🌠 100 shooting stars an hour. Tonight.

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📬 Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here. Tomorrow: The good news is your phone isn’t secretly recording every word. Bad news: It doesn’t need to. I’ll break down the real spying and the privacy fixes worth doing.

Happy Wednesday, friend. Look down at your keyboard. Right now. Around 100 keys are staring back at you. They aren’t equal. We’ve got numbers for this. A software engineer named Daniel Stenberg logged every single keystroke he made for an entire year. The grand total: 6.76 million key presses.

⌨️ Which one took the crown as the most-pressed key? A) The letter E, B) Enter, C) The space bar or D) Backspace? Make your guess, no peeking. The answer is at the bottom. 

📋 A killer’s shopping list: When police searched the man’s car after he assassinated a Minnesota lawmaker in her own home, they found a notebook listing 11 people-search sites. The kind that sell your address for a couple of bucks. Type your name in. There you are. Incogni forces those sites to delete you and keeps checking because deleted data creeps back. Get 60% off now.* — Kim

🤯 WOW! Tonight, Earth slams into a comet’s dust trail, and grains of sand hit our sky at 133,200 mph, burning at 3,000 degrees, 60 miles over your lawn chair. Up to 100 shooting stars an hour, visible from every state. 

The Short Version: Get away from porch lights after 11 tonight, give your eyes 20 minutes, look up (no telescope, no ticket) and prop your phone for a long-exposure shot. Steps below.

📖 Read time: 2 minutes

When you’re married to a science nerd, date night is two lawn chairs at 11 p.m. and a man whispering, “Wait for it” at the sky. Tonight, there’s a show playing over all 50 states. No tickets required, no login, no password sharing crackdown. 

Every August, Earth plows through the dust trail of comet Swift-Tuttle, a 16-mile-wide mountain of ice that swings by every 133 years. The “shooting stars” hit our atmosphere at 133,200 mph and burn up 60 miles overhead at 3,000 degrees. 

The new moon means zero lunar light washing out the faint projectiles. Sky watchers wait years for this lineup. That’s why I was excited to tell you.

Prop the phone against something steady (a tripod, a coffee mug, the cooler) aiming at open sky. Set a three-second timer, so your tap doesn’t shake the shot. Turn on airplane mode, so a call doesn’t ruin the exposure. Catch even one streak, and you’ve got tomorrow’s group chat trophy.

Why does a shooting star taste better than a comet? It’s a little meteor.

🎯 Send this to someone who has a lawn chair, a kid or both.

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This preteen is getting the best daughter award. She’s going viral for building an AI receptionist. It’s already helping three countries. What were you doing at 12 years old?

Listen before everyone else is talking about it. 👇

▶️ Forget lemonade stands. This kid built an AI. →

🕹️ Runways need gamers: I suddenly feel bad for every parent who confiscated an Xbox. The FAA reportedly recruited more than 2,000 competitive gamers to help fill its air traffic controller shortage, betting their spatial awareness, multitasking and quick decisions can transfer from the screens to the skies. The pay? Eventually six figures without needing a traditional four-year degree. One concern, though. Actual passengers don’t respawn, and recruits still need serious FAA screening and training.

✍️ Invisible ink, AI edition: Thought that AI-written novel could pass as all yours? Anthropic is now watermarking the text Claude generates. It’s an invisible signature baked into the words themselves that survives copy-paste and “may persist through some editing.” Every new Claude model gets it automatically, thanks to Europe’s new AI transparency rules, and Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI signed the same pledge. So that “heartfelt” toast your nephew gave at the wedding? It might come with a receipt.

🏡 The nightmare you don’t see coming: Title theft sounds like one of those “it won’t happen to me” scams until it does. Thieves forge a deed, transfer your house on paper, and suddenly, you’re fighting for your own property. I use Home Title Lock because it monitors your title around the clock and flags suspicious activity before it becomes a disaster. Grab a free Title History Report and a 14-day free trial.* 

Royal false alarm: Somebody at Radio Caroline accidentally told listeners King Charles III was dead, based on a bulletin nobody had verified. That’s already a rough shift. The staff then pulled the feed and left 16 full minutes of dead air while they figured out what they’d done. I don’t know about you, but I can feel that control room panic from here. Still not as bad as that false emergency missile alert that had everyone in Hawaii thinking they were going to die. Long live the King.

