Millions of cars carry a Southern California dealer alarm with a security flaw

Most of the 2.2 million affected cars were sold at Southern California dealerships, but resale carried several hundred thousand of them everywhere else. Two minutes tells you whether yours is one.

The map your robot vacuum made of your house, the camera reading your license plate, and a deepfake takedown that costs nothing

Also in this issue: the Odyssey streaming scams, the AI habits that actually pay off, something new on Fridays, and how to make your phone stop ringing for robocalls.

You just got scammed. What now?

The hours lost to embarrassment are what turn a bad afternoon into a drained account. Here is the order to work in, and what is actually recoverable.

Google wants a video of your face. Skip it for now.

Google's new selfie sign-in is optional, stored on Google's servers, and easier to turn on than to undo. Five minutes on your recovery settings does more for you.

Make your phone stop ringing for robocalls

Your phone can send robocalls straight to voicemail, or make them say who they are first. Here is the five-minute setup on iPhone, Android, and Samsung.

What a Flock camera actually does

It photographs every car that passes, including yours. The argument your city council is having is about who gets to search the record.

Also this week: rival app stores, Siri's public beta, and rising phone prices

Four tech stories from this week that matter to everyday people, each in a sentence or two, with a link to whoever reported it well.

The Odyssey hit theaters Friday. The scams were ready by Monday.

Scam sites and a fake movie file appeared within hours of release. Two rules protect you, and neither needs technical skill.

AI tips for people who don't want to get left behind

The habits that make AI genuinely useful, written for regular people, not AI people. What to set up, what to watch out for, and why it works.

How to get a deepfake of you taken down

The full platform-by-platform companion to our deepfake explainer: where the real removal paths are, what each report form actually covers, and what to save before you file anything.

The sketchy hospital letter that turned out to be real, a deepfake you can't report, and the Windows bug eating your drive

Also in this issue: what data brokers actually sell, the password habit worth one evening, and a five-minute trick for copying text out of a photo.

Shark fixed the vacuum flaw. Here's what yours knows about you.

A researcher pulled a live camera feed, a floor plan, and a Wi-Fi password off a Shark robot vacuum he didn't own. Shark hasn't fixed it. Here's what every robot vacuum collects, and what you can do about it.