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Hours wasted on reCAPTCHA. Choosing images (like which ones have a bike or a bridge) stopped bots years ago, but now they’re useless. So, why do they still exist? When you interact with the boxes, Google gets access to your browsing data to sell to advertisers. They’ve collected $6.1 billion just by making you click. Sneaky dogs.
Tags: bots, data, dogs, Google, Images
Heads-up, fellow pet owners: Microchipping company Save This Life shut down, so your furry friend’s chip might not be registered anymore. If you’re unsure, take them to a vet or shelter to get scanned. If a number pops up, you should be good to go. Plug it into the AAHA lookup tool to double-check. If the chip is invalid, ask your vet for an alternative.
💻 The nerd in me loves this: The world’s fastest supercomputer just went online at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The $600 million El Capitan is powered by 44,544 AMD chips. Its job is to secure the U.S. nuclear stockpile, run national security research and crunch other classified tasks. How fast is it? Its peak performance is 2.746 exaflops. That’s about 69 million times faster than a top-of-the-line MacBook.
Almost three years after the iPad 10: Apple’s new base model iPad 11 is coming this spring with a chip upgrade from the A14 Bionic to A17 Pro (about 40% faster), double the RAM (4GB to 8GB) and Apple Intelligence. If you don’t care about AI, the 10th-gen iPad is 20% off right now.
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This is a Pisa work: Scammers created a deepfake voice of Italy’s defense minister to call big names like Giorgio Armani and Prada’s Patrizio Bertelli (paywall link). The fake minister said journalists had been kidnapped and they needed cash to pay the ransom. At least one fell for it, wiring over $1 million to scammers.
😡 Justice, served: This is horrifying. A woman received a webpage filled with deepfake porn of herself, along with detailed, disgusting fantasies, and the page included her phone number, address and other private info. She went into full detective mode. The culprit? A close friend from college. A judge threw the sicko in prison for nine years.
🤝 I want to be your secret helper and mentor: I’ve been around tech forever. My business has thrived for over 20 years without debt or investors. If you have an issue, problem or question about your life or business, I’d love to help you. Ask me here on my site. I read every single note.
💡 Watt a good idea: Apple is working on a new robot that could one day replace your HomePod, Amazon Echo or smart speaker. It looks and moves exactly like the Pixar lamp. Apple wants to make robots interact more naturally with us. Ask “How’s the weather?” and it’ll literally turn its head toward the window before answering. Here’s the video.
🩸 Follow the money: People with kidney failure rely on dialysis machines to remove toxins from their blood, but the tech is outdated and a hassle to move around. That’s why researchers are developing smaller options, like the AKTIV. They’re struggling to secure funding, which is no surprise, given the dialysis market is worth $26 billion a year. They don’t want change.
Pranksters, unite: TouchTunes is the app equivalent of putting a quarter into a jukebox. Over 65,000 bars and restaurants use them, and you don’t have to be there in person to add a song to the queue (paywall link). That made it easy for the troll who played “Rocky Top” (the University of Tennessee’s unofficial fight song) in an Ohio State University bar … from 500 miles away.
🎨 No paint, no gain: Christie’s is planning its first-ever auction dedicated to AI art, and let’s just say people are not having it. The biggest gripe? Most generative AI tools were trained on IRL artists’ work without consent. A letter demanding Christie’s cancel the show has gathered thousands of signatures.