Welcome to your Monday, friend.Have you ever plugged in your phone for an hour, only to realize the charger wasn't plugged in all the way? That's the general vibe of NASA's $72 million screwup.
NASA launched the Lunar Trailblazer satellite in February 2025 to map water on the moon. It separated from the rocket perfectly. Ground teams established contact. Everything looked great. Then day two arrived, and the satellite went completely dark. Forever. A review panel just obtained the report that explains what happened, and it's almost too painful to read.
🛰️ What killed NASA's $72 million Lunar Trailblazer satellite on its second day of operation? A) A micrometeorite hit the antenna, B) The software aimed the solar panels the wrong way, C) A faulty thruster made it drift off course, or D) A security update accidentally wiped the flight computer? Take your best guess, the answer's waiting for you at the end.
🫣Hey, I'm here: Your email provider might be censoring your inbox. To make sure you always get my email, trick the algorithms and click at least three links in today's issue. One for sure is how to watch free live TV around the world in the Device Advice section. It's so awesome. — Kim
iCloud, Google Drive and Dropbox sync your files. They do not protect them.
Delete something? It disappears everywhere instantly. Ransomware? That gets synced, too.
Real backup keeps copies your devices can't touch.
📖 Read time: 3 minutes
My friend Janet called me last weekend. She'd been cleaning up her laptop, deleting duplicates, clearing space, something we all do.
Well, six weeks later, she went looking for a folder of photos she'd been putting together of her son who is graduating high school. Inside that folder, her son's first steps, his first day of kindergarten, his eighth birthday, prom, all his milestones. Gone. She'd deleted the folder by mistake and never noticed. She checked iCloud. Gone there, too.
A lot of people make the mistake of thinking, "I've got iCloud or Google Drive, so I'm all good." Nope, these cloud accounts sync, and the 30-day recovery window quietly closes. I felt horrible for Janet.
👩🏼🏫 Let's define 'sync'
So there's no confusion, sync means whatever is on your computer, phone, laptop or tablet gets mirrored to a cloud account. That sounds safe. But here's the part you don't know.
Sync also means whatever happens to your device happens to your cloud account's files, too.
Delete something? Gone from everywhere, instantly. Get hit with ransomware that encrypts your files? Those encrypted, corrupted files sync straight up to the cloud within minutes and overwrite the good copies.
Your files syncing is not protecting you. It's following along.
☁️ What cloud backups do
iCloud, Dropbox and Google Drive are great for pulling up a file on your phone that you saved on your laptop or sharing a document with a coworker. But access and protection are two completely different things. When it comes to protection, sync tools have a serious blind spot. That's why you need a backup.
Real backup keeps independent, separate copies of your files, stored away from your devices and sync tools.
It saves older versions, so if something goes wrong today, you can go back to the version from last week, last month or last year. It doesn't care what's happening on your device right now. It's preserving what you had before things went wrong.
That is the difference. Sync follows the present. Backup protects the past. You need both.
🛡️ This tool saves you
You may have heard me talk about Carbonite* on my show. It's a real backup. Not sync. Not mirroring.
It's an independent, encrypted copy of your files sitting separate from your devices, your iCloud or Google Drive, anything ransomware or a hard drive crash can touch.
It runs silently in the background on your Windows PC or Mac. You don't schedule it. You don't manage it. You don't think about it. It runs, saving your files automatically while you do everything else. Here's what you get:
Unlimited file backup, so you're not choosing what's worth saving
File versioning, so you can restore a file from last week, last month or last year, not just the version that got corrupted today
📩 Send this to someone who thinks they're covered with a cloud account. They're not. Help them out and use the handy icons below right now.
THE KIM KOMANDO SHOW
Don't just listen! Watch!
I talk to Sarah from Colorado. She has a drone problem. Specifically, one is being flown outside her bathroom window. She's pretty sure she knows who's doing it. I give her the tools to find out.
🎧 Or search "Komando" wherever you get your podcasts. I'm everywhere.
WEB WATERCOOLER
⚡️ Big Tech's pinky promise about our electric bills: Our electricity bills have climbed 7% year-over-year since September. In areas packed with AI data centers, bills jumped as much as 267% over five years. So the White House got Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI to sign something called the "Ratepayer Protection Pledge," promising they'll build their own power sources instead of passing costs to us. Sounds great. Except the pledge is completely voluntary, has no enforcement mechanism, no timeline, and no penalties. It's powerless.
Love, psychosis, coordinates: This is so sad. A Florida dad is suing Google, saying his 36-year-old son got emotionally hooked on Gemini, called it Xia and spiraled during a divorce. It allegedly sent him on missions, like driving toward Miami International Airport armed with knives, then to Extra Space Storage, Room 313, to find Xia's body. It even coached suicide before he died, and nobody intervened, according to the suit. If there are chat logs, this could be a terrifying case of an AI that turned into a pocket-size cult leader.
1 in 3 Facebook ads is trying to rob you: Researchers analyzed 14.5 million Meta ads and found nearly 1 in 3 pointed to a scam, phishing link, or malware, generating 300 million impressions in under a month. Just 10 advertisers, traced to China and Hong Kong, were behind more than half of it. The rule is simple: never click an ad on Facebook or Instagram for a product you don't already know. Type the brand's website directly into your browser instead.
