🛑 Never swipe again

📬 Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here. Tomorrow: Your medical device is quietly reporting on you. Your insurer sees it. Sometimes a courtroom does. I’ll tell you what’s phoning home while you sleep.

Welcome to this terrific Thursday, {{first_name | friend}}. Airplane Wi-Fi used to be a scam with a seatbelt sign. You paid real money, got dial-up speeds at 35,000 feet, and prayed your email landed before you did.

It was old satellites, way 22,000 miles up, doing the world’s slowest game of fetch. Now airlines are switching to Starlink, and those satellites are mind-bendingly closer to your plane. 

📡 How high up are the Starlink satellites beaming internet to your flight? A) About 340 miles, B) About 6 miles, just above the clouds, C) The same 22,000 miles as the old satellites, only more of them, or D) They’re not using satellites at all, the signal’s bounced off cell towers. Keep reading, the answer is waiting for you at the end.

🙏🏻 Quick favor before we dive in. Gmail and Yahoo are like that friend who notices everything. If you never click my links, they assume we're not close anymore and shove me in spam with the extended warranty offers. One tap fixes it. Any link counts. Even this one. It tells your inbox, "We're good. Keep her coming." Deal? Deal.— Kim

⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

You tap your card at the coffee shop. Beep. Done in half a second. And a little voice in your head goes, “Wait, ahem, was that safe?”

Well, that tap is the safest way to pay by card in person. And the reason is wild.

Swipe the old magnetic stripe, and your card hands over your number. The real one. Every single time. That’s why crooks stick skimmers on gas pumps and ATMs. Skimmers are still one of the most common ways card numbers get stolen, and the stripe is their favorite target because it never changes.

Tapping works completely differently. When you tap, your card builds a one-time code on the spot. A scrambled string that works for that single purchase, then dies. A thief who grabs it gets garbage. It expired the second the sale ended.

Banks call it a dynamic cryptogram. You can call it a self-destructing number. Either way, your real 16 digits stay locked inside the chip and never travel across the room.

Here’s how to pay, best to worst.

One more thing. Tap has a small dollar limit at a lot of stores, so a lost card can’t ring up a fortune before you cancel it. The whole system was built to protect you, not the bank, for once. That’s why I keep a $100 bill in my phone’s case.

So next time a skimmer is lurking at the pump, go ahead and tap. As the thief slinks off with nothing, he can mutter the only words he’s got left: Hasta la Visa.

📩 Send this to someone who still swipes their card at every register because they’re convinced tapping isn’t safe. Use the share links below. I put them there for a reason.

(Starts at 1:06) A salvage crew is literally pulling the plug on modern internet history. They’re reeling in the ocean’s first transatlantic fiber-optic cable from 1988 to recycle it. The tech? Overboard.

Listen on Komando.com →

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⛽ Siphoned off your savings: Picture yourself at the pump, one hand on the nozzle, one eye on the guy buying three lottery tickets and a Slim Jim. Gas in, job done, drive off, right? Might want to check the machine before you go. Scammers may have stuck a tiny screw into the nozzle cradle, so the pump stays active after you leave. Then a stranger fills up on your card like you sponsored their commute. Checking takes two seconds. Don’t get pumped and dumped. 

One-cent madness: They really made adults feral over a penny. A TikTok influencer exposed a Home Depot quirk where discontinued or display items sometimes get marked down to 1 cent in the store system, even if they started as pricey tools, fixtures or big home upgrades. It’s a needle-in-a-warehouse hunt, and stores can refuse to sell. So bargain hunters are stalking the aisles like wildlife photographers, hoping a $900 whatever becomes coin-slot destiny. Check out the TikToker buying $4,000 of smoke detectors for $1.01. 

👀 The interview double: Get this. A journalist built a deepfake AI avatar of herself, dropped it into a video job interview, and it beat 261 real applicants to land the tech gig. The avatar nodded, smiled, answered questions. The hiring team never caught on. What? The scary flip side? Companies are drowning in fake candidates running the same play. The job market officially has gone from quiet quitting to AI applying. Next round is CAPTCHA, blood type and a priest throwing water at the webcam.

