Turns out your phone can be quite the lifesaver.

A 43-year old man from Australia narrowly missed being hit by an arrow, after the object ended up being lodged in his phone on Wednesday.

SEE ALSO: Feel like your phone’s spying on you? You’re not alone

Police said the incident began when the man drove to his home in Nimbin, in the northern part of the state of New South Wales. 

Once the resident exited his car, he noticed another man, who was known to him, standing outside his property armed with a bow and arrow.

The man held his phone up to snap a photo of the armed man, who is alleged to have fired an arrow at the resident, which ended up piercing his phone.

While the arrow also hit the resident in the chin, it only left a small laceration which required no medical treatment. As you can see from the photos, it was definitely a close call.

Police later arrested a 39-year-old man at the scene, where he has since been charged with assault and damage offences. He is due to face court in April.

Now, we’re off to cherish our own phones.

Elaine Herzberg was walking her bicycle across a Tempe, Arizona street when a Volvo XC90 hit her, almost a year ago on March 18, 2018. She died at the hospital. 

The car that hit her was an Uber, but this one was self-driving. The driver and sole occupant in the car was a “safety operator” sitting behind the wheel, not controlling the vehicle.  

The fatal crash had immediate ramifications for Uber’s self-driving car program and the industry. Only recently did Uber restart its testing (and only in Pittsburgh). Now 12 months later, we’re seeing that the public perception of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is still heavily affected by that deadly crash. 

An American Automobile Association (AAA) survey of more than 1,000 American adults released this week shows that 71 percent of respondents are afraid of to ride in a self-driving car. That’s as high as fear levels from April 2018 after the Tempe fatality. Before the incident, fear of AVs was at 63 percent. 

In this year’s survey, only 19 percent of respondents said they were comfortable using the robo-cars to transport their children or loved ones. When it comes to seeing these cars as safe experiences, the trust isn’t there.

SEE ALSO: Even Apple’s self-driving car safety report is super secretive

Part of that safety perception is understanding the technology that makes a computer-controlled car work. Yakov Shaharabani, CEO of Israeli far infrared sensor company AdaSky, said in a phone call last week that thermal sensing “is the missing technology for fully self-driving cars.” He considers the current sensors, like light-measuring LiDAR, cameras, and radar a solid start but doesn’t fill in the gaps necessary for higher levels of autonomy.

For him, trust will come when the public can see and understand that the sensors and computers can see humans and living things — no matter what. That’s where his sensors come in, complementing autonomous systems with better visuals and sensing during snow, dust, bright light, darkness, dense urban areas, and more. Humans and animals, like deer, with their body temperatures contrasting with the surroundings are easier to detect and from a long distance. 

A common tool from the defense industry, Shaharabani considers it an easy switch to the automotive industry. He said while reconstructing the Uber fatality situation his sensor detected and classified the pedestrian as a walking human six seconds before she was in front of the car.

He thinks adding another type of sensing to autonomous vehicles “will save more lives.”

Even if public perception is hurting, companies from tech startups to traditional car makers are investing in autonomous tech. A Leasing Options survey and industry review found that companies have put in about $100 billion into developing driverless cars over the years. 

So, yes, self-driving cars are still coming. But it’s at a different pace after Tempe, which has become something of a shorthand for the fatal event. An Uber spokesperson reflected on the past year and how its self-driving program made a hard reset and a renewed focus on safety. Uber no longer tests its vehicles in Arizona. 

Once it did resume self-driving on public roads in Pittsburgh nine months after Tempe, it implemented a rigorous testing threshold of 70 tests and simulated scenarios. Everything from before Tempe was essentially overhauled, and now two operators are in every vehicle. Cell phones are kept away. (The operator in the Tempe crash was streaming TV shows on her phone while behind the wheel, according to police reports.)

Court documents from the Uber-Waymo trade secrets trial were unsealed last week and analyzed by TechCrunch. They show the self-driving program was spending $20 million a month and was overly ambitious with plans to have 75,000 self-driving cars by May 2019 and offer a self-driving taxi service in 13 cities by 2022. Those numbers are a far cry from where the program is today.

Despite the deadly speed bump, companies like Google’s Waymo still launched a self-driving taxi service in the Phoenix— even if it was a low-key launch and far from driverless, it still arrived in the same year and region as the worst thing that could happen to the industry happened.

This week The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Michigan included its first autonomous vehicle in an exhibit: a pre-production Chevy Bolt that General Motor’s Cruise used as its self-driving test car. Cruise has yet to move beyond road testing mostly in the San Francisco area, but it claims it will offer a self-driving taxi service by the end of this year. 

Autonomous vehicles are making history as it’s happening.

Google has made a curious addition to its Chrome browser. 

With the release of Chrome 73, the browser has added the pro-privacy DuckDuckGo to its suite of default search engines, alongside Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

SEE ALSO: Stop what you’re doing and update Google Chrome

As per TechCrunch, the addition was spotted in the changes for Chrome, and the option will be available in 60 markets around the globe. 

Launched in 2008, DuckDuckGo has been lauded for its privacy focus, hitting 30 million daily searches last October. The search engine doesn’t track users, nor does it store their personal information.

“We’re glad that Google has finally recognized the importance of offering consumers a private search option in Chrome,” DuckDuckGo wrote in a tweet.

Another privacy-first search engine, Qwant, was added as a default option, but only in the French market.

To change your search engine preferences, you just need to open Settings on Chrome, and select DuckDuckGo next to the “Search engine used in the address bar” option.

Yes, we know, you could’ve manually added DuckDuckGo as a search engine in Chrome already, but as tech giants like Google and Microsoft know well, defaults help dominate market share, allowing them to decide what you see on the internet.

