A bot's name in the participant list is not an introduction. Early in a case against Otter, a federal court declined to assume, under Washington law, that seeing the bot told one plaintiff he was being recorded, though it dismissed his claim on other grounds. Otter denies the core notice claims.

Bots also outstay meetings: one emailed a guest, by his account, hours of a firm's private talk afterward. In Ontario, by the hospital's own report, a former physician's bot joined its rounds and emailed a recipient list of 65 a link to seven patients' details.

• Ask for consent before the bot joins; don't just announce it.
• Someone objects? Switch it off for them.
• Stop the bot at the end; check who gets the summary.
• Unannounced bot? Ask for it to be removed.

One does not seat a stranger because he brought his own chair.

GTA 6's "physical" edition is a box with a download code in it, and no disc.

Sony's PlayStation terms already spell out what that buys: content "licensed on a non-exclusive and revocable basis," for "non-transferable" use, and product codes that, "unless otherwise stated," "may be used once only by the recipient."

The box is not the loss. It is the deal you already had, in a form you can hold.

A loyalty point is a currency whose issuer sets the exchange rate, and 2026 keeps proving it: Hyatt's May 20 award-chart overhaul raised the top-category ceiling from 45,000 to 75,000 points, and The Points Guy cut its Hyatt valuation from 1.65 to 1.55 cents in June (it has since recovered to 1.6). The airlines are further gone: Delta, United, and American all scrapped published charts, and five airline currencies dropped in TPG's August table alone.

The defense:

• Earn transferable bank points, not airline miles; on TPG's August numbers every US bank currency (1.75 and up) beats every airline mile (1.55 tops).
• Transfer to an airline only at the moment you book.
• Do not hoard; balances only reprice against you.
• Book when schedules open, 330 to 361 days out; AwardFares finds Delta's dynamic prices often lowest right at window open.

Spend it before the next memo.

Europe's AI transparency rules arrived on schedule on August 2, and almost nothing a normal person would notice arrived with them.

• Machine-readable marking gets a grace period to December 2, 2026 for generative products already on the market.
• Checking a file across providers is a voluntary promise dated February 2, 2027.
• Google made Gemini's visible watermark optional on August 14, with no EU country among the places where switching it off needs a paid Ultra plan. No breach: the visible label is the publisher's duty, never the tool's, and the invisible SynthID mark stays on every file, Google says.
• The Commission's published list of national enforcers names 8 of 27 and was last updated in September 2025.

You can complain about the big chatbots straight to the AI Office, in any EU language.

Kelly Services named Ford, Commonwealth Bank, and IBM as reversing AI layoffs. Only Commonwealth Bank holds up at source.

• Commonwealth Bank cut 45 roles for a voice bot in 2025, then offered them back a month later, saying it had misjudged them. The union counts around 800 CBA roles cut in the year to July 2026.
• Ford hired roughly 300 veteran engineers after over-trusting quality automation. No source I found says they were cut for AI.
• IBM cut about 1 percent of staff in 2025 for what Axios reports was "business demand." Nothing I found links it to its hiring plan.

Before August 11, Fast Company, CNBC, and Kelly ran the 32 percent without Robert Half's restriction: managers who had already cut for AI.

Commonwealth Bank's reversal followed workers counting the calls and a union at a tribunal, not the software failing. Built from published documents. I contacted nobody.