🖨️ Your printer is snitching on you

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We made it to Friday, {{first_name | friend}}. Pop your AirPods in. Hop on a call. Walk into the loudest coffee shop on Earth. Espresso machines screaming. Someone’s toddler absolutely losing it. The blender from hell doing its thing.

🧏🏼‍♂️ The person on the other end of your call? Hears you perfectly. Apple hid something genuinely weird inside those little white earbuds. Your AirPods can tell when you’re talking versus when the world around you is chaos.

What surprising feature do Apple AirPods use to detect your voice in a noisy crowd? A) A lipreading camera inside the case, B) An AI bone conduction sensor, C) A microphone that filters by voice frequency only, or D) A built-in accelerometer that senses jaw movement. Take your best guess. The answer is mumbling at the end.

✅ ICYMI: Yesterday I launched a brand-new AI newsletter and the first issue already has people's jaws on the floor. I used AI to find $564 a year hiding in my own subscriptions. Did not see that coming. Read it here and sign up free at SplashofAI.com so you never miss another one.

🔥 Stop waiting until June: I created ImproveLife Metabolism with a team of experts, and it’s the real deal. Clinically studied ingredients that wake up your metabolism, reduce cravings and have you feeling like yourself again. In stock now, no wait lists, no back orders. Get up to 37% off, free shipping and a free gift.** — Kim

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⚡ TL;DR Key takeaways

📖 Read time: 2 minutes

Here’s something you don’t know. First, go grab something you printed in color. Now shine a blue LED light on it. See those tiny yellow dots in a grid pattern across the entire page? Those are Machine Identification Codes. Fancy words for, “We’re tracking you.”

Your printer put those dots there without asking. Every color laser printer from Xerox, Canon, HP, Brother and Epson does this. Every single page. Every single time.

The dots are roughly one-tenth of a millimeter wide, printed in yellow on white paper so you’ll never notice them. They encode your printer’s serial number, the exact date and the exact time you hit “Print.” 

The pattern repeats about 150 times across a single sheet, so even a torn scrap of paper carries enough data to trace it back to your machine.

This started in the mid-1980s when Xerox and Fuji developed the system to fight counterfeiting. Color printers were getting good enough to copy money, and governments told manufacturers: Build in tracking, or we won’t let you sell these things. 

So they did. And they never told you. A Xerox spokesperson later admitted they “didn’t advertise it much.” You think?

In 2017, NSA contractor Reality Winner printed a classified document about Russian election interference and mailed it to a news outlet. The outlet published the scanned pages without removing the yellow dots. Security researchers inverted the colors and decoded the pattern in minutes: printer model 54, serial number 29535218, printed May 9, 2017, at 6:20 p.m. 

The NSA matched that to their printer logs. Winner got five years in federal prison. Her printer testified against her.

Here’s the thing. You don’t have to be leaking government secrets to care. Every color page you’ve ever printed has your printer’s fingerprint on it. Medical documents. Financial records. That anonymous letter to your HOA. (Yep. Traceable.)

What you can do: Use a black-and-white laser printer for anything sensitive. They typically don’t include tracking dots since they lack yellow toner. If you’re on a color printer, know every page is signed with a tracking kiss.

📊 Post this stat: Researchers analyzed 106 printer models from 18 manufacturers. Every. Single. One. They all had some form of hidden tracking code on every page printed. GetKim.com

In 1982, Sarah Geer’s murder went cold. Decades later, tech stepped in. I’ll tell you how the FBI used DNA from a discarded cigarette to finally put her killer behind bars. Hear the full story now.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

⚠️ Ay, Coruna: Ever open a sketchy site and tell yourself it’s fine because you didn’t click anything? You might want to start checking your iOS version like you’re looking for a tick. A hacking tool kit called Coruna (paywall link) could infect iPhones simply by loading a page, using 23 iOS bugs and five exploit chains. It’s been used by surveillance clients, suspected Russian spies targeting Ukrainians, and crypto thieves hitting Chinese-language gambling and wallet sites. Apple patched it in iOS 26. Settings > General > Software Update > Download and Install.

Smart home tattletale: My golden retriever Abby is about to lose her job as head of neighborhood surveillance. Google Home says Gemini is joining Live Search (paywall link), meaning it can look at your live camera feed and answer stuff like, is there a car in the driveway? Only for Google Home Premium Advanced ($20/month or $200/year) folks. Supposedly, it also fixes dumb command drama, so turn off the kitchen means lights, not your whole house.

Allowance gets complicated: MrBeast bought Step, a banking app built for teens and young adults with 7 million users. Spending, saving, investing and a secured card to build credit. All under the Beast Industries umbrella. Nothing says 2026 like your kid learning compound interest from the guy who buries cash in random backyards. He’s got 469 million subscribers (paywall link), and now he wants to be their banker, too. Parents, heads up. Your kid’s financial habits are about to have a very recognizable pitchman.

