The TikTok ban and your videos
If Communist China-owned TikTok is banned on the 19th, that doesn’t mean it’s game over for you.
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If Communist China-owned TikTok is banned on the 19th, that doesn’t mean it’s game over for you.
☕ Me espresso: Carol Chapman, aka “Grandma C,” is an 81-year-old TikTok coffee reviewer. She hit 1.1 million views trying pop star Sabrina Carpenter’s Brown Sugar Shakin’ Espresso at Dunkin. Even Sabrina responded with, “i love you grandma C 💋.” In a follow-up video, Grandma C was bopping to Sabrina’s music for the first time. Love her.
Up for grabs in a claw machine in Queens, New York. It’s the game you remember (move the claw, drop it down, pray), except there’s a $50 buy-in (paywall link). Other prizes ripe for the plucking include $549 AirPods Max headphones and a $600 Chanel wallet. Why can’t anybody win at a “Frozen” claw machine? Because it will always let it go.
Big Parkinson’s breakthrough: Delray Medical Center in Florida just introduced Exablate Prime, a tool designed for the fight against Parkinson’s disease. It sends ultrasound waves to heat the brain areas that cause tremors. The tech is promising for patients with Alzheimer’s and chronic pain, too. There’s a year-long waitlist.
Wanna play a game? Meet Pdftris, the classic Tetris game packed inside a 60KB PDF, created by security analyst Thomas Rinsma. Hit this link to play it in your browser. It’s not a visual masterpiece, but that’s part of the charm. There’s one for Doom, too. Heads-up: Don’t start downloading random PDFs; hackers love that trick.
This is bad: Cops are using facial recognition to find suspects, and they’re sometimes skipping collecting other evidence before making an arrest. Case in point (paywall link): Christopher, a 29-year-old father, was wrongfully arrested for assaulting a security guard based on a blurry video still. It took more than two years to clear his name.
Google’s hold on search traffic. For the first time in a decade, more than one in 10 folks search the web some other way. It’s not ChatGPT taking over just yet. Bing, Yandex (a Russian search engine) and Yahoo all saw market share increases. Yeah, Google’s AI Overview stinks.
Free AI test drive: Nothing has changed our tech lives quite like AI. You need to start using AI in your small (or large) business before it’s too late. Take a free test drive of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure now at Oracle.com/kim. You’ll be glad you did!
💊 He takes 54 pills a day: Tech millionaire Bryan Johnson, on a mission to reverse aging, figured out one of his daily supplements was actually making him older. The culprit was rapamycin, which comes with rough side effects like a higher resting heart rate and skin infections. Catch my podcast with Bryan here.
Red Note is No. 1 in the App Store: It’s kind of like Instagram but with a Pinterest-style layout and 300 million monthly active members. Why is it suddenly so popular? TikTok creators who are worried their audiences will evaporate with the possible ban don’t realize this app is also Communist China-owned, too. D’oh.
🚨 Don’t reply to spam — ever: Hackers have a workaround to get phishing links past Apple’s iMessage security measures: Tricking you into replying. Links from unknown senders are disabled, so they send frantic texts about shipping issues or unpaid road tolls that push you to send “stop” or “yes.” The moment you respond, the link goes live and you’re screwed.