San Francisco residents are being awakened throughout the night by Waymo self-driving cars hooting at each other in a parking lot. This story is among the articles, videos, podcasts and more that caught the TechCentral editorial team’s eye over the past 24 hours.
- CrowdStrike accepts award for ‘most epic fail’ after global IT outage: Just a few weeks after its software update triggered a global IT meltdown, CrowdStrike isn’t shying away from the spotlight. In fact, the company’s president, Michael Sentonas, even took the stage at the Pwnie Awards to accept the award for Most Epic Fail. Read more on TechCrunch. TS
- Score, the dating app for people with good to excellent credit, quietly shuts down: This reminds me of an episode of Black Mirror. This app was apparently made to gather data and was supposed to shut down in February but will now shut down in early August. Read more on TechCrunch. TS
- Self-driving Waymo cars keep SF residents awake all night by honking at each other: San Francisco’s South of Market residents in the US are being awakened throughout the night by Waymo self-driving cars hooting at each other in a parking lot. No one is inside the cars and they appear to be automatically reacting to each other’s presence. There’s a video showing the fiasco as well. More on Ars Technica. TS
- Hohm Energy in financial distress months after $8-million raise: We hope this isn’t the start of a trend. South African solar company Hohm Energy has entered business rescue due to cash flow issues, just months after raising US$8-million, according to TechCabal. Rapid growth expectations and poor governance reportedly contributed to financial distress. Read more on TechCabal. DM
- I used ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode. It’s fun, and just a bit creepy: Wired’s Reece Rogers has been playing around with ChatGPT’s upcoming Advanced Voice Mode. It’s a fun, albeit imperfect, new feature that allows users to engage in lively, voice-based interactions. It’s capable of quick language switching, vocal impressions and even dynamic conversations. Paying ChatGPT users should get access in the South African spring. Read more on Wired (soft paywall). DM
- Europe ramps up its battle with Elon Musk: Per the Financial Times, a public dispute between Elon Musk and the EU has sharpened concerns in Europe about its ability to wield power over the sprawling social media platform X at a time when disinformation and deepfakes have helped to fuel political discord and an outbreak of UK rioting. It’s going to be fascinating to see how this plays out. Read the full article on the FT website (hard paywall, sorry). DM
- White House wants to make cancelling subscriptions as easy as signing up: “Try it now”, “begin your free trial” and other such buttons take up a large proportion of the space on your screen when you are contemplating signing up for a new service. The “unsubscribe” button, on the other hand, seems to be more of a recluse, found at the bottom of some obscure page after following a chain of not-so-clear links – and its usually greyed out, too. Well, US officials have had enough and are now legislating how service cancellation options should be presented to consumers. Read more on Techspot. NN
- More schools banning students from using smartphones in class: It turns out teachers are just as annoyed by students using cellphones in their classrooms as parents are when children use the devices at the dinner table. In both cases the currency being battled over is attention and learning cannot take place without it. Read more on 9to5Mac. NN
Top stories on TechCentral in the past 24 hours
- South African-founded Syspro sold, Phil Duff to retire
- More can be done to support MVNOs in South Africa
- China drives African lithium surge
- China to build vast solar farm in Botswana
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