💀 They own your movies

It’s Thursday, {{first_name | friend}}. Let’s talk space race. In 1969, NASA strapped three humans to a rocket and shot them 238,000 miles to the moon. The computer guiding that mission had 4KB of memory and ran at 0.043 MHz. You probably own dozens of devices way more powerful. But the gap between the Apollo Guidance Computer and some of them will genuinely surprise you.

🚀 Which of these has more computing power than the Apollo Guidance Computer that landed humans on the moon? A) A 1990s graphing calculator, B) A digital kitchen scale, C) A singing birthday card or D) A car key fob? The answer’s a tricky one taking off at the end. 

Big news. I hope you didn’t miss it. I publish a second newsletter every Thursday called Splash of AI. Five minutes. No jargon. Sign up free at SplashOfAI.com. It’s free. Btw, the subject of each newsletter starts with this emoji 💧 so you can find it easily in your inbox. 

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⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

Think about every movie you’ve ever bought on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, Hulu, Roku, Vudu or wherever. Now imagine waking up one day and it’s all gone. Poof!

That’s not a hypothetical. That’s what happened to Microsoft Movies & TV customers in 2025 when Microsoft shut the whole thing down. Every movie people paid for, gone.

That’s your cash walking out the door.

When you purchase a physical DVD, you own it. Loan it. Sell it. Watch it years from now. Nobody can touch it.

Here’s what they don’t want you to know about digital movies. When you “buy” a copy, you’re only purchasing the right to watch it under the platform’s rules for as long as the platform feels like it. Studios can yank titles over licensing disputes. Services can shut down. Terms can change. 

You have exactly zero legal leverage when that happens. 

Step 1: Set up one movie place. Go to moviesanywhere.com now to check it out. It’s free and links your accounts across Apple TV, Amazon, Google TV and Fandango at Home. If one platform disappears, your movies survive in the others. Takes five minutes.

One thing you won’t find on the home page: Movies Anywhere was founded by Disney. It works great for Disney, Marvel, Warner Bros., Universal, Sony and Fox titles. But Paramount and Lionsgate refuse to join. Top Gun, John Wick, The Hunger Games are stuck on whatever platform you bought them on. The only real competitor, UltraViolet, shut down in 2019.

Before the complaints flow in to me, the Movies Anywhere tool is free. Buying or renting a movie through the app costs money. That part hasn’t changed.

Step 2: Convert your physical discs. Fandango at Home has a disc-to-digital program. Open the app, scan the UPC barcode on your disc and convert it. Standard definition is $2. HD is $5. Those copies flow straight into your Movies Anywhere library, too.

Step 3: For movies you truly love, buy physical. An HD Blu-ray player (my pick now on Amazon) runs about $95. A disc runs $15 to $25. Hit your local thrift store, and you’ll find them for less than $5. Your internet can go down, your subscriptions can lapse, but that disc still plays. Physical media is the only true ownership left.

The studios spent years convincing us digital was more convenient than a shelf of discs. They forgot to mention that convenient and permanent aren’t the same thing.

🤔 Something to think about: A radiator is essentially a vital organ to a car, so it’s weird that the town in the movie Cars is called “Radiator Springs.” That’s like humans having a city called “Liver Pool.”

📩 Send this to someone who buys streaming shows and movies. You know who that is. They need to know what’s really happening.

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Years of footage. One AI algorithm. Nowhere to hide. Israel hijacked Tehran’s security grid to create a real-time digital shadow of Khamenei. The result? A strike driven by the most precise targeting data we’ve ever seen. Here is exactly how they pulled it off.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

🚀 Rocket stock mania: Well, SpaceX is going public at more than $1.75 trillion. Elon’s company quietly filed with the SEC, and if it lists as soon as June, it could raise up to $75 billion, the biggest IPO ever by a mile. Bigger than Aramco’s $29 billion. And get this. You know the whole rockets and Starlink pitch, but it’s also including things like Starship, AI data centers in space and a moon base. My index fund just lit a cigarette.

It’s alive: Maybe today is the day you decide to be nicer to your chatbots. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says we’ve basically hit AGI (paywall link), and DeepMind cofounder Shane Legg (the guy who coined the term) more or less agrees. AI can do plenty of human-level cognitive work, thousands of times faster. Whether that excites you or keeps you up at night depends entirely on who you are. I’m gonna need everybody in tech to stop saying AGI so casually like we’re discussing patio furniture.

📍 Bushel of luck: A kidnapped man in New Jersey was rescued after his Apple Watch sent an emergency SOS alert when he could not call or openly ask for help. Cops tracked the signal and got to him in time. I love a good wearable tech rescue story. The little wrist narc that bugs you to breathe turned into a getaway plan. Charge and wear your watch, it might save your life. 

