Guru's Tech Bytes — Episode 139

Good morning, it's Saturday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode one hundred thirty nine. And boy, do we got a weird one for you today. I mean, we got everything from search engines to, uh, felony charges, which is, you know, a real party mix. Heh. Hhh, okay, that's something. So grab your coffee, maybe a donut, and let's just dive right into the deep end, because this stuff is wilder than my cousin's conspiracy theories about the toaster. First up, Kagi. That's the search engine that actually respects you, I guess. They added a setting to just, poof, remove all those paywalled links from your results. You know, the ones where you click and it's like, "Sorry, you hit your free article limit." Gone. Just like that. It's like having a bouncer for the internet. I love it. It's a small thing, but it's huge. No more getting teased by a headline and then slammed with a subscription pop-up. That's progress, plain and simple. Second, and this one's a doozy. There's a story about a citizen who got hit with felony charges for deleting their phone data at the US Border. Felony. For clearing your own phone. I mean, I clear my phone data every time I drop it in the toilet, which is, uh, more often than I'd like to admit. But the point is, they're saying it's obstruction of justice. That's a heavy hammer for a simple swipe and delete. It's a scary precedent, folks. Third, we got something called Felony Bench. And no, it's not a piece of furniture for criminals. It's a website, I think. It's a database, a tool that tracks judges and their sentencing, specifically for felonies. It's like a scorecard for the courtroom. You can see which judges are handing out the hard time and which ones are more lenient. It's transparency, man. It's like Yelp, but for the justice system. You know, before you get sentenced, you can check the reviews. Wild stuff. And finally, this one is just pure chaos. A guy accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases. On accident. He just left a server open, and boom, all these calls, all these numbers, just sitting there for anyone to grab. That's your daily byte. Have a great day. Until next time.