Bad idea: Mozilla has collected more than 30,000 hours of voice recordings from volunteers worldwide. Its Common Voice project is a free public dataset anyone can use to train AI software in 180 languages. Here’s the catch: Mozilla won’t say how or who will use your voice. Don’t add yours.
The Beatles’ newest hit: “Now and Then” is the first AI-assisted song to earn a Grammy nomination. Released in November 2023, “Now and Then” was restored using a type of AI called “stem separation,” which cleaned up the 60-year-old, low-fidelity demo originally recorded by John Lennon. The result? A finished master recording. Ah, there’s hope for me to win a Grammy yet.
🎬 Sorry, we’re out of business: Thousands of Redbox DVD vending machines are sitting abandoned, and people are grabbing whatever they can. Recent Reddit posts include a person who scooped up 99 movies, another who set up an entire kiosk in their house and a guy who bought eight machines to sell for scrap.
Ever wonder what happens to the massive amounts of U.S. military data stolen by Communist China’s spies? Its newest jet fighter aircraft (bottom pic) is a nearly identical design to America’s new F-35 stealth fighter (top pic).
It took the U.S. over 20 years and $2 trillion to produce theirs; China duplicated it in less than five years, using hundreds of terabytes of stolen U.S. military secrets.
🙊 Not that kind of Barbie girl: Mattel says it’s deeply sorry for printing the wrong URL on boxes of its “Wicked” movie-themed Barbie dolls. The mix-up swapped the movie’s site for trailers and tickets for another wicked site that offers a very different kind of girl-on-girl action — porn.
That was a bust: Apple is axing its $3,500 AR headset, the Vision Pro. They’ve already cut production in half and the end is near. In a podcast interview, Tim Cook called the headset an “early adopted product.” You know, like early adopters with a ton of money to spend on a device that developers are staying far away from.
Just say no: An Uber or Lyft driver might ask you to pay in cash so they can take home more money. They make as little as $9 an hour (paywall link) through the app, but a cash payment means no safety features like the emergency button, and you’ll get hit with cancellation fees.
🎣 Reeled in a big one: A 33-year-old Nigerian man was sentenced to 10 years for a phishing scam that stole $20 million in nest eggs from over 400 U.S. homebuyers. He sent phishing emails to real estate professionals, tricking them into providing their login credentials. Using those, he redirected home purchase payments to compromised accounts and laundered the money into bitcoin via Coinbase, according to the DOJ.
Pass on this NAS: Over 60,000 D-Link network-attached storage (NAS) devices let hackers slip in data-stealing code. Affected models include the DNS-320 Version 1.00, DNS-320LW Version 1.01.0914.2012, DNS-325 versions 1.01 and 1.02, and the DNS-340L Version 1.08. D-Link’s advice? Replace it. Here’s an alternative.
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Before you buy: If you’re in the market for a baby lounger, sleep positioner, wedge, inclined sleeper, weighted sleep sacks or crib bumpers, just know not everything sold online is safe. Third-party retailers on Amazon and other sites often don’t comply with recalls. Always search online for the exact name of a baby or kid product with the word “recall.”