Streaming eats savings: Imagine five streaming apps standing on each other’s shoulders in a trench coat. I checked my subscriptions and felt my cable box laughing from the attic. Most U.S. cord-cutters are spending the same amount (paywall link) of money (or more) within three months. The average American pays $69/month for 5.2 subscriptions, while 1 out of 5 folks add YouTube TV or Fubo for about $80. Cable runs $80 to $120. The lesson: Cord-cutting saves money only if you actually cut something.

🧑‍⚖️ Objection, your laptop: This one’s a heartwarmer. A 64-year-old retiree built his own AI platform to help fight a legal case, taught himself as he went and ended up winning. The unexpected bonus? Working on it together brought him and his wife closer. No $500-an-hour attorney. No billable hours. Merely a determined guy, a laptop and a problem worth solving. Proof that AI in the right hands is a great equalizer. Nothing says romance like mutual discovery requests.

Storm Duncan is selling his 14-acre California home. He won’t take cash. He wants Anthropic stock instead. I talk with him about why he’s ditching prime real estate and going all in on the future of AI.

Listen on Komando.com →

🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Before Instagram or Facebook chops off someone’s forehead, set your camera’s shape first. On Android, open Camera and tap the ratio button, like 3:4, then choose 9:16, 1:1 or Full. On iPhone, open Camera, tap the arrow at the top, then 4:3 and choose 16:9 or Square.

🎶 Stop overpaying. I have tested thousands of gadgets in my career. Raycon Everyday Earbuds are still my top pick. They offer incredible sound and a custom fit that actually stays in your ears. You get premium quality without the massive markup of other brands. Enjoy your summer with better music and podcasts. Use my link and get 15% off sitewide.* 

Nickname your map spots: Google Maps can save you from typing the same addresses over and over. Label places you know you’ll come back to, like a friend’s house. Press and hold the location to drop a pin, swipe up and tap Add label. Name it whatever you want. Now “Kim’s place” is searchable.

⌨️ Chrome keyboard cheat codes: Bookmark a page with Ctrl + D or ⌘ + D. Save every open tab with Ctrl + Shift + D or ⌘ + Shift + D. Downloads are Ctrl + J or ⌘ + Shift + J. History is Ctrl + H or ⌘ + Y. Close a tab with Ctrl + W or ⌘ + W. Wrong one? Ctrl + Shift + T or ⌘ + Shift + T brings it back.

📁 Folders, front of the line: On Mac, new folders show up under screenshots, pdfs and other mystery files. Fix that in Finder > Settings > Keep folders on top. Toggle on both options. Folders stay at the top on your Desktop and in Finder windows instead of hiding in the clutter. Organization restored.

🖥️ Have a dedicated graphics card in your PC? Windows installs the first driver and calls it a day. Problem is, you may miss newer patches, performance fixes and game optimizations. Download the NVIDIA App or AMD Adrenalin app, then turn on automatic updates. You’ll also get cool features like “frame smoothing.” Yes, it’s free. 

Screen addiction is a growing concern for kids. Naturally, the internet responded with a solution that solves absolutely none of that.

A viral video shows a fake book designed to hide your phone within hollow pages. A magnetic holder keeps the screen in place, letting parents scroll away while maintaining the appearance of being engrossed in a novel.

On the bright side, the child grows up around books, though all they’ll learn is that every chapter is just TikTok.

Reading a great book at the moment called The History of Glue. I can’t put it down.

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🔜 Tomorrow: While you sleep, your health tech may be filing reports. CPAPs, glucose monitors and other devices can collect more data than people realize, and insurers may use it to judge “compliance.” I’ll explain what’s happening and how to protect your privacy.

Coming up in trivia, why Big Tech sometimes pays its brightest minds to do absolutely nothing.

✈️ The answer: A) About 340 miles up. Old-school airplane Wi-Fi relied on geostationary satellites sitting about 22,000 miles above Earth. Your signal had to take a truly absurd round trip to space and back before your meme, email or “running 10 mins late” text could move an inch. 

Starlink’s satellites orbit much lower, which slashes latency from roughly 600 milliseconds to under 30. Yes, the miracle of modern aviation is that you can stream a show, send Slack messages and pretend to be “touching base” while zooming through the sky in seat 24B. The signal improved. The legroom did not. Such is life.

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

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🎉 Keep it going! You got this! — Kim

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, HOTO, @Bulvarpress via X

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