🔎 Your bill’s lying

📬 Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here. Tomorrow: Regular people are still flying to Europe for around $300 round-trip. They’re not lucky. I’ll tell you the free trick that takes 10 minutes to set up.

Welcome to your Tuesday, {{first_name | friend}}. Remember when traveling meant resetting your watch like some kind of tiny-time mechanic? Now your phone lands in Paris, Peoria or Peru and has it all under control. 

⏱️ What tells your phone the exact time, no matter where you are standing on our beautiful planet Earth? A) A quartz crystal inside the phone that never loses a second, B) A signal from the official clock tower in England, C) Atomic clocks on satellites way above you, D) It guesses, then fixes itself when you’re not looking. Keep reading, the answer is waiting at the end, wearing a very punctual little hat.

💧 Big news. Every Thursday, I publish a second free newsletter called Splash of AI. It’s five minutes, no jargon and built for people who want to actually use AI, not read about it. This is some of my best work. Haven’t signed up yet? Get on the list at SplashOfAI.com. It’s free. — Kim

⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 3 minutes

Ron, first, no shame. Most people never open the itemized bill. You did. That’s step one.

Here’s what sneaked in over 18 months. None of it is taxes. All of it is on purpose.

Start with the “administrative fee” or “regulatory cost recovery charge.” It’s overhead the carrier buries so the advertised price looks lower. Verizon agreed to a $100 million settlement over admin fees. If they’ll pay that to settle, picture what they collected.

Next, the “free” phone. You’re locked into the priciest plan for 36 months, and leaving early means you owe the full balance. Then insurance. Carriers auto-enroll you in device protection at $18 to $25 a month. Over two years, that’s up to $600.

Watch for ghost subscriptions. And some carriers charge to reach a human. Ten dollars for phone help, $35 to get help in a store. Now they bill your questions.

So here’s Ron’s real question: Won’t a cheaper carrier pull the same stunt? Fair. Not if you pick the right carrier.

I switched to Consumer Cellular years ago and never looked back. That’s exactly why they sponsor my show. What you get: 

Reader Rebecca wrote in to say she’s saving $800 a year since switching. She’s not the only one. Bill saves $740 a year. Shelly’s pocketing $1020!

✅ Make the switch today and save an extra $50 right now with promo code KIM50. Stop being a donor to the big carriers. You’re smarter than that.

📩 Send this to someone who hasn’t looked at their phone bill in a year and keeps saying, “It’s fine.”

(Starts at 39:20) Apple dropped its big iOS 27 updates. Siri gets a huge AI brain transplant. Your home security cameras can “read” what happens on your porch. Plus, new parental controls.

Listen on Komando.com →

Click your favorite podcast player below to listen now or later:

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

📺 Remote control takeover: Fox dropped $22 billion to buy Roku. Not for the shows. For the data and that home menu more than 100 million households scroll through every night. So do this today. On your Roku, open Settings > Privacy > Advertising, and flip on Limit Ad Tracking. While you’re in there, shut off Smart TV experience. Lock it down before Fox redecorates your living room. Because they didn’t buy a streaming company. They bought the remote possibility of owning you. (Get it? Remote… tough crowd today.)

The robot pileup: If you’re a small-business owner opening job applications and, oh great, here comes another “highly motivated self-starter” who “thrives in fast-paced environments.” Very original, robot. AI-made applications are flooding hiring inboxes, leaving you guessing who can actually run the register, fix the spreadsheet or, wild concept, show up Tuesday. Small firms get clobbered because there’s no big HR firewall. The fix? Ask for a quick task or a live conversation early. Real skills show up fast when the robot can’t help.

🧾 Wrong guy payday: Here’s a nightmare for anyone who signs the checks. A town in Maine almost wired about $190,000 to a scammer posing as a real vendor before anyone caught it. It’s called business email compromise, and it’s crushing small operations everywhere. The boring fix works: Before changing payment details, call the vendor on a number you trust. Not the one in the email. One phone call beats a five-figure mistake. Trust, but verify the routing number.

