🏖️ Don’t book that trip

Happy Wednesday, {{first_name | friend}}. Picture this: It’s 1826. A French inventor props a camera outside his window and waits all day for one blurry image. The first-ever photo might’ve been grainy and ghostly, but it’s pure history. Now we take more selfies per minute than he did in a lifetime. But all of us combined? The number is wild. 

Can you guess how many photos humanity took every single day in 2025? A) 500 million, B) 1.2 billion, C) 5.3 billion or D) 12 billion? The photo finish answer is at the bottom.

💻 Your hard drive will die. It’s a simple fact. Every computer eventually fails and takes your photos and documents with it. Data recovery experts charge thousands to get them back. I don’t pay that. I use Carbonite to back up my files automatically to the cloud. Save 50% on the only backup I trust. More below.*

Another day, another $250 up for grabs in my February Cash Grab. If you won, you’ll see a bright huge red box at the top telling you so. Time for today’s tech news. — Kim

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⚡ TL;DR (THE SHORT VERSION)

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

This is a crazy story. A family vacation turned into a five-year nightmare. And it started with one payment.

L. Williams found a cruise consultant online who booked her family a week on Carnival Freedom. Great price. One catch. He only accepted Zelle. She sent $3,556. The family sailed the Western Caribbean. Gorgeous sunsets. Wonderful memories.

Five years later, she tried to book another cruise. Nope.

Carnival told her she was on the Do Not Sail list. Turns out her “consultant” pocketed the Zelle cash, then used a stolen credit card to book the trip. When the real cardholder disputed the charge, Williams got the blame. 

She now owes $3,556 for a trip she already paid for. Banned for life. The scammer’s phone? Disconnected. (Of course.)

Here’s what you need to know. The cheapest window for domestic spring break flights is about 43 days before departure. For late March trips, that’s this week. Wait until late February, and prices jump 20% to 25%. That’s your cash walking out the door.

Fly Tuesday, Wednesday or Saturday, and save up to 30% over weekend flights. Set Google Flights alerts now. Caribbean fares are down 17% from last year. 

Bundle flights with hotels through Costco, Expedia or Delta Vacations, and you can knock hundreds off the total.

Williams’ story isn’t a one-off. Over 38 million people are expected to cruise in 2026, and scammers know it. Here are the big cons I’m seeing.

Your three rules: Always pay with a credit card. Never call a customer service number from a Google search, go to the official site. If you want a travel agent, verify them at ASTA.org.

Book smart and you’ll be sipping something tropical in a few weeks. Book carelessly and you might end up on the Do Not Sail list, which, ironically, is the worst kind of cruise control.

🏝️ If anyone you know is booking a spring break trip, send them this first. It takes two seconds to forward and could save them thousands. One payment to the wrong person cost a woman her vacation money, her cruise line privileges and years of debt headaches.

Your smart speaker is listening. You didn’t know. I cover why Google paid $68 million to settle eavesdropping claims. Then I talk to Aaron, a student from Baton Rouge who turned in his final paper and got flagged for AI cheating, even though he didn’t use AI. Plus, how one island got rich from the .ai domain boom and the AirTag 2 launch.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

🧻 GPT ads incoming: You know how ChatGPT can help you write a cover letter, plan dinner and stop you from spiraling about your printer? Now it’ll try to sell you paper towels. Ad testing started for Free and Go plans. Paid folks stay promotion-free. They say ads are clearly labeled, won’t affect answers and won’t show up near health, mental health or political topics. For now. You can opt out by going to Settings > Ads controls > Change plan to go ad-free. But you’ll get fewer free messages.

Glass act: Corning has been making glass for 175 years. They worked with Thomas Edison. They worked with Steve Jobs. And they spent almost 20 years losing money on fiber-optic cables while everyone told them to quit. They didn’t. Today, AI data centers are gobbling up fiber like it’s oxygen. Why? Data travels faster over light than electricity. Corning’s $6 billion deal (paywall link) with Meta sent their stock to all-time highs. Patience paid off. Turns out the future was made of glass the whole time.

💼 Hire the best people: The most talented employees are usually already working and not checking random job boards. But they are on LinkedIn. I use LinkedIn Hiring Pro to put my open roles in front of qualified professionals who might not be actively looking. It’s the smartest way to build a winning team without sifting through hundreds of bad résumés. Get $100 off your first job post.*

Bootleg box bonanza: Ever check your streaming apps and realize you’re paying $60/month to watch two shows and one sad playoff game? Same. People are buying rogue boxes like SuperBox and vSeeBox for $200 to $400 from resellers, including at farmers markets, promising free stolen NFL, UFC and 8,000+ other channels. Dish says it’s piracy and is suing sellers for up to $1.25M. Bonus: The box can get remotely bricked and spread malware on your network. Still, nothing unites America like hating your subscription list.

