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📬 Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here. Tomorrow: Turns out your GPS has been moonlighting for the Pentagon since 2007. You cannot afford to miss this wild story.

Well, hello, it’s Wednesday, {{first_name | friend}}. Think back to the last time a real letter showed up in your mailbox. Not a bill. Not a coupon. Not a “you may be a winner.” My niece Danielle sends me handwritten thank-you notes. I love them.

💌 We now all have a tiny mailbox in our pocket. Texts, emails, FaceTime, group chats. Suddenly, licking a stamp feels like churning your own butter.

Since the smartphone arrived in 2007, how much has the volume of personal letters, cards and notes regular folks send dropped? A) About 25%, B) About 50%, C) About 80% or D) It actually went up. Keep reading, the answer is waiting in the mailbox at the end. 

😱 Three people, same nightmare week. Dave lost five years of family photos. Anita watched files disappear from three devices at once. Chris got a $2,100 quote to try recovering a corrupted USB drive. All three thought they had backups. They had sync tools. Big difference. Carbonite creates real backups, automatically and off-site. Get 50% off complete protection, $4/month.*

⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 2 minutes

The thing that drives me up a wall: those online tests that make me prove I’m human.

Find the motorcycle. Great. I tag the handlebars, the seat, both wheels. Then an eighth of an inch of muffler pokes into the next square. Does that count? Click it, wrong. Skip it, wrong.

Either way, a website made me, a grown adult, sweat over a moped. Here’s the twist. Robots pass that test in a second flat.

Remember those years clicking traffic lights, storefronts and buses? You weren’t proving you’re human. You were doing free labor. The early tests made you type two warped words. One proved you were real. The other was scanned text no computer could read. You transcribed books for free.

So the puzzles are vanishing, replaced by systems that watch you instead of quizzing you. They track your mouse, typing speed, phone’s tilt, even behavior patterns, then decide if you’re human before any puzzle appears.

That little “I’m not a robot” checkbox isn’t reading your click. It’s reading everything you did to get there. Over 70 signals, judged in the background. You passed a test you didn’t know you were taking. (Seriously.)

There’s a nasty trick called ClickFix, and it’s everywhere. Attacks surged 517% in a year, feeding on the exact CAPTCHA frustration we talked about.

Here’s the play. You hit a page that looks like a normal verify-you’re-human check. Instead of traffic lights, it says the check failed and offers a fix. Press Windows + R. Paste this. Hit Enter. Sometimes it’s dressed up as a Cloudflare box or a fake Windows update.

Don’t touch it. The moment you land, it drops a command onto your clipboard. Paste it, hit Enter and you ran malware on yourself. It grabs your logins, bank details, crypto, even screenshots.

A real human check never asks you to open a box, paste a command or press a key combo. If it does, close the tab. Already pasted something? Disconnect, run a malware scan and change your passwords from another device.

That page isn’t checking if you’re human. It’s checking if you’re gullible. Don’t pass.

📩 Send this to someone who rage-clicks through blurry traffic light puzzles and yells, “I AM a human!” at their screen.

Share this now using the links below:

SpaceX is going public. The largest in history. Anthropic filed, too. And 80,000 Flock cameras and a fleet of new drones watch your car’s every move. Plus:

A photographer didn’t use a fancy camera for a photo competition. He used his Samsung. It was so good, the judges didn’t believe him. They banned his photos. He proved everyone wrong.

Hit the link below, so you’re in the know. 👇

▶️ SpaceX aims for $1.75 trillion IPO, Flock’s drones track cars, and Uber’s weirdest lost items. →

🕳️ Instagram spills digits: Picture typing Kylie Jenner’s Instagram handle into a reset box and getting personal contact info like a receipt. That’s what a recent viral X thread accused Meta’s recovery flow of doing: full phone and email. No proof required that you own the account. Type someone’s username and you get the personal details. It’s not only celebs, you could be next. This follows a dark web dump of 17.5M Instagram accounts. Remove your phone number from Instagram if you can (Accounts Center > Personal details > Contact info), and use an email alias and an authenticator app, so your number isn’t the spare key under Meta’s doormat. Here’s how.

Auto-complete ambulance problem: I read chest pain and chatbot in the same sentence and immediately remembered those WebMD spirals back in the day. Researchers tested ChatGPT’s health tool on 1,000 medical scenarios and found it missed the urgent care call in roughly 1 in 5 high-risk emergencies. It’s better at sniffles than sirens. Remember that. 

👀 Your camera has a narrator: Tucked inside Apple’s WWDC is Apple HomeKit Secure Video. It links Apple Intelligence to your security cameras, generating detailed descriptions of everything happening in the footage stored in your iCloud. So instead of scrubbing hours of video, you ask, and the AI tells you who showed up and when. Convenient? Sure. Also a little eerie. An AI reads your front porch like a bedtime story.

