Mouse magic

🛞 Mad Max meets Model 3: Tesla dropped two new “self-driving” modes: Sloth (grandpa speed) and Mad Max (the one your insurance hates). No confirmed speeds yet, but “Mad Max” mode is made to accelerate and swerve through traffic “like a sports car.” The feds opened a preliminary investigation, I wonder why? Coming soon: Mario Kart Mode, bananas sold separately.

Wi-Fi grounded: Got big dreams of fast Wi-Fi everywhere you go? SpaceX just told Starlink Mini users to slow down. Starting Nov. 7, dishes on $165-a-month roaming plans can’t work past 450 mph (down from 550). Too many people were strapping them to private jets. Want faster internet at 30,000 feet? You’ll need the $10,000-a-month “Aviation” plan. Yep, that’s per month.

🔄 The hacker becomes the hackee: If you’ve ever thought, “I’ll just grab the cracked version” of a software or video game, surprise, you’re the product. Check Point found thousands of YouTube “free software” videos that sneak malware into your PC. Some hit hundreds of thousands of views. That’s crazy. Turns out that you can actually fool all the people all the time. Remember, if it’s free and asks you to disable antivirus, it’s a setup.

The phone scam evolution: This is frightening. A cybersecurity firm built a real-time voice deepfake, meaning someone can sound like you on a call instantly. Cheap laptop, open-source tools, done. They tested it, and people fell for it almost every time. So when your “boss” calls asking for gift cards, maybe call back first. You should take a sec and check it out.

💄 Swipe left on spies: In the most James Bond news today, U.S. counterintelligence says foreign agents, mostly from China and Russia, are cozying up to Silicon Valley execs through dating apps, LinkedIn and startup circles. Some even marry their marks. Forget malware, this is man-ware. Roses are red, violets are blue, your crypto’s gone, and she works for Xi, too.

Hold the phone: Do you love talking to robots on the phone? Have I got good news for you! Yelp’s rolling out two talking bots. A Host AI for restaurant bookings and Receptionist for business calls. They’ll handle everything from wait lists to “do you take dogs?” for about $99 a month per restaurant. Next up, a suggested 25% tip.

It’s a sign: A Kenyan engineer built what’s basically Google Translate for sign language. His app, Terp 360, listens to speech and uses AI-powered 3D avatars to sign in real time. It’s built with motion-capture tech (sensors track actual signers’ movements), and it already knows thousands of words. I’ve always wanted to learn ASL. 

🔫 Artificial unintelligence: After football practice, a Maryland teen got swarmed by armed police because an AI gun detector thought his Doritos bag was a pistol. In other words, a weapon of nacho destruction. Turns out, the system flagged the way he held the bag as “gun-like.” The teen was cuffed, searched and cleared. Put your hands up and the chips where I can see them!

AWS eats its own: Here’s the cloud tea, Amazon says this week’s massive AWS outage wasn’t a hack but a software glitch so bad it fought itself. That’s right, a mini-tech civil war. Two automation systems tried to update network records at once and triggered a global domino crash. A chunk of the internet went briefly offline, even some people’s smart beds. 

♣️ Hackers, hustlers and high rollers: This is nuts. The feds unsealed an indictment straight out of Ocean’s Eleven, full of poker tables with hidden cameras, hacked Deckmate shufflers, even contact lenses that read cards. 30+ people, including the NBA’s Chauncey Billups, Damon Jones and Terry Rozier, were charged in a $7 million poker scam tied to Mafia families. Maybe your uncle blaming the game for being “rigged” was actually onto something. But also, maybe he’s just bad at poker.