🌕 Moon selfies incoming: My favorite part of space travel is realizing it’s still people and gadgets, with more firepower. NASA’s administrator greenlit iPhones in orbit, kicking off with SpaceX Crew-12 to the ISS and Artemis II. Why so late? It took this long because NASA has to certify everything that flies, and it’s hard to fast-track a pocket computer with a battery that would love to become a tiny space fire.

Tax refugees: So California floats a 5% billionaire tax, and suddenly, high-end Miami real estate agents are super busy again? Who’d have thought! Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are reportedly buying a newly finished mansion on Indian Creek (paywall link), a gated Miami island that collects the ultrarich like trading cards. Locals think it’ll go for $150M to $200M. The seller is an LLC tied to Jersey Mike’s founder Peter Cancro. Neighbor gossip says Zuck plans to move in by April.

👂 Still on the call: That AI bot taking notes in your meeting? It might not leave when you do. Some recording bots keep running after people drop off the call. Your post-meeting vent about the boss, the spicy hot take, the “I can’t believe they approved that” sidebar? Potentially transcribed and delivered to everyone’s inbox. Yikes. The fix: Get consent before recording. Limit who sees transcripts. And give the host a real kill switch. “No, YOU hang up first” should stay on date nights, not conference calls.

From dictating emails and reports to writing code, AI-powered voice-to-text is replacing the keyboard in the modern workplace.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Gas pump skimmers are everywhere. Before you swipe, grab the card reader and wiggle it. Skimmers are plastic overlays that pop right off. Here’s the sneaky part. Open your phone’s Bluetooth while you’re standing at the pump. See a device called HC-05 or a long random string of numbers? That’s a wireless skimmer sending your card info to a scammer nearby. Nope. Pay inside or use tap-to-pay. Skimmers can’t read contactless payments. Your wallet will thank you.

Your lock screen has a leak: Even when your phone is locked, some features can still be accessed from the drop-down menu. On iPhone, open Settings > Face ID & Passcode, and under Allow Access When Locked, turn off anything you don’t want to share. On Android, go to Settings > Lock Screen or Quick Settings and disable it. 

⚠️ Turn on browser warnings: These alerts warn you if you’re on a phony banking site or about to download something sketchy. In Chrome, open Settings > Privacy and security > Safe Browsing and turn on Enhanced protection. On iPhone, go to Settings > Apps > Safari and turn on Fraudulent Website Warning. For more safety, try out Webroot.* It blocks 99% of threats.

Getting tagged in random Instagram posts? There’s a secret setting that lets anyone tag you in photos and reels unless you change it. Open Settings and activity > Tags and mentions > Who can tag you and choose people you follow or no one. While you’re there, do the same under Who can @mention you, so you don’t get spam shout-outs.

🎨 Your computer has a secret emoji keyboard: You don’t need your phone to drop a 👍 into an email. On Windows, press Win + Period (.), and a full emoji picker pops up. On Mac, press Ctrl + Cmd + Space. It works in emails, documents, Slack, everywhere. There are also GIFs and kaomoji (those little text faces) hiding in there. Your coworkers will wonder how you got so expressive. (╯°□°)╯

I want to hear from you: Did you ever use technology to catch someone red-handed? A cheater, a scammer, a snooping coworker? Tell me what happened. Your story might end up on my national radio show!

I started this company with no investors and no debt. Still have neither. What I do have is nine open positions and a team that reaches millions of people every day.

We’re in Phoenix. We need content creators, editors, producers and marketing folks. I care less about your title and more about whether you light up when you find something cool and immediately want to tell someone about it.

That’s the job. Help people. Explain things. Change lives. No corporate nonsense. At our headquarters in Phoenix. No remote work.

Know someone? This might be the post that changes everything for somebody.

See all our openings here.

🔜 Tomorrow: I get calls every week from people who think someone’s watching their every move. Sometimes they’re wrong. But stalkerware attacks surged 29% in 2025, 26 spy app companies have been hacked and 1 in 10 Americans have been tracked by a hidden GPS device. I’ll tell you the exact settings to check on your iPhone or Android in your newsletter tomorrow.

The answer: C) 5.3 billion photos a day. That’s 61,400 photos every second. If you tried to take one photo every second, around the clock, it’d take you 61,000 YEARS to match what humans will shoot in just one year.

Oh, and we’ve collectively snapped over 14.3 trillion photos, that’s 1,800 images per person on Earth. Most popular photo platform? WhatsApp, with 6.9 billion images shared daily.

I saw a baguette posing for a photo. Wow, such a roll model. 🥖

🛡️ Don’t wait for a disaster. Ransomware and crashes happen when you least expect them. Carbonite runs quietly in the background and encrypts your files. If the worst happens, you restore everything with a few clicks. It’s cheap insurance for your digital life. Get my exclusive 50% off deal right now.*

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

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT, Wolfbox, Kim Komando

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