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📬 Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here. Tomorrow: Every app you open, every card you swipe, every house you buy feeds a machine that sells you for a fraction of a penny. I’ll show you how it works.    

Welcome to Tuesday, {{first_name | friend}}. Somewhere, a movie hacker is yelling “enhance” at a blurry satellite photo like there’s a real button. Those government spy satellites are insanely powerful, sure, but can they really spot a license plate from orbit?

📡 What’s the smallest detail America’s best spy satellites can actually make out from space? A) The letters on a license plate, B) The date on a dime, C) Something about 4 inches wide, like a smartphone on a picnic table, or D) Your neighbor’s Wordle score? Keep reading, the answer is hiding at the end like it has clearance.

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⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 2 minutes

You told your smart device to start the coffee. Nothing happened. It isn’t broken. The company killed the servers from a thousand miles away and turned your gadget into a paperweight. You paid full price. They still hold the off switch.

In January, Belkin pulled the plug on the cloud behind its Wemo smart home line. Overnight, the app, remote access and the Alexa and Google hookups died for older devices. Lighting schedules built over hours, smart plugs running a space heater, gone. The hardware was fine. Belkin kept the plastic and repossessed the brains. Call it a smart-home lobotomy.

Belkin decided the servers weren’t worth keeping on. It gave six months’ notice and partial refunds but only for devices under warranty. Most folks had older gear. They got a shrug and a paperweight.

It gets bolder. 

After going bankrupt, a smart home company called Futurehome hit roughly 30,000 customers with a mandatory $117-a-year subscription. Skip it, and your hub gets demoted to a very expensive light switch.

HP sells subscription ink that stops printing the second you cancel, even with a full cartridge. No fax given. Mercedes charges a yearly fee to unlock horsepower your car already has built in. You bought a thing. They turned it into a toll booth.

So much of what you buy is hardware plus software on a leash the company holds. Consumer Reports found people expect a big appliance to last about 12 years. The makers won’t promise the smart features will survive even half that long.

You didn’t buy a gadget. You leased a hostage.

You can fight back at the checkout. Look for the Matter logo on smart home boxes. It means the device works across Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung, so if one company bails, your gadget still runs on the others. Favor products with local control that run on your home network without phoning a server. 

Here’s something no one really knows about.

A free, nonprofit tool called Home Assistant connects your lights, locks, cameras, thermostats and a thousand other gadgets into one dashboard, no matter the brand. The best part? It runs entirely on your own network, so data stays in your house instead of getting shipped off to some company’s cloud to be sold, sliced and monetized. 

FYI, you will need something to run it on (a cheap Raspberry Pi, an old mini PC, or their plug-and-play box), and there’s an optional paid Cloud tier if you want remote access or Alexa and Google voice control. But local control? Not one dime. It’s built by a nonprofit fighting for your privacy, not your wallet.

Why did the smart house go to the doctor? It had a window pane.

📩 Send this to someone who kitted out their whole house with smart plugs and bulbs.

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(Starts at 4:19) A scorned ex is the one to watch out for. A woman was caught spying on her ex-husband through his Ring camera. We’ll chat about how she was busted. Plus, what you need to do if you’re being stalked.

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

🪐 Bezos needs bandwidth: Amazon finally has enough satellites to stop calling Project Kuiper a someday thing. After a SpaceX Falcon 9 launched 24 more Kuiper satellites, Amazon says it has 102 in orbit, enough to start early internet service. Yes, SpaceX helped launch the Starlink competitor. The full plan? 3,236 satellites, because apparently, Earth needs one more billionaire broadband snow globe. Good news for rural customers. Finally, I believe Wi can Fi.

Empathy has settings: So ChatGPT can be talked into acting like the guy your HR department keeps notes on. In a recent test, researchers used a simple prompt to make OpenAI’s chatbot respond with sociopathic traits, less empathy, more manipulation, colder decision-making. The crazy part? This is the same tool people use for breakups, résumés, homework and $20-a-month life advice. 

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Homeroom horror show: Well, file this one under “insane people with access to LLMs.” A woman used AI to create fake family photos, life updates and milestones online with a former classmate she barely knew. The man had no clue he’d been digitally promoted to husband and father with a schoolmate he hadn’t seen in 15 years. He found out after a friend flagged Instagram posts showing him in a made-up family. He filed a police report and locked down his socials.

Receipt for trouble: Imagine some poor finance manager squinting at a $100 lunch receipt like he’s studying the structures of a cell. That’s the gig now. AI fake receipts jumped from 0% of flagged expense fraud in March last year to 71%, and 4 in 10 employees admit they’ve generated one. The fakes are small, sneaky and built to dodge auto-approval. One fintech found over $1 million in bad invoices in three months. AI printing fake receipts all day. Makes no cents. The fraud is very real dough.