AI rest my case: This one’s almost too good. A federal judge in Mississippi tossed an entire trial after discovering lawyers on both sides leaned on AI that invented court cases that never existed. The judge disqualified all four attorneys, fined them up to $3,500 each and barred two of them for two years. One kept using AI even after getting busted. Incredible.

💸 Surge pricing attention: Real companionship now costs more because fake companionship got too good. Forbes says high-end escorts in Silicon Valley are charging $3,000 to $5,000 an hour, sometimes $6,000, with weekend bookings around $30,000. That’s up from rarely over $1,000 five years ago. The clients? Tech workers swimming in AI jobs and starving for actual eye contact. It’s funny that as AI gets better at faking flirty conversation, real human attention is getting pricier, not cheaper.

Every morning your mail carrier knows what’s heading to your mailbox. You don’t. A free USPS tool emails you pictures of what’s coming every day. Plus, Twitch star Emily CC has been streaming her whole life, 24/7. Over four years straight. 400,000 strangers see almost everything. I ask her why.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: iPhone keyboards are hiding symbols you probably didn’t know how to find. Tap the 123 number button, then long-press 0 for the degree sign. Weather texts sorted. Long-press the $ currency key for £, € and more. Need a bullet point? Long-press the minus sign. Voilà, dot unlocked.

🕵️  Meet the $3 crime fooling every bank: Criminals buy your Social Security number for $3, build fake identities around it and max out credit before disappearing. The Federal Reserve calls synthetic identity fraud the fastest-growing financial crime. I use Coveron to monitor the dark web where SSNs get traded. Right now, it's 66% off at $4.74 monthly with $1 million recovery support. Stop identity thieves before they strike.*  

📸 Ring’s using your footage, surprise: Ring rolled out a feature called Search Party a while ago. It uses nearby cameras and AI to help find missing pets. Cute idea. Tiny catch: If your Ring saves video to the cloud, you were automatically enrolled. Your call, but if that feels too nosy, consider a camera with local storage or home hub storage.

🔒 Put ChatGPT on a leash: If you use ChatGPT for private stuff, toggle on Lockdown mode. It blocks live web browsing, deep research, agent mode and file downloads while you write, summarize or brainstorm like usual. Think AI brainpower with fewer ways for your info to unintentionally leave the chat. Head to Settings > Security.

😒 Facebook’s phone number snitch: Facebook can suggest your profile to people who have your phone number or email. Fine for friends, not so fun when it’s that nosy coworker. Open the app, and go to Settings > Audience and visibility > How people find and contact you. Set phone and email lookup to No one. Boundaries, baby.

🖱️ Mac cursor, less crawling: Mac trackpads are set pretty slow out the box. Cue the wrist pain. Go to System Settings > Trackpad > Tracking speed and slide it higher. You’ll get across the screen with fewer swipes. Bonus: Using a non-Apple mouse with sticky scrolling? Try the Mos app. It smooths things out.

Juan Hernandez didn’t join SpaceX as a hoodie-wearing founder. He joined as a welder making $28 an hour.

When he became full-time, SpaceX gave him $10,000 in stock. He kept buying more, sold some to buy Texas properties, and now his remaining shares are worth around $880,000. I’ve talked about how in-demand the trades are, but this is next level. Talk about getting on a rocket ship. 

Silicon Valley loves pretending wealth comes from vision. Sometimes it comes from showing up and fusing metal. Congratulations to you, Juan!

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🔜 Tomorrow: Researchers found a hidden Pentagon messaging channel tucked inside the GPS signals your phone, car and smartwatch use every day. It sounds like a spy movie, but it’s real. Don’t miss this one in your inbox.

Tomorrow’s trivia is about the fitness stat your Apple Watch may be hiding from you until you make one very particular move.

📈 The answer: C) Almost 80%. In 2005, Americans sent about 45.9 billion pieces of single-piece first-class mail, the stamped personal stuff. By 2025, that had dropped to 9.62 billion. 

Translation: Roughly three-quarters of personal letters, cards and notes have vanished while we all moved our chatter to the glowing rectangle in our hands. The post office isn’t going anywhere. Literally. The whole place is stationary.

🩷 I send my son a card in the mail every month or so. At his house a few months ago, I opened a kitchen drawer and saw he saved them all. So send a handwritten card to someone you love. It means more than a text. 

💾 iCloud is not your backup: Neither is Google Drive. They sync selected files, not your entire system. When disaster hits, you’ll discover what wasn’t covered. Carbonite backs up everything automatically. Your whole computer, unlimited space, total protection. Get my exclusive 50% off deal. Just $4 a month.*

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

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Philips, @RT_com via X

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