If you have ever paid the NC DMV online you may have seen a recent email from them about the recent text or SMS scam going around. It purports to tell you that you have unpaid tolls or fees. The “NCDMV will never request payment by text.” When I got “mine” it was easy to tell it was fake, it was coming from the country code of +63 (the Philippines) so I knew without thinking it was fake. Don’t engage, just delete. BTW, I don’t know of any states that use text messages to tell you about unpaid tolls and if you are in doubt, call them.
News junkies, yo can mimic a wall of TVs on your computer by looking to https://tvwall.live/ to do just that. Options to unmute particular stations, pick your countries to display, change the number of stations on your wall, and the ability to go full screen, are all choices to play with.
Another reason to go to the Fairview Library is for their very fast public WiFi, free to all patrons. And, it is on 24/7 so you can even just park in their lot after hours, especially to download those large software updates that might take hours at home. Or, go inside and check out some books while you are basking in the speed.
Users of Google’s Gmail app with paid Workspace Business and Enterprise accounts will be finding a new feature, AI powered summaries of email threads, taking up space at the top of that app. It should be helpful but if you want to turn it off you have to disable “smart features.” Unknown is whether Google will roll this out to us users of the free Gmail service. I would be curious to see how well it works.
Google is showing off some of their best videos created with their AI video tool called Veo. See what you can find at https://labs.google/flow/tv/channels and you don’t need to pay anything to view these. If you want to create, you can at least try one month free, look at https://labs.google/flow/about for more information. Just make sure you cancel before it automatically renews. This is part of their paid Google AI service.
No matter what web browser you are using, you should test its privacy features using the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cover Your Tracks project. Open that browser you think is doing a good job, go to https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ and see what they think of your setup. Then try that site again in private or incognito mode, or try the browsers Brave from https://brave.com/ or Vivaldi with its built-in ProtonVPN service https://vivaldi.com/ and see what changes. Learn more about tracking by clicking on the Learn link at Cover Your Tracks, https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/learn.
ChatGPT users should be aware that even deleted chat logs will now be retained by OpenAI, due to a recent court order. Read more at https://openai.com/index/response-to-nyt-data-demands/
Finally, stop by https://neal.fun/ and try his Internet Roadtrip for an interesting experience in driving by group voting, changing direction every 10 seconds.