Why I never use Waymo

👶 Nature had other plans: A pregnant California woman’s water broke on her front porch, forcing her to give birth right then and there. Her Ring doorbell cam captured everything, from her squatting down to finally pushing out her baby girl. Luckily, her husband was by her side. Mom and baby are both doing great.

Pink Floyd’s payout for selling the rights to their recorded music, name and likeness. Sony now owns the British rock band’s catalog. I smell a virtual concert coming to a city near you, where you can be comfortably numb. Btw, digital avatars of ABBA do concerts seven days a week in a custom-built London arena with a 3,000-seat capacity. They make $2,000,000 per week!

💻 Microsoft Office 2024 is here: Expect new features like adding live camera feeds to PowerPoint slides and pasting images into Excel without messing up the formatting. Prefer to pay once, like in the old days? For one device, Office Home 2024 costs $149.99, and Office Home & Business is $249.99. FWIW, Microsoft 365 is $69.99 per year with regular updates.

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Found, thanks to a pair of AirPods. Thieves took the car in Greenwich, Connecticut. Luckily, the owner had left a pair of AirPods inside, and police tracked the stolen ride down at a gas station. They pulled over the suspects, who then fled the scene and were later captured. Dopes.

Red tape tragedy: A U.S. government agency has one of the most accurate hurricane forecasting models, but because of a contract with a private company, that data is locked down until 2025. Hurricane Helene just left an 800-mile trail of destruction, killing at least 130 people. It’s ridiculous they’re withholding lifesaving info when we taxpayers are footing the bill.

🚖 Another wayward Waymo: A San Francisco woman was trapped in an autonomous Waymo cab when two men stood in front of the car and wouldn’t move. Why? They wanted her phone number.  She told them no, but the cab wouldn’t budge, leaving her stuck until they finally walked away. Waymo’s response? She got a free ride.

Oh, Snap: A new lawsuit is calling out Snapchat for not doing enough to warn about sextortion schemes targeting kids. Online predators pressure kids into sending explicit images, only to blackmail them later. In 2022 alone, Snap was getting around 10,000 sextortion reports a month. An employee says that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

In e-bike injuries between 2019 and 2022. Scooter injuries were up 88% in that time, too. FYI, injuries from e-bikes are much more likely to lead to a hospital visit than other “micro-mobility” devices like scooters and standard bikes. Just make sure your helmet is MIPS-rated to keep your noggin safe.

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🛰️ If you want peace, prepare for war: The U.S. and its allies are working to defend against growing space threats from China and Russia. Cyberattacks, GPS jamming and even space debris all pose serious risks. So far, NATO has added a space branch, the U.K. has launched its own spy satellite, and France is developing tech to prevent interference in low Earth orbit (paywall link). See you crater, space invader!

A U.S. senator was deepfake duped: Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Ben Cardin, D-Md., had a Zoom call with a scammer posing as Ukraine’s former foreign minister. The deepfake looked and sounded just like the real guy, and the scammer pressed for Cardin’s opinions on sensitive foreign policy and the upcoming election. Cardin got suspicious and the call ended. It’s still unclear who was behind it.