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March 8, 2025

🗣️ You got to hear this: I called a networking gear company and got “Heather.” I could barely understand her. Those days may be over. Teleperformance, the world’s largest call center company, is using AI to change Indian accents into American or British ones in real time. You need to take a sec, click here and select Demo. Pick a person, hit Play and toggle the button on and off. Amazing.

Move over Kia Boys, the Nissan Boys are here: Steps outlining how to steal a Nissan are all over social media. Thieves use special hardware to intercept a Nissan’s key signal, which lets them unlock the doors and start the engine. To stop your key’s signal from transmitting, wrap it in tinfoil (Yup, that trick again!) when you’re at home or place it in a metal box. Expect an upgrade from Nissan soon.

I like big bots and I cannot lie: Your HR department can’t write you up for saying that. Your new coworker could be an AI bot. OpenAI is about to create special “agents” for jobs like sales and software development. They’ll start at $2,000 and go up to $20,000 a month for PhD-level research. Upside: The bots never call in sick.

Doing taxes this weekend? Fun times. Remember that if you made over $5,000 using apps like Venmo, PayPal and Cash App for your side hustle, you’ll get a 1099-K form. I answer your FAQs about this here. Here are each app’s reporting rules.

🦆 Duck off: Tell that to your AI chatbot collecting data. Duck.ai is out of beta and lets you chat anonymously, for free, with no account required. You can use GPT-4o mini, o3-mini, Meta Llama 3.3, Mistral Small 3 and Claude 3 Haiku without worrying about your data being collected. Chats are fully anonymized, meaning they’ll never be used for AI training. Try it out.

🎶 DJ King Charles III: Yes, you read that right. Chucky’s hosting a show from Buckingham Palace called The King’s Music Room on Apple Music. It’s all about the tunes and artists he loves. In the premiere dropping Monday, he’ll call out Bob Marley, Kylie Minogue and Davido. You can bet there’s no royalty-free music on his playlist. (I groaned when I wrote that!)

Found after 7 years: Watch “Unsolved Mysteries” on Netflix? You might remember Abdul Aziz Khan. He went missing from Atlanta after his mom, who didn’t have custody, allegedly kidnapped him. Police found her and her husband, who isn’t Abdul’s dad, in an empty house in Colorado and charged them. Now Abdul is 14 and finally coming home.

$21 million

Stolen from victims of a grandparent scam ring. Good news: Police caught the bad guys. Scammers called, pretending to be a teenager or adult grandkid who was in a car crash, arrested and needed money for bail.

Got an old Apple Watch? You might get paid. If you had an original Apple Watch or a Series 1, 2 or 3, you could be entitled to a cut of the $20 million Apple Watch settlement. Act fast: Payouts range from $20 to $50, and the deadline is April 10. File your claim here.

🔍 Google’s testing AI-only search results: The new AI Mode ditches the usual 10 blue links and instead lets Gemini 2.0 take over with web summaries, graphs and shopping data. Think of it as a bigger version of AI Overview, and yes, we all know how spot-on that is. It’s opt-in only for now through Google’s Search Labs, so you can ignore it … for now.

Hate YouTube ads? There’s a cheaper fix. YouTube is rolling out Premium Lite for $7.99/month, cutting down on “most” ads. News, fashion and gaming videos will be ad-free, but if you want music without ads, you’ll still need the $13.99/month standard Premium plan. That one also includes offline downloads.

📬 Ransomware by snail mail? It’s happening. Cybercriminals are now sending ransom demands through postal mail. The letters warn folks that their networks have been compromised and sensitive info stolen. The price to keep it private? $250,000 to $350,000 in bitcoin, due in 10 days. And because they’re oh-so-considerate, they include a QR code so you can send the crypto right to their wallet.

15 minutes

Before your plane takes off, arrive at the airport. I bet that just stressed you out. This “airport theory” has almost 400 million views on TikTok. Some folks breezed through security and made it on time. Others weren’t so lucky. Don’t chance it.

1 million+ infected with malware: You know those cheap Android-based streaming boxes, tablets or used car infotainment systems? Bad news. They’re being used as a botnet by the Badbox 2.0 hacking group. The top targets are TV boxes with the generic names “TV98” and “X96.” Don’t risk it to save a few bucks.

33 mushers

Are taking on this year’s Iditarod dogsled race in Alaska because the usual route didn’t get enough snow. There are normally 50 to 75 mushers. The new course is farther north and now stretches a record 1,128 miles, forcing racers through endless wilderness and brutal blizzards (paywall link). You know, life is like a dogsled team. If you’re not the lead dog, the view is always the same.

🐓 Egg prices got you scrambling? Rent a chicken. Seriously. Rent The Chicken lets you “borrow” hens for fresh eggs at home. For about $140 a month, you’ll get two hens, a portable coop, feed and instructions to keep them happy. Expect one to two dozen eggs per week. I had a hen who could count her own eggs. She was a mathemachicken. That was bad. I agree. Watch the video here.