📸 80K cameras track your car

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Happy Wednesday, {{first_name | friend}}. Somewhere between the Walkman era and your last podcast binge, earbuds became tiny miracle machines, with one very gross enemy. Earwax. Yep, your loyal little sound beans are in there fighting a sticky battle every time you hit play.

So, engineers added a microscopic shield, a membrane so thin sound waves pass right through it, while the grossness of wax, sweat and grime get stopped cold.

👂 What’s that earwax-blocking membrane in premium earbuds made of? A) The same material as a Gore-Tex rain jacket, B) A thin layer of real beeswax, C) Recycled silicone or D) Pressed paper. Keep reading, the answer’s waiting to hear if you’re right at the end.

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⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 3 minutes

On my way to work, I pass six Flock cameras. And every one of them knows my car better than half my neighbors do.

Here’s the thing. Somewhere between your house and the grocery store this morning, a camera photographed your car. It logged your plate, the time, your make, your model and the exact spot you passed. You didn’t see it. You never agreed to it. And it dropped a fresh dot on a map of everywhere you’ve been.

That camera almost certainly belongs to a company called Flock. What Flock has built should stop you cold.

Flock makes those small license plate readers bolted to poles in neighborhoods, business parks and parking lots. They snap every car that rolls past. The company runs roughly 80,000 cameras across 5,000 communities in 49 states, scanning more than 20 billion vehicles a month.

It started as an anti-car-theft tool. Reasonable enough. But the cameras don’t sit only with police. HOAs run them. Malls run them. Retailers run them. All that data pools into one searchable system.

One city’s cameras were quietly switched to “nationwide” sharing, opening the door to 600,000 searches by 250-plus agencies that never signed a single agreement. In another city, out-of-state agencies queried the database 1.6 million times in seven months. Your daily drive, searchable by strangers with a badge far away. No warrant required.

The poles were the start. Flock’s newest product is a drone called the Alpha. It reads a plate from 2,000 feet up, hits 60 mph and arrives in 85 seconds. Often before any officer.

A police lieutenant described it like this: An operator watches a plate-reader alert pop, taps a screen and a drone launches from the same software. It follows the vehicle in real time. Flock sells these to private companies coast to coast, hovering over malls and warehouses.

The cameras record where you’ve been. The drone watches where you’re going. Together they create something this country has never seen: an automatic, always-on record of how a free person moves through their own town.

You can’t opt out of a pole camera. You’re not powerless, though. If your HOA or city is installing these, show up. Demand it in writing: a strict data-retention limit and zero outside sharing.

Go to https://maps.deflock.org/.

I tested this myself. Type in your address. You’ll be surprised how many devices are already watching your neighborhood.

They say a camera adds 10 pounds. With plate readers on every pole and a drone overhead, I must be under some seriously heavy surveillance.

📩 Send this to someone who thinks their daily drive is nobody’s business but their own.

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Don’t let a “boring” email turn into an exciting afternoon at the identity theft office. Hackers are using a Google Drive loophole to send Gmail alerts that look like a standard “verify your access” request. One click gives a stranger total control over your photos, docs and recovery info.

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🏡 Backyard brain farm: Nvidia, Span and homebuilder PulteGroup want to bolt a mini AI data center to your new house. It’s called XFRA, about the size of an HVAC unit, packing 16 RTX PRO 6000 GPUs and 3 TB of RAM. One prototype’s live, with 100 Southwest houses planned for fall 2026. They tap your home’s unused grid power. But that viral promise of a “$1,000 a month” check for homeowners? Total myth. You pay Span around $150 monthly for cheaper power and Wi-Fi. FYI, read the fine print before your lawn starts crunching numbers.

The bill thickens: Looks like your monthly streaming bill might get a small ankle bite. DirecTV is hiking some plans June 25 by as much as 22%, with MySports going from $69 to $74 a month. Starz is raising its monthly price from $10.99 to $11.99, and AMC+ bumped $9.99 to $10.99, both starting June 8. That hits you if you subscribe directly or tack them onto Hulu like a little entertainment barnacle. The average ad-free streaming bundle was $62 in 2021. Now it’s $78, up 26%, before sports and premium tiers. 