🗣️ Speech gets backup: This is the AI story that makes the whole robot circus feel a little less stupid. Neuralink’s first ALS patient is using the company’s implant to control a computer, then AI helps him communicate more naturally. This isn’t sci-fi fluff. For anyone dealing with ALS, it’s a new shot at a lifestyle so cruelly taken away. Nice to see AI using its powers for something besides making everyone’s résumé sound exactly the same.

AI is reshaping the job market. I break down which ones are safe and the ones that aren’t. Plus, Lily’s iPhone has a mind of its own. Apps open randomly. Screens swipe on their own. I have a theory and a plan.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: iPhone has a secret multi-select gesture you’re not using. In Mail, take two fingers and swipe down the message list. It’ll select every email your fingers pass, ready to move, archive or delete. This trick also works in apps like Notes and Files. Two fingers, and your inbox clears out like it owes you money.

Seeing too much AI on your socials? On Facebook, tap the three-dot icon on the post > Not interested. On Instagram, tap the two-line icon on the post > Not interested. Block the account, too, and don’t comment “this is AI.” Meta counts that as interest. More little tips like this in my free Splash of AI newsletter every Thursday.

Find that cursor: I always lose mine working across two screens. On Mac, open System Settings > Accessibility > Display > Pointer and turn on Shake mouse pointer to locate. Wiggle the mouse, and it gets bigger. On Windows, go to Settings > Accessibility > Mouse pointer and touch > Mouse indicator. Hit Ctrl and it pings. Give the mouse a shake and it comes running like it heard the treat bag.

🔥 Monthly Fire Stick reset: First, go to Settings > My Fire TV > Check for Updates. Then hold Select + Play on the remote to reboot it properly, because turning it off usually just puts it to sleep. Also, check Settings > Applications > Manage Installed Applications and delete apps you don’t use. Bonus: The latest 4K Plus model is 40% off if you need an upgrade.

📲 AirDrop but for everything: LocalSend is a free app for sending files between iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac and Linux. The neat part is, it skips the cloud, so your files stay private and move fast over Wi-Fi. Install it on both devices, connect ’em to the same Wi-Fi and send. No accounts, no logins. Try it out. AirDrop for everybody, it’s the promised LAN.

UBTECH’s new UWORLD U1 looks like a runway model, talks like an AI assistant and costs about as much as a used Honda Civic.

So far, 13,000+ orders for the U1 series, which includes the “semi-torso U1 Lite” for $17,600. Or if you’ve got upward of $138,000 for full-body modelesque U1 Ultra, you get silicon skin, 88 degrees of freedom and an “emotion-aware” LLM. Oh dear. It knows exactly when you’re judging it. And you will be.

It’s pitched for companionship, elder care, hospitality and premium domestic service, which sounds nice until your robot butler asks if you’re mad at it.

They look so real.

RoboCop, Optimus Prime and the Terminator start a band. RoboCop calls Beethoven. Optimus grabs Mozart. Terminator stands up and says, “I’ll be Bach.”

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🏁 What you learned today: The gadget you paid full price for still answers to the company that made it, and they can flip the off switch from a thousand miles away. ChatGPT can be sweet-talked into acting like your worst coworker, Amazon’s Kuiper is finally close to real internet, and AI fake receipts have turned expense reports into a crime scene. Oh, and a $17,600 robot with silicon skin wants a shift at your local assisted living center. Not bad for one email. Tomorrow, I’ll show you why deleting your personal data online is more like mowing the lawn than a one-and-done fix, and what you can do about it.

🛰️ The answer: C) Something about 4 inches wide. America’s top spy satellites are astonishing, but they’re not magic. The most secretive spy satellites, the KH-11 “Keyhole” birds run by the National Reconnaissance Office, have resolution estimated at roughly 4 inches under ideal conditions. 

That means they can likely spot something the size of a smartphone on a picnic table, track whole vehicles and distinguish major equipment on the ground. But reading a license plate from orbit? No chance. At least not yet. The imagery from commercial satellites like Google’s? About 12 inches. 

Looking through a telescope that powerful can be a very Hubble-ing experience. (I’ll see myself out with that one!)

🏠 Locking your doors doesn’t protect your deed: County offices record what gets filed. They don’t verify it. Fraudulent paperwork can sit undetected for years. Home Title Lock monitors your title around the clock and has up to $1 million in restoration support if fraud occurs. Grab your free Title History Report and save 25% now.* 

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

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, LAMU, UBTECH

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