off millions of people again? The streaming giant is going live with two NFL games tomorrow: The Chiefs versus the Steelers and the Ravens versus the Texans. After the Tyson-Paul fight fiasco, they must’ve learned their lesson, right? Internet providers like Comcast are stepping in with extra capacity, and Netflix says they’re ready (paywall link). They passed on third-party backups, so we’ll see.
🔞 AI porn star: A 33-year-old adult film star sold her likeness to an AI company to lighten the load of her, ahem, demanding career. Chloe Amour says she loves connecting with fans, but she can’t always fulfill all their desires. Enter AI: Now she can be everything they want, anytime they want it. Business is booming. One guy says he’s dropped $10,000 a month on AI “girlfriends.”
“Last Christmas,” for the second year in a row. Wham!’s iconic classic is racking up about 7.7 million streams a day on Spotify. That’s almost 90 plays per second. No kidding, it barely missed the No. 1 spot 40 years ago. It’s holding down the No. 3 spot now in the U.S.
Saving little lives: Mercedes’ new CLA coupe is equipped with Child Presence Detection, or CPD. The tech is sensitive enough to pick up even a newborn’s breathing when the car is turned off. If the car senses a little one, its cameras will check for an adult. If no one’s there, it sends an alert, kicks on the AC and honks the horn. About 37 kids a year die in hot cars.
Snapchat lawsuit: Some 64 families are suing Snap, claiming its Snapchat app connected their kids with drug dealers who poisoned them with fentanyl. With geolocation tools for easy handoffs and messages that vanish in 24 hours by default, it’s a dealer’s paradise. Snap’s defense? They’re not responsible for what others do or say on their platform.
👰🏻🤵🏻 Billionaire wedding: So many news outlets are reporting Jeff Bezos, 60, is tying the knot with fiancée Lauren Sanchez, 55, next weekend in an Aspen, Colorado, wedding rumored to cost $600 million. Jeff says, “The whole thing is completely false.” Phew, now I don’t feel so bad I didn’t get my invite yet.