🔏 The fake complexity trap: Think you’re safe because you swapped the letter “a” for an “@” symbol in your password? You aren’t. Cybercriminals use AI-powered tools that guess those variations in a fraction of a second. Stop playing defense with bad habits. I use NordPass to generate random passwords hackers can’t crack. Grab my exclusive deal for just $1.43 a month.*

Your AI coworker: Microsoft stuffed an autonomous office worker inside the apps your boss makes you use. At Build 2026, CEO Satya Nadella announced Agent Mode for Office 365 Copilot, rolling out this month across Word, Excel, Teams and Outlook. These agents can take multistep tasks and run with them while you keep working. This isn’t some separate AI toy. It’s parked directly where America’s spreadsheets go to age. Your inbox is about to get more interesting than “sharing for visibility. Thx.”  

🍔 Uber Eats 101: This woman has saint-level patience. She posted a video online teaching her 102-year-old grandfather George and 89-year-old grandmother how to order Uber Eats on a computer. Grandma asks, “How do I get into this?” Francesca explains the browser. Grandma writes it down while Grandpa calmly says he can’t see the link. Nearly 26 million views and almost 20,000 comments. I love it. Watch the video here.

Apple quietly bumped trade-in values on its model devices by $50. The catch? Android trade-in values dropped. Plus, Las Vegas celebrity magician Ben Seidman reveals how easily your tech can be swiped.

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⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Gmail can send emails while you sleep. On desktop, write your message, click the arrow next to Send and select Schedule send. On mobile, after composing, tap the three dots at the top right and hit Schedule send. Choose the date and time. No more setting an alarm to send one message.

Stop calls taking over your iPhone: A full-screen call alert is annoying when you’re in the middle of something. Fix it at Settings > Apps > Phone > Incoming Calls, then switch “Full Screen” to “Banner.” Next time a call comes in, it’ll show as a small alert at the top. Swipe up to ignore it and keep moving.

🤳🏻 Facebook knows how long you lurk: Want the uncomfortable truth? Open the app and go to Settings & privacy > Time management to see your daytime, nighttime and busiest scrolling days. If the numbers look scary, tap Daily limit at the bottom and pick two hours or less. Facebook will nudge you to leave. Imagine that.

Give Windows better volume controls: Windows 11 can adjust sound by app, but it hides the good stuff in Settings. EarTrumpet is a free tool that puts app volume sliders right in your task bar. Music, browsers, system sounds, all one click away. After installing, check the system tray in the bottom right. Its icon looks like a regular speaker.

🤖 Chatbots need the full story: A one-line question gets you a one-size-fits-none answer. Instead of “How do I unblock a slow drain?” try: “I’m new to DIY. Show me how to fix a slow drain step by step, like I’m 12.” Same problem, way better answer. Robots aren’t mind readers. Yet. Want more AI tips? Sign up for my free weekly Splash of AI newsletter every Thursday.

Your smartwatch tells you how many steps you skipped. Your ring wants to tell you if your cardiovascular system is being weird at 3 a.m. 

The new Oura Ring 5 launches tomorrow with sleep-based blood pressure pattern detection, nighttime breathing disturbance tracking and AI health coaching. It’s 40% slimmer, priced at $399.

This tiny finger narc studies you while you drool on a pillow, dreaming about winning arguments from 2017. 

Tracking your ticker while you sleep? Guess that’s what they call putting the heart before the course.

🔜 Tomorrow: That tiny beep at the register is doing more than saving you time. Tap-to-pay can hide your real card number from thieves, while swiping is the old-school risk criminals love. I’ll explain why the fastest way to pay is also the safest.

Coming up in tomorrow’s trivia, the tiny altitude difference that turned sky Wi‑Fi from “please wait forever” into “sure, stream the movie.”

☔️ The answer: A) The same material as a Gore-Tex rain jacket. That tiny earbud shield is usually made from ePTFE (expanded polytetrafluoroethylene), the same material family behind Gore-Tex. The membrane is packed with pores measured in microns, big enough for sound to slip through, way too small for wax or water. 

It’s hydrophobic (shrugs off sweat) and oleophobic (repels oily wax), and it loses less than a single decibel of sound doing it. One little sheet, years of protection. That’s one sticky situation. 

Speaking of wax, an old man tells his doctor he can barely hear out of one ear. The doctor asks, “Which ear is it?” The old man says, “2022.”

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