Common face tax: You know when someone tells you they saw someone that looks just like you? About that. Florida police used AI facial recognition in criminal investigations, and some innocent people ended up arrested because the software pointed at the wrong face. In some places, police don’t even have to say the machine was involved. That matters, because defense lawyers cannot challenge secret evidence they do not know exists. If cuffs ever enter the chat, ask how they found you.

🎀 Cancer’s early snitch: OK, this is great. Looks like AI spots breast cancer before anyone knows there is breast cancer to spot. In a huge new study, AI looked at routine mammograms in screening clinics and caught patterns human eyes can miss three to six years before diagnosis, then nudged the scans into the pay-attention pile. Not replacing radiologists. More like handing them a flashlight, a second brain and fewer reasons to squint at shadows. This is a robot I’ll happily root for.

Doctor printouts can look like they’re written in a totally different language. AI makes sense of them in seconds. Plus, renowned surgeon Dr. Amron shares a wild story. He found out someone was using an AI clone of his voice. Why? To sell fake medical cream to his patients.

Listen on Komando.com →

Click your favorite podcast player below to listen now or later:

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

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Your lunch doesn’t need an over-the-top filter to look delicious. Open Camera on iPhone or Android, switch to Portrait mode and stand 2 to 8 feet from your food. The background blurs while the plate stays in focus. Look at that, picture-perfect every time, ready for your update.

❄️ That credit freeze has a hole in it: It stops crooks from opening new accounts in your name, but it does nothing to stop them from draining the bank accounts you already have. That’s the part nobody talks about. I use Coveron to cover that blind spot. It watches the dark web around the clock and pings me the second my info shows up somewhere shady. Get 66% off right now. For less than a latte, you’re not an easy target anymore.*

Lock private Safari: Hand someone your unlocked iPhone, and your private tabs are right there for snooping. Apple went and buried the fix for this one. Go to Settings > Apps > Safari > Privacy & Security. Then turn on Require Face ID to Unlock Private Browsing. Next time, nosy taps get blocked. 

🛡️ Windows Secure Boot checkup: Microsoft’s new Secure Boot update rolled out, and it matters. Old security certificates start expiring June 24. They help stop bootkits, a type of malware that can sneak in before Windows and your antivirus even start. Open Windows Security > Device Security > Secure Boot. A green checkmark means you’re covered.

Gmail, cover me: Going on holiday? Let Gmail tell people you’re away instead of replying from a beach chair. On desktop, click Settings > General > Vacation responder. Pick your start and end dates, write a quick message, then hit Save Changes at the bottom. Out-of-office, without the office guilt.

⌨️ Snack graveyard: Your keyboard has probably survived crumbs, sunscreen fingers and at least one coffee scare. Over time, that gunk slips under the keys and makes them harder to press. Shut down your PC, unplug the keyboard and use a small cleaning brush. An air duster helps, too. Please, no soaking. 😅

Tesla’s self-driving has reached the “Kool-Aid Man” phase.

In Redmond, Washington, a driver says their Tesla’s system malfunctioned before the car swerved into a residential garage door and ended up lodged inside. Police are investigating. No one was hurt, and there were no signs of impairment. The exact driving mode is still fuzzy, which matters because Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving are different flavors of “please keep your hands nearby.”

The future is autonomous, supervised and apparently doesn’t knock.

Share this now:

🔜 Tomorrow: Mistake fares and off-peak drops put round-trip flights to Europe in the low hundreds, and free alert services ping you the second one appears. That intel is in your inbox from me tomorrow.

Coming up in tomorrow’s trivia, your car might have a crash witness hiding inside, and it’s not as nosy as people think.

The answer: C) Atomic clocks on satellites way above you. Yep, every GPS satellite carries an atomic clock so precise it would barely lose a second over millions of years. Your phone listens to several at once and locks onto their time. 

🛰️ Those clocks tick faster up in orbit than they do on the ground, by 38 millionths of a second a day, thanks to Einstein’s relativity. So engineers set them to run slow on purpose to cancel it out. Skip that fix, and your maps app would be wrong in two minutes and 6 miles off by dinner. 

Those satellite clocks never once argue about the time. Why would they? They don’t tock to themselves.

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

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Fanttik, Redmond Police Department via X

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