Twelve bizarre tech tales from each month of 2024

The tech world in 2024 was anything but dull. Looking back, industry twists and turns seem to have kept both Silicon Valley insiders and tech enthusiasts on their toes.

In 2024, Cybernews journalists published over 4,000 articles. I’ve hand-picked 12 of them – one for each month of the year – to illustrate just how wild the industry has been.

January: a smart mirror that promises a soul-cleansing experience

The AI (of course) mirror by Baracoda can supposedly manage stress, soothe anxiety, and reduce insomnia. It can provide its user with recommendations based on their moods. For example, if one is having a bad day, the mirror might encourage them to practice mindfulness.

February: the glassholes with Apple Vision Pro

While the costly Apple Vision Pro was launched in January, the buzz around a $3,500 device continued well into February. Social media was flooded with videos (some fake, naturally) of people using the device in public and endangering others. Can you drive wearing the device? What about taking a train?

It’s been nearly a year since the launch and we can say for sure that the trend of wearing them in public hasn’t become a long-term shift in behavior. At least for now, as Apple Vision Pro is affordable only for a few.

Several comments suggest that people wearing the Apple Vision Pro in public may do so for attention or bragging rights. The novelty factor and the desire to showcase the latest technology can be found in week one of the release, but there’s still time to find out whether this trend is a fad or a long-term shift in behavior.

March: scam slavery

It is natural to get mad at someone who scammed you out of hundreds of dollars. Or worse, they took your money and your data. However, in quite some cases, it turns out that the fraudster behind your misfortune is a victim themselves. Some people are reportedly enslaved in romance scam factories where they even have a quota to meet. If they fail, they are being electrocuted or otherwise tortured by the kingpins.

April: hello, Moscow

This April, we conducted a curious experiment where we installed the top 100 apps on a factory-reset iPhone SE. We found that the iPhone doesn’t go to sleep when you do – it buzzes with activity, accesses your data and sensors beaming back and forth mostly with Apple, but sometimes also reaches out to servers in Russia.

May: mute Scarlett

There’s been much drama around OpenAI in 2024, but nothing will probably top the one with Scarlett Johansson’s voice. OpenAI had to pause one of its voices after netizens noticed it sounded much like ScarJo.

OpenAI denied that the voice was modeled on the famous actor. However, when GPT-4o was announced, Sam Altman shared a post on X that simply said, “Her.” ScarJo voices the operating system in the movie Her, in which the protagonist (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with a chatbot.

June: “Balenciaga” pope worried over AI

Remember the image showing Pope Francis wearing a white-colored Balenciaga puffer coat with a cross around his neck making rounds last year? While it was AI-generated, many fell for it. With AI models only getting more advanced, the problem is getting bigger, too. Even the Pope himself addressed the AI problem during the G7 summit.

“We would condemn humanity to a future without hope if we took away people’s ability to make decisions about themselves and their lives by dooming them to depend on the choices of machines,” said the pope.

July: RabbitR1’s weakness

The RabbitR1 device has also received a fair share of spotlight. Our in-house investigations team took it for a spin and determined that it could be hacked using an old vulnerability. So, if you are considering a second-hand RabbitR1, first read this.

August: words can hurt more than sticks and stones

The internet is buzzing with crazy narratives and conspiracy theories. Did you know that some nonsense, like “Taylor Swift is a government asset put there to influence young voters,” spreads like wildfire not because people actually find it believable but because there’s someone behind it? We look into the so-called narrative attacks, and attempt to explain how operators behind conspiracies rely on technology to influence people and their decisions.

September: exploding pagers

The pager attack on Hezbollah undoubtedly took serious muscle to execute. Also, it was a highly targeted attack. However, considering that even an analog device can be turned into a lethal weapon, don’t you feel at least a little bit worried about living in a fortress made of technology? Not only do outages like Crowdsrtike bring our daily operations to a halt, but our pocket devices can be turned into bombs?

October: Internet Archive hacking drama

Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, was hit by a massive data breach - its website was defaced, and tens of millions of its users' details were exposed. It was also continuously plowed with one DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack after another. Why did hackers target the Internet Archive’s spin-off, the Wayback Machine, which has been preserving hundreds of billions of web pages? We tried explaining it the best we could. At least for as long as it was possible to follow hacktivists’ logic.

November: pink tax

It's not only pink razors that cost more than they should. Apparently, many colored devices will also cost you more. Originally, a pink tax refers to the pricing tendency that occurs when products marketed for women are more expensive than those created for men.

However, some companies apparently market electronic devices in gendered colors. Black or pink? Check the price tag next time before you decide.

December: UFO craze

Look up in the sky. Is it a drone? Or is it a UAP? Or some TikTok prankster just fueling the fire online? After a series of vague announcements, we looked into the recent obsession with UAP. And while looking, we remembered a famous radio play by Orson Welles. Broadcasted in 1938, the fictional story about Martians invading New Jersey caused havoc for months. We ask, what are the similarities between the delirium back then and in 2024?