Google has been under the spotlight for its search engine dominance in recent years, of which it retains 90 percent of market share.

The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story isn’t so much a Ponzi scheme documentary as it is a bitter obituary for a now-deceased conman, written by the people who hated him most.

Viewers unfamiliar with the criminal enterprises of fraudster Lou Pearlman, the blimp salesman turned entertainment tycoon behind music acts like the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, are in for a wild ride. 

Unfortunately, dedicated fans of the con artist documentary genre will struggle to find lasting value in its narrative, largely because The Boy Band Con‘s well-researched core is undercut by its unrestrained hatred for the star subject.

SEE ALSO: Olivia Wilde’s ‘Booksmart’ is destined to become a teen comedy classic

The documentary’s creators would like you to believe they have presented an even-keeled, factual portrait of the “real” Lou Pearlman — and they do that, but only up to a point.

The film begins by chronicling the creation of Pearlman’s boy band empire, examining the formation of Backstreet and then *NSYNC. A half hour into the film, the sparkly MTV clips give way to tense courtroom discussion as the severely underpaid groups go after Pearlman for allegedly stealing their deserved fortunes. 

For those who remember the original cases’ coverage, it is a factual retelling. Having been signed into rigid contracts that took advantage of their naiveté and ambition, the boy bands turn to the goodwill of the justice system to escape the legal shackles Pearlman’s lawyers placed them in. They triumph and move on to bigger and better things, evidently still angry, but sans Pearlman. 

In an attempt to answer the obvious question — “Why was this guy such a jerk to JT and his friends?” — The Boy Band Con pivots to examine Pearlman as a young boy, leaving the most readily verifiable part of the film’s narrative behind. 

Visiting his hometown of Queens, New York, the documentarians interview Pearlman’s childhood friends who discuss his love for aviation as well as propensity for fibbing. It is a personal, subjective, but seemingly well-intentioned look at the man behind the headlines. Then, things takes a sharp, tabloid-like turn. 

Each claim is somehow splashier, but briefer than the last. 

In a torrent of ill-paced, poorly explained, and really colorful interviews, the project’s large cast unleashes a firestorm of allegations against Pearlman, seemingly out of nowhere and with little exploration beyond their bullet point horrors.

Performers from Pearlman’s other groups, including C-Note, LFO, O-Town, and Innosense, offer up a wide array of accusations, ranging from pedophilia to death threats.

Pearlman’s childhood friends similarly turn on him, detailing stories of betrayed trust and lost connections as well as various incidents of low-level fraud.

Suddenly, an investigator from Orlando is added into the mix to describe an alleged Pearlman scam involving a modeling agency (as well as the bribing of a public official) that never got prosecuted.

Each claim is somehow splashier, but briefer than the last. That’s not to say some or all of them cannot be true. Rather, the various narratives appear so abruptly and in such a confusing order, it is difficult to follow how they connect, let alone assess their validity. Simply put, it is a very damning, very angry mess.

Notably, the film does provide a counterpoint through Aaron Carter, another former client of Pearlman. Carter serves as a steadfast denier of many of the claims against Pearlman, but he is also presented as the most emotional of the interview subjects, at one point screaming at the camera before bursting into tears and taking off his microphone. 

In a documentary with so many calm interviewees eager or at least willing to detail Pearlman’s misdeeds, the solitary Carter isn’t silenced, but his credibility appears to have been sandbagged — either through editing or his own profound feelings about Pearlman.

The narrative leapfrogs between these various allegations and a handful of Carter’s retorts before finally crescendoing with the reveal of the meat of this scam story: Pearlman’s historically successful Ponzi scheme, a complicated web of fraud that left victims over $300 million in debt and resulted in Pearlman’s incarceration. He would later die from cardiac arrest in federal custody at the age of 62.

Simply put, it is a very damning, very angry mess.

It is a confusing structure to an already confusing story. The scheme’s big reveal is weighed down by the dozen reveals that come before it and as a result its credibility and importance are substantially devalued. 

The obvious solution here would seemingly be to cut out this confusing grab bag of allegations and focus primarily on Pearlman’s Ponzi scheme — but unfortunately for The Boy Band Con‘s creators, that scheme wasn’t particularly interesting and likely didn’t merit a documentary. 

Sure, the scheme’s proximity to stars like Justin Timberlake and Nick Carter makes it of note, but lousy contracts, false promises, and shifty accounting aren’t new infractions and the way Pearlman carried the scheme out wasn’t novel or clever. As a result, the flood of unsubstantiated and unexplored claims in that bizarre montage are necessary for the film to be interesting enough and long enough to be worth making.

The next obvious solution to this storytelling conundrum? Well, possibly to not make the film at all. But for its creators and cast, that doesn’t seem to have ever been an option. 

In an interview with Deadline, former *NSYNC member Lance Bass, who also serves as a producer on the film, explained why they waited until after Pearlman’s death to tackle the project.

“I never really wanted to touch it until he was just out of the way,” Bass says. “I just didn’t want to deal with him.”

It’s a fair perspective, but explains exactly why the film doesn’t quite work. Not wanting to “deal with” Pearlman because of anger, frustration, or sheer hatred, rendered The Boy Band Con‘s creators incapable of assessing their subject in a meaningful way. Instead, they throw everything they’ve got at him in a rage-filled panic that’s not hard to sympathize with, but is nearly impossible follow, let alone enjoy.

It’s not difficult to say whether the hatred against Pearlman is justified — it is. He took advantage of some of America’s most beloved boys next door, irreversibly damaged the lives of dozens of his investors, and quite possibly may have done worse. But, in an increasingly competitive genre, a really bad guy at the center of your scam documentary isn’t enough to make it stand out.