🔥 Is your power bank a fire risk?

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🤯 WOW! A power bank is a lithium battery you carry. Brand matters, and there’s one label check that matters more. Picks below.

📖 Read time: 2 minutes

Julie, first, you’re not being dramatic. There have been 56 battery smoke-and-fire incidents on U.S. flights this year. The brand is half of it.

Flip any power bank over.

I get asked this a lot. Apple killed its MagSafe Battery Pack in 2023, and the only battery it sells today is a $99 pack that fits one phone, the iPhone Air. Nothing for an iPad, nothing for a MacBook. 

Apple would rather let Anker, Belkin and UGREEN fight over the battery. Those three publish their safety testing, put the UL mark on the case and answer the phone.

Now, your two fears. 

The nightstand: Charge on a hard surface, never under a pillow or on the comforter, and unplug it when it hits full. 

The plane: It rides in your carry-on, never checked, and you charge it in your lap or the seat pocket. Where you can see it is where you can stop it. If a bank ever puffs up, runs hot or takes a hard drop, it retires to the battery drop-off, not the trash.

I got angry when my phone battery died. My therapist suggested I find an outlet.

📩 Send this to someone who bought the cheapest power bank on Amazon.

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A computer labeled Robert Dillon a 93% match with a suspect in a crime 300 miles from his home. He’d never been there. He spent a night in jail anyway. Now he’s suing. Here’s what I want to know: How much should we trust AI when it’s deciding things about real people?

Plus, Meghan Markle joined her kids’ school group chat as “M.” Her number was out within hours.

Also on the show:

🤐 Chatbot, meet evidence locker: Here’s your reminder that ChatGPT is not a lawyer, a priest or a vault. Court records show a vandalism suspect asked the AI for “damage control” tips right after the damage was done. Prosecutors got the chat logs, and now his cleanup plan is evidence. What you type into an AI can end up in a courtroom. My rule: If you wouldn’t say it to a detective, don’t type it to a chatbot.

Bot and paid for: Your Amazon side hustle just hired a night shift that never sleeps. Amazon opened its seller tools to outside AI agents, starting with Anthropic’s Claude. It can update listings and manage inventory while a one-person shop owner does something reckless, like sleep.  If you sell on Amazon, this is worth a look. Finally, an employee who actually reads the manual. The catch? If the AI botches a price, description or stock count, your morning begins with lost sales and refunds. 

🔐 A human picks up the phone when fraud hits: That’s what sold me on Coveron. Not just alerts. A real restoration specialist who handles everything. Up to $2 million in identity theft coverage. I left LifeLock for this. Get 71% off, that’s $4.36 a month.* 

Sunglasses need boundaries: Get ready for a Thanksgiving where your nephew wears Ray-Bans that might be listening, filming or answering questions, and nobody knows which. Meta’s Gen 3 glasses start at $449 with better battery life and another mic. The camera-free Ray-Ban Audio model gets rid of the feature making ordinary people inspect each other’s faces like airport security. More than 100 style combinations coming by year-end. I’d rather fumble for my phone than make dessert feel like surveillance training.

💳 Checkout gets pickpocketed: Picture typing in your card to buy a plane ticket, and an invisible script quietly makes itself a copy. That happened across at least 119 websites, including a major airline and a Fortune 500 hospitality company. Hackers used AI agents to install the skimmers for about $25 per target, stealing more than 600,000 cards since July. I’d always use a credit card, skip debit and enable instant purchase alerts. Fraud loves someone who doesn’t check their checking account.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Weird outlines around people on the TV? Try turning down Sharpness. A better picture comes from the screen’s resolution and the quality of the stream. That slider can’t invent missing detail. On computer monitors, the neutral setting is often 50 out of 100 or 5 out of 10, depending on the model. There, everyone looks a little less like a sticker.

🌐 The web guy is out. AI is in: I opened Hostinger, typed what I wanted and had a complete website in 35 minutes. No coding, no designer, no hassle. 30-day money-back guarantee. Plans start at $2.69 a month. Get 10% off if you sign up.*

Scrolling shouldn’t turn your stomach: Google’s car-sickness feature is coming to more Android phones. Bubbles move around the screen’s edges when the car is in motion, helping your eyes and body agree on what’s happening. Look for it in Settings > Safety & Emergency > Motion Assist. FYI, you’ll need Android 17 or later and updated Google Play services.

📋 There’s the button I was looking for: iOS 27 adds a Paste shortcut right above the iPhone keyboard. Copy some text, a link or a photo, switch apps and tap a place to type. The button appears, ready to drop it in. No pressing and holding for the usual menu. Small improvement, yes. But think how often you do this. 😌

Hear what all the fuss is about: Apple Maps is adding podcasts about famous landmarks. Look up the Statue of Liberty or Hollywood Sign, and you may see a Hidden Histories episode. Tap to listen, or browse Guides for more. For now, it’s only a few places in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

🎮 All ideas, no coding? That’ll do: Meta will soon let you make games by describing them. Think “Make a multiplayer 2D racing game.” It’ll work on phones and browsers, and published games could appear in Facebook and Instagram feeds for people to play without downloading anything. Tell the kids to join the wait list. I expect a mention in the credits.

Frankie Lapenna climbed into a cage with a modified EngineAI T800 humanoid, a 6-foot, 165-pound metal kickboxer dressed like it wandered off a Terminator set. Under the hood, aviation-grade magnesium-aluminum alloy. Remote-controlled in real time, with preset button-triggered moves.

Its kicks can reportedly hit with about 850 pounds of force vs. roughly 650 for an average adult.

According to Cix Liv, CEO of REK (Robot Entertainment Kombat), Lapenna still won by unbalancing his opponent and ripping its head off. Classic move. 

You can see highlights here. So a robot might have lost its head. I’ve seen worse after a family group chat.

🎓 What you learned today: Power bank safety comes down to watt-hours and reliable certification, Amazon sellers can hand inventory chores to AI agents, Meta’s new glasses keep the privacy debate alive, checkout skimmers are getting nastier and a robot kickboxer lost the old-fashioned way. Not bad for one email. Your ISP may know more than you think. Tomorrow, I’ll break down what they can see and the simple steps to lock things down.

✅ Answer: C) About 50%. If you’re putting an iPhone, iPad or MacBook away for a while, Apple says charge it to around 50%, then power it off. Not full. Not empty. Right down the middle, like the Switzerland of battery percentages.

Two more drawer rules: Keep it cooler than 95 degrees (the garage in July won’t qualify), and if it’s sitting more than six months, top it back up to 50% at the six-month mark.

🚩 Why shouldn’t you wave a red flag at a battery? Because a battery charges.

💾 Your external drive is not enough: It sits right next to your computer. Same flood. Same fire. Same theft. Carbonite backs everything up to the cloud automatically, so the same accident can’t take out both. Sign up through me and get 50% off.*

Kim Komando • 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, DREO, @frankielap via Instagram

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