🐣 Never saw this coming: Couples told that biological children were impossible may have another shot because STAR, an AI vision system, can spot viable sperm human embryologists missed. It scans microfluidic samples from severely infertile men in minutes instead of forcing lab workers through hours at a microscope. Every parent thinks their kid is one in a million. These kids? One in 250 million, and it took an AI to find them. You could even call the research seminal.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: ChatGPT or Claude give you a garbage answer? Don’t waste five messages correcting it. Tap Edit beneath your original prompt, and rewrite it instead. The bad reply disappears from the conversation, so it won’t keep influencing what comes next. 

💧 I write this for you: Get my Splash of AI free newsletter every Thursday. I’ll show you how to stress-test a stock before you buy it, rehearse a speech before you bomb it, spot the tech quietly tracking you and understand where AI is taking over the kitchen next. Yours free. Sign up now at SplashOfAI.com, so it hits your inbox tomorrow morning.

📍 Save yourself the retyping: Going somewhere regularly? Google Maps can keep the address ready for next time. Search the place, tap Save and add it to Favorites. Later, tap the search field, and your favorite places appear right underneath. You can also make custom lists or stash vacation spots under Travel plans. Future-you has directions covered.

🚨 Galaxy owners, check this right away: Samsung’s latest security patch fixes 38 security issues across phones and tablets, and some could expose your data. You may get an automatic prompt, but I’d go see if it’s already waiting. Open Settings > Software update > Download and install. Let it run while the coffee brews.

👂 When did you last test your hearing? Hearing loss can sneak up on you from genetics, loud jobs or years of cranking the volume. If you have AirPods Pro 3, open Settings, tap your AirPods, then Take a Hearing Test > Get Started. It takes about five minutes in a quiet room. Worth checking before “huh?” becomes your catchphrase.

🧩 Browser extensions, explained: You’ve probably seen me recommend a few over the years. ICYDK, they’re little add-ons that can do things like force dark mode or block ads. Handy, yes. But install the wrong one, and you could give it access to everything you do online. I was recently interviewed and broke down exactly how to install them safely, remove them and which ones I’d use. Give it a read. 😏

Netflix found a new way to make LA traffic uncomfortable: put a guy in a house 30 feet above it.

To promote The Last House, a sci-fi horror movie about a family mysteriously sealed inside their home, Netflix bolted a furnished house facade onto a Sunset Boulevard billboard and stuck a real performer inside. He communicates with commuters via whiteboard beneath the tagline, “How long can you survive?”

It’s basically Black Mirror meets Airbnb with catastrophic zoning. Finally, an ad that understands nobody reads ads anymore. 

Check him out here. I heard he made $75,000 for sitting there for three days. Not a bad gig!

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🎓 What you learned today: The Perseid meteor shower is giving every state a free late-night light show, the FAA is recruiting gamers to help guide real planes, AI is helping fertility labs, and Netflix put a real person inside a billboard house. Not bad for one email. Tomorrow, think your phone is listening to your conversations? I’ll show you what’s really behind those “psychic” ads and the settings to change immediately.

⌨️ The answer: C) The space bar. In that yearlong study, the space bar racked up about 10% of ALL key presses, and in everyday writing, estimates run even higher. Makes sense. Roughly every fifth or sixth character you type is a space. I feel like I hit it a thousand times writing this newsletter.

Now for the slacker: Scroll Lock. It’s the least-used key in modern computing, a leftover from 1980s IBM keyboards that most software ignores. You won’t even see it on modern MacBooks. In Stenberg’s study, dozens of keys barely registered, and a handful were never touched at all.

But before you pity poor Scroll Lock, here’s its one party trick:

The space bar really is the hardest worker in tech. Everyone else is just spacing out. And Scroll Lock? That key needs to get a lock on life. (Yeah, I was on a roll right there!)

🔍 Your front door is one Google search away: Data brokers sell your address, phone number and family names to anyone willing to pay a couple of dollars. Incogni forces them to delete you and keeps monitoring so it stays gone. Go to PrivacyKim.com for 60% off.* 

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

🏆 THE KIM CHALLENGE: Forward this to ONE person who needs to hear it today. Pick the person who popped into your head while reading. You know who it is.

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, KEFEYA, Viproud, Netflix

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