Richard Lawler

Do you even need deepfakes? The Guardian reports that while “Steven Reece Lewis” helped pull in millions of dollars as CEO of “Hyperverse,” a collapsed crypto / pyramid scheme, their investigation has been unable to turn up any evidence he exists.

After a debut in the Hawkeye Disney Plus series a couple of years ago, the Echo show starring Alaqua Cox starts January 9th. Other than serving as another link to the Netflix shows with appearances from Vincent D’Onofrio (Kingpin) and Charlie Cox (Daredevil), it’s appearing on both Hulu and Disney Plus, even as those experiences overlap.

Car enthusiasts recently spotted a facelifted Taycan in testing, and here’s some confirmation. While we’ll have to wait for more details on what’s new for the Taycan in 2024, Porsche said test driver Lars Kern has apparently set a time of 7:07.55 around the 12.9-mile course (in a car with a roll cage and racing seats, on an empty track).

Passwordless logins with passkeys, tied to biometrics or other security options like hardware keys, seem ready to secure our logins. Google is already prompting users to add passkeys to their online security (here’s some helpful info on getting it set up), along with Apple, while password managers, including 1Password, are inching toward supporting a zero-password lifestyle.

Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon is still in Montenegro waiting to be extradited, but the SEC’s case against him will proceed, with a January 29th scheduled start date.

In August, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers denied Google’s attempt to end a class-action lawsuit filed in 2020 that claims it illegally invaded the privacy of millions by tracking browsing activity even with “incognito mode” activated in Chrome and other browsers.

Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun is making the jump from smartphones to EVs before the debut of the long-rumored Apple car or Sony’s Afeela. The SU stands for “Speed Ultra,” and when the SU7 debuts, it will accelerate from 0 - 100 km/h in 2.78 seconds. A Xiaomi Pilot autonomous system is powered by Nvidia’s Drive Orin chips, and at the end of the launch event, two cars drove themselves onstage.

CoinDesk points out Binance’s year-end wrapup, noting that despite the guilty plea and $4 billion in fines for engaging in “Anti-Money Laundering, Unlicensed Money Transmitting, and Sanctions Violations,” its new CEO says the user base has grown by 30 percent to 170 million.

It’s one thing when it’s Spotify, Apple Music, or SoundCloud, but these recaps from Culver’s, Dunkin (it dropped the “Donuts” from its name in 2019), Chick-fil-A, and Shake Shack are taking the whole year-end recap trend a little too far. Especially when they’re personalized.