Hooked on purpose: Nothing says family entertainment like a product meeting about behavioral dependency. Internal YouTube chats show staff talking about viewer addiction as a goal, ditching safety features that got in the way. This is the platform babysitting millions of kids, radicalizing uncles and teaching me about the Byzantine empire at midnight. If YouTube could legally install a carnival barker in your drywall yelling, “Stay for Part 7,” it would.

🧳 Don’t bus a move: I’d lose it if I got to the gate and found out my flight was a bus. Not transportation to the plane, that long vehicle is your plane. American Airlines is selling some itineraries that look like normal connections, but one leg is ground transportation in the fine print. So you book a flight online, drag yourself through TSA, and surprise, it’s highway time. Read the details before your layover turns into a field trip. Yikes.

Every message you’ve ever sent? Not as private as you think. Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s original evangelist and Silicon Valley icon, sounds the alarm in his new book, Everybody Has Something to Hide. I sat down with him to talk about what’s at stake, why Signal is the only app he trusts for private messaging and why he wants you to use it, too.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Chrome has an AI Mode for questions. That button next to the search bar isn’t decorative. Click it and ask whatever you want to know, properly, not three words and a prayer. It pulls summarized answers with sources. Then ask follow-ups in the prompt box below like a normal conversation if you want more info. No extra app. No subscription. Already sitting there. Free.

🚗 Old car, new tech tricks: No Apple CarPlay or Android Auto? No problem. A $20 Bluetooth FM transmitter (the best one I researched for you) plugs into your cigarette lighter and broadcasts your phone’s audio through your car stereo. Tune to an empty FM station, and suddenly you have Spotify, Waze, podcasts and hands-free calls. Pair it with a magnetic phone mount (the one I use) on your dash, and you’ve got a setup that rivals cars twice the price. Your 2009 Camry doesn’t know what hit it.

Mac display looking a little off? True Tone is probably the culprit. It adjusts colors based on ambient lighting, which sounds clever until you’re editing photos and everything looks wrong. Go to System Settings > Displays and toggle it off. Boom, color accurate, always. Bonus: While you’re there, adjust scaling, too. More Space fits more on screen. Larger Text makes everything bigger. Your call.

💾 Life lesson: My much, much, much older sister (Hi, Christine. Love ya!) called me in a panic. Her thumb drive died. 738 files gone. Just like that. Gone. Thumb drives and hard drives fail, period. That’s why I use Carbonite. It backs up your files and photos in the background, then lets you restore everything fast when disaster hits. Get 75% off using my link. “I saved it on a USB” is not a backup plan.*

Samsung and Apple are finally playing nice: You can AirDrop straight from your iPhone to a Galaxy S26. On Samsung, pull down Quick Settings and tap Quick Share. On iPhone, open Photos, share via AirDrop, and your S26 shows up as a recipient. Accept it on the Samsung side. Done. ICYMI, you can already AirDrop to Pixel 10s. The wall between iPhone and Android is crumbling. Slowly.

 Buying glasses used to mean, “Can I see?” Now it’s “Can I justify this purchase?”

Meta and EssilorLuxottica launched two new Ray-Ban Meta Optics frames, Blayzer (square) and Scriber (round), built for real prescriptions, including transitions. 

They sport slimmer frames, adjustable temple tips and swappable nose pads, and chains like LensCrafters offer more in-store fittings. Other features include a 12MP camera, voice controls, speakers and AI that translates, summarizes group chats and tracks what you eat like a polite narc.

The price? $499, before you even unlock vision. Adding your prescription costs you up to $300 more. I’ll buy a pair and report back.

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🔜 Tomorrow: Stop letting YouTube feed you the same bland sludge. I’ve got five delightfully niche channels that are fun, calming, bizarre and way more watchable than they have any right to be. You may leave with a new favorite. I bet you do. That’s in your inbox tomorrow morning for free.

The answer: All of the above, A, B, C and D. Every single one of them outperforms the computer that landed humans on the moon in 1969. Your smartphone is roughly 100 million times more powerful than the Apollo Guidance Computer. The engineers who built it had no shortcuts. They hand-wove the memory, literally threading copper wire through magnetic rings by hand, one bit at a time.

Did you hear the Apollo missions found insects on the moon? Lunatics! 🪳 (You try writing good jokes for free!)

🌓 By the way, four astronauts are heading to the moon for the first time since 1972. NASA’s Artemis II crew is on a 10-day trip around the moon and back. They’ll break Apollo 13’s 56-year distance record at 252,000 miles. Watch live on NASA+, Amazon Prime or YouTube. Godspeed.

🔭 The horizon gets better when you keep looking up. Take a deep breath. You can do this. — Kim

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

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Photo credit(s): Gemini, Bomves, EssilorLuxottica

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