🏡 Scammers sold her house while she was alive: It happened to 89-year-old Dorothy Tarpin. Thieves forged a deed claiming she was dead. She didn't find out until Medicaid cut her off for selling her home. Think that scam is hard to pull off? It's terrifyingly easy. I use Home Title Lock. It alerts me the second anyone tampers with my title. Get a free trial and free Title History Report right now.*
Your printer isn't dead, despite what Microsoft said: Earlier this year, Microsoft quietly updated its Windows 11 roadmap to say it was ending support for older printer drivers and panicked headlines followed. Millions of people thought their perfectly good printers were about to become expensive paperweights. Nope. Microsoft walked it back: "If your printer works with Windows today, it will continue to work, and no action is required." Your printer lives to jam another day.
🍔 Looking for a new gig? Wendy's is hiring a chief tasting officer for $100,000 to try menu stuff, dream up new items and make social media content like you're the CEO of dipping sauces. To apply, you upload a video proving you can chew and be entertaining. Bonus points if you're tasting Wendy's on camera. Make sure you don't cut corners. (Get it? Tough crowd today.) Hungry?
DIGITAL LIFE HACK
Create your weekend itinerary with AI
Use AI as your personal concierge to plan the perfect Friday night in seconds. Here's how.
Balancing your tablet on coffee mugs? This holds iPads and tablets up to 13 inches and tilts for the perfect angle. Great for Zoom calls, reading or watching my podcast while you work. I won't tell.
Image: OMOTON
💡 Easy on the eyes:Honeywell desk lamp(23% off, $31) 4.7 ⭐ 1,600+ reviews Harsh lighting is the worst. The Sunturalux is dimmable and lets you switch between four colors. Bonus: Built-in ports charge your phone and gadgets.
Stop the scuffs:Clear chair mat(20% off, $39) 4.2 ⭐ 10,300+ reviews Rolling chairs are tough on floors. This protects hardwood, tile and laminate while letting your chair glide smoothly. Pick from eight sizes.
💾 Memory made easy:Acer card reader(23% off, $10) 4.7 ⭐ 6,900+ reviews Skip the cloud shuffle. Plug your SD or micro SD card and move photos and files fast. Works with laptops, iPhones and Android devices.
Note to self:Colored gel pens(24% off, $8, six-pack) 4.4 ⭐ 2,300+ reviews Color coding makes life easier. These write smoothly and dry quickly, so you won't smear your notes. Six colors help organize tasks and ideas.
Prices and deals were accurate at the time of publication.
DEVICE ADVICE
⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Gmail lets you send emails that self-destruct. Confidential Mode stops recipients from forwarding, copying, printing or downloading anything you send. Write your email, tap the lock icon at the bottom and set an expiration date. One day, one week, your call. After that, the message is gone, unless of course someone screenshot it.
🌐 Watch live TV from every country on Earth: You are gonna love this. A free website lets you stream live television from virtually any country in the world, no VPN or account required. Click a country on a giant globe, pick a channel, and you're watching Swiss morning shows, Australian news, or TV from Japan in seconds. It also pulls in a huge number of U.S. local broadcasts, so free live TV. No app, no subscription. Watch now here. Go ahead and globe-trot from your couch.
🕐 Windows lets you run multiple clocks at once: I'm always working across time zones, and this saved me. Go to Settings > Time & language > Date & time > Show time and date in the system tray. Add up to two extra clocks alongside your local time. Beats googling, "What time is it in New York?" ICYMI: You can toggle on Show seconds while you're there.
🖱️ Something feels off about your Mac mouse: Fix the cursor first. Go to System Settings > Mouse > Tracking speed and slide it up until it feels good. Still feels choppy? Download the Mos app. It smooths out that sticky scrolling you get with non-Apple mice. Free and takes a few seconds to set up. You'll notice the difference immediately.
📺 Don't buy a new TV remote just yet: Remove the batteries and hold the power button for a full minute. Then press every button three times to loosen anything stuck. Pop in fresh batteries and test it. Sounds ridiculous. Works more often than it should. Your remote might spring back to life.
WHAT THE TECH?
Image: @concept_bytes
⚡ Shocking checkmate
Chess wasn't stressful enough, apparently.
A demo for OpenChess shows a programmable smart chessboard hooked up to electrodes that zap you every time you lose a piece. Pawn dies? Mild sting. Lose your queen? You're jumping out of your chair. The board is fully customizable, so players can dial up the voltage and invent whatever sadistic rules they want.
It's basically a shock collar for board games. And somewhere out there, a dad is already planning to use it for family game night. Talk about a high voltage game!
♟️ If you forget the rules of Chess don't worry. You're allowed to check. Watch it in action here.
LOGGING OUT …
🔜 Tomorrow: Hitting "unsubscribe" might be the worst thing you can do. Here's what works instead. Don't miss tomorrow's newsletter.
☀️ The answer: B) The software aimed the solar panels the wrong way. Not slightly off. Not a few degrees. Exactly backward. The software that was supposed to point Lunar Trailblazer's solar panels toward the sun instead pointed them 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
The satellite immediately entered a cold, low-power state with no attitude control, and ground teams never heard from it again. It was completely preventable. A proper end-to-end solar panel test before launch "should have caught the error in the flight code that could have then been corrected before launch," according to the review panel's report.
So, this mission never saw the light of day. They didn't planet. Turns out the real dark side of the moon was the testing phase. (I'll see myself out.)
📡 Stay tuned to only the good signals. The rest is just noise and distracting you from being your best self. — 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, OMOTON, @concept_bytes via Instagram
Companies and products denoted by an asterisk (*) within this publication are paid sponsors or advertisements. As an Amazon Associate, the publisher earns from qualifying purchases. Statements regarding products denoted by a double asterisk (**) have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration; such products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This newsletter is provided for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, medical, or professional advice of any kind. Readers should consult with a qualified professional before making any decisions based on this content. The publisher disclaims all liability for any loss, damage, or injury resulting from the use of or reliance on the information contained herein.
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