It’s the ultimate internet bait-and-switch: Someone sends you a link (say, an important article you really need to read!), you click the link, and you hear, “Never gonna give you up/ Never gonna let you down!” How’d Rick Astley’s 1987 song become synonymous with good-natured internet trolling? Did the guy know he had a hit on his hands? (Spoiler: Nope.) And who invented the Rickrolling meme? These questions and others are answered in this fun video. Seriously, it’s worth a watch. My favorite viewer comment: “He lived long enough to see himself become a legend. That is a blessing.” Right?!
Bye-bye fireworks? The drones are here
They’re mesmerizing, a little magical and … pretty dangerous. That’s why a handful of cities are going high-tech this year, replacing their Fourth of July fireworks with drone shows.
Look to the sky
In California, Lake Tahoe, La Jolla and Ocean Beach are going the drone route this year. The same goes for Salt Lake City, Utah, and Boulder, Colorado. That is not surprising, given how dry those states are. Utah is one of the states most prone to wildfires, with 800 to 1,000 yearly.
It’s not just fire
In 2022, about 10,200 people went to the ER with fireworks-related injuries; 11 died. So sad.
- 38% of injuries were burns, and 29% of those were to the hands and fingers. Legs and the head/face/ears accounted for another 19% each.
Then there’s the matter of where fireworks come from
Surprise, surprise: The vast majority of bottle rockets, Roman candles, firecrackers, sparklers and all the rest come from China. In 2020, Americans spent $370 million on Chinese fireworks. The next biggest source? Spain, which we spent a collective $3.61 million on.
With drones, there are no huge booms! No debris or smoke to deal with, either.
Once you get past the tradition of it all, drone shows make a lot of sense. Have you ever seen one in person? They’re beautiful, too!
AI takes over
An AI in Tokyo secretly rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down — could this be the start of machines taking control into their own hands?
You get what you pay for: Hackers got their hands on 19 million IP addresses by luring people in with “free” downloads like MaskVPN and DewVPN. If you ever downloaded a free VPN, uninstall it ASAP. My pick is ExpressVPN for a solid, safe option.
$12,500 award on eBay
It’s a 1990 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame statue given to the Kinks’ guitarist Dave Davies. The seller got his hands on it after Davies had a stroke and missed a storage unit payment. Looks like they figured out a deal, because the statue is marked as sold.
Woman takes down peeping Tom
Michelle Chandler was trying on pants in a Nordstrom dressing room when she sensed something off. She looked down under her stall. What did Michelle find? A man recording her with his iPhone. He tried to run. That’s when she took matters into her own hands, literally.
$11 tip
For a nonexistent burger. A guy with way too much time on his hands ordered a burger from McDonald’s, then removed everything from the list of ingredients. His DoorDasher came through: “You’re gonna get an empty box. You good with that?”
40,000 dings
From a digital doorbell to alert ecologists fish are waiting to pass through a canal lock in the Netherlands. More than 1.2 million people have tuned in to the canal livestream to see whether any fish are waiting. If they are, altruistic streamers are invited to ring the doorbell for a fish who can’t (because, you know, no hands).
Deepfake p*rn survivor fights back
In 2020, Breeze Liu found a nude video of herself — recorded without her knowledge — on P*rnhub. That video then spiraled into hundreds of deepfakes created of her. Seeking help to take them down, she found little to none. Now, she’s taking matters into her own hands.
Where’s Adam, though? OpenAI’s new humanoid robot, Eve, has claws for hands, rolls around on wheels and features an LED face like a Tamagotchi. It also does a heck of a job in factory work. Watch it here.