🚨 150 million passwords just leaked: A massive data breach exposed 150 million social media, streaming and financial logins. Infostealer malware quietly harvested the unprotected credentials. Reusing passwords gives hackers the keys to your entire digital life. I rely on NordPass to create and store strong, unique passwords for every single account. If one site is breached, the rest stay locked down. Get 52% off right now. That’s only $1.43 a month.*

Humans-only club: I hate agreeing with paperwork, but this one tracks: If a machine can make art, it should at least suffer through a copyright application like the rest of us. Ever look at an AI image and think, Cool, but who gets paid when it’s on a T-shirt at the mall? Not the robot. The U.S. Supreme Court declined Stephen Thaler’s case after he tried to copyright a 2018 AI-made image listing the machine as the author. Courts said humans only. Here’s the real question nobody’s asking: If AI can’t own the work, who does? The guy who typed the prompt? The company who built the model? Lawyers are going to eat well on this one. Real well.

⌚ Wrist saves driver: Another day, another Apple Watch saves the day story. An Ohio 19-year-old hit a tree while driving home from work in the snow, slid down a 15-foot ravine, and her truck flipped upside down into the Little Miami River. Pitch-black, swallowing water, trapped. Her Apple Watch detected the crash and called 911 while she breathed through a 4-inch gap in the floorboards. Firefighters busted the window, yanked her out, with minor injuries. The watch costs $250. Let’s see your Rolex do that. These stories never get old. Neither does being alive.

If I were working at Google or Microsoft right now, marketing Chromebooks and Surface laptops, I’d be sweating.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: ChatGPT has a secret “off the record” mode. You know those questions you’d never google on a shared computer? There’s a fix. Click the speech bubble icon in the top right corner and Turn on temporary chat. The prompt box goes dark. Nothing gets saved to your history. Nothing feeds the AI’s memory. Close the window when you’re done, and it vanishes completely. No trace. No awkward explanations. (You’re welcome.)

Your Mac has a built-in white noise machine, and most people have no idea: Go to System Settings > Accessibility > Audio, flip on Background Sounds and pick ocean waves, rain or a stream. Drag the slider to dial in the volume. Works on iPhone, too, same path. Windows and Android users? Sorry. You got skipped on this one. YouTube playlists exist, but they’re not the same. Sigh.

⌚ Silence your Apple Watch without touching a single button: Just cover the face with your palm and hold it there for three seconds. Muted. To make sure it’s on, go to Settings > Gestures > Cover to Mute. And while you’re in there, turn on Wrist Flick, too. Two quick flicks dismiss notifications and take you home. Two gestures. Zero tapping. Extremely satisfying.

Chrome can read the internet to you: Add the Read Aloud extension from the Chrome Web Store. Pin it. Highlight any text on any page, click the icon, and it reads it back. Adjust the voice, pitch and speed under Settings. Perfect for when your eyes are done but your to-do list isn’t. FYI, it works on PDFs, too. That one’s a game changer.

🌙 Stop torching your eyeballs every night: Dark mode exists. Use it. On iPhone: Settings > Display & Brightness > Dark. On Android: Settings > Display > Dark Theme. Better yet, schedule it to flip automatically at sunset on both. You’ll sleep better, save a little battery and stop squinting at a glowing rectangle like it personally offended you. Easy.

Remember when Orangetheory was all the rage? They were onto something.

Imagine a world full of ripped people cycling, rowing, sprinting and pulling weighted generators that feed energy straight into nearby data centers. Welcome to ENERGYM, a satirical peek into the future of humans as resources.

The pitch from the founders (older, noticeably softer versions of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman) is simple: “What if we could use the energy of humans to power the machines that took away their jobs?” Poetic, really.

So yeah, AI may have taken your career, but don’t worry, it found you a workout. Looks like we’ll power through this one.

🔜 Tomorrow: Consider this your refund scavenger hunt. I’m walking you through class action real settlements that are open, how to claim your cash step-by-step and why companies are betting you’ll be too tired to click submit. Look for me in your inbox in the morning!

The answer: D) A built-in accelerometer that senses jaw movement. Your AirPods are tiny motion detectors for your face. When you talk, that little sensor picks up the vibrations in your jaw and skull. Not sound. Vibrations. Then beamforming microphones zero in on your voice and kill everything else.

Same accelerometer also knows when an AirPod is in your ear vs. on the table (auto-pause), reads your head nods and shakes to answer or decline calls, and tracks your head movement so Spatial Audio stays locked even when you turn around. All from a sensor smaller than a grain of rice.

🙉 Apple put a biomechanics lab in your ears. Wild. I used to hate my ears. But I grew attached to them. That’s sound advice right there.

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🔐 Smart people don’t fear the future. They prepare for it. So honored I can help you do that. — Kim

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 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): Gemini, slopehill, Jan De Loore

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