📬 Did someone forward this to you?Sign up here. Tomorrow: Mark in Texas suspects a family member might steal his identity. His question led to four free checks that tell you if someone is living as you.
Settle into Saturday, friend.Let’s rewind to the 1960s: Cold War tension, trench coats, secrets and one CIA plan that sounds like it escaped from a Saturday morning cartoon. The agency wanted to listen in on Soviet diplomats strolling through D.C. parks, but regular bugs couldn’t get close enough.
👂 Which animal did the CIA reportedly turn into a tiny walking spy gadget? A) Pigeon, B) Squirrel, C) Cat or D) Raccoon? Make your guess, the answer is waiting for you at the end.
💾Don’t be the person who learns this lesson the hard way. I’ve taken tearful phone calls from people who lost everything. Priceless photos. Videos. Tax returns. Years of work. Gone. Carbonite backs it up automatically. Get Carbonite for 50% off with my exclusive offer.*
Every color laser printer encodes nearly invisible yellow tracking dots on every page you print.
The Secret Service designed the program in the 1980s, and it never ended. Every major brand participates.
Law enforcement used it to identify people. You can test your own printer tonight.
📖 Read time: 3 minutes
Look closely at the image for this story. See those tiny yellow dots, arranged in a faint grid?
They’re on every page you’ve ever printed using a color laser printer. And they contain more than most people ever knew to look for.
If you hold a blue LED flashlight over that page in a dim room, a pattern emerges. These are called Machine Identification Codes. Printer manufacturers started embedding them in the 1980s at the direct request of the U.S. Secret Service.
The goal was to catch counterfeiters. If someone printed fake currency, investigators could trace the bills back to the specific machine. It worked. And it never stopped.
🖨️ What those dots reveal
The yellow dot pattern encodes your printer’s serial number, the date the page was printed and the time down to the minute. Invisible to the naked eye. Fully readable by investigators with the right tools. In 2004, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reverse-engineered the code and published a complete decoding guide.
Their work confirmed every major brand participates. HP, Canon, Xerox, Brother, Epson. If you’ve printed anything on a color laser printer since the early 1990s, those pages carry an invisible fingerprint tied back to your machine.
Law enforcement uses it. In 2017, NSA contractor Reality Winner was identified after leaking a classified document to a news outlet. Investigators traced the printout back to her specific machine, using those embedded yellow dots.
🔦 What you can do
Inkjet printers don’t use this system. Only color laser printers. You can test this yourself tonight. Print any page on a color laser printer.
Hold a blue LED flashlight over the blank white areas in a dim room. Look for a faint grid of yellow dots. You’ll find them.
Your printer has been quietly filing reports on you for decades. You never got a copy. Yup, I know what you’re thinking. Someday, my prints will come.
📩 Send this to someone who has a printer at home or in a home office. Use the links below.
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📺 YOUTUBE: THE KIM KOMANDO SHOW
Watch now or bookmark for later
Meta cut 8,000 jobs. The ultimate plot twist? It told the remaining employees every keystroke they type at work is being recorded. Why? To train the AI that could replace them.
That’s just one of the jaw-dropping stories in this week’s podcast.
Also on the show:
AI cracks $400K Bitcoin mystery.
Strangers form a human roadblock to stop a swerving driver.
Tesla Cybertruck takes a dive in the lake.
A CIA scientist claims the government knows about four alien species. (His words.)
One bride used ChatGPT to design her own wedding dress and saved $12,000.
University of Virginia researcher Maria Lungu on AI-powered wrongful arrests.
A grandpa uses AI to write a children’s book for his grandkids. (Grab the tissues.)
And wait until you see this homeowner’s drone tell delivery drivers where to go. It’s the future.
This episode is funny, creepy, emotional and honestly a little terrifying.
Listen now before everyone else is talking about it. 👇
🥾 Steel toes win: I’d like to formally apologize to every shop class kid told by society that they were choosing the backup plan. Picture a 24-year-old HVAC tech stepping out of a van for a fully booked week while somebody with $80,000 in loans refreshes a job board. AI’s nibbling on the bottom rung of the white-collar ladder while electricians and welders are seeing 30% pay jumps. Turns out the real career hack was owning kneepads that aren’t for pickleball. I guess you could say they’re wired for success.
🏦 Grandpa buys Bitcoin: Get this. Morgan Stanley, founded in 1935, is rolling crypto trading onto E-Trade like it discovered Reddit at Thanksgiving. The bank is reportedly undercutting Coinbase, Robinhood and Charles Schwab on fees, with a wider launch coming later this year. Nothing says financial maturity like an almost 100-year old bank whispering, “Fine, show me the dog coin.” How do you get $1,000 in cryptocurrency? Start with $2,000.
📘 Feel like AI’s moving faster than you can keep up? You’re not alone, but you can catch up. If your business is scaling fast, grab “Demystifying AI” for free. Glenn Hopper gives a great intro to AI, core concepts and the tech that fuels it.*
Remember to forget: Apple’s new stand-alone Siri app, reportedly coming with iOS 27, has a memory problem on purpose, letting you auto-delete chats (paywall link) after 30 days or one year, like Messages already does. That’s the pitch: ChatGPT remembers, Apple forgets. The crazy part? The long-delayed Siri reboot still arrives this fall wearing a beta tag, and Google’s Gemini is doing the brain work underneath. Apple outsourcing Siri’s brain to Google feels like hiring your ex to organize your wedding seating chart.
🚗 Faster than reality: Mercedes unveiled the AMG GT 4-Door EV, with 1,153 horsepower, reaching 0 to 60 under two seconds, and 600kW charging that can add 300 miles in about 10 minutes. The best part? It plays fake V8 sounds and exhaust burbles through speakers and even has fake gear shifts so it feels like a gas car. Purists are furious (what else is new?), but it sounds incredible. Hey, if my car adds 300 miles in 10 minutes, it can make fart sounds for all I care. Watch the unveiling here.
🎤 PODCAST: THE KIM KOMANDO SHOW
CIA scientist claims the government knows about 4 alien species
(Starts at 42:53) The government just released UFO files, and a former CIA scientist claims officials have known about at least four alien species for years. Humanity spent decades asking if we are alone, but it turns out the universe might be a variety pack.
This isn’t your basic Fire TV Stick. It’s the only model with Wi-Fi 6E, so streaming stays silky smooth when everyone’s online. Alexa+ search finds your shows fast, without the endless scrolling.
Image: Amazon
📱 Shake-free video: The Osmo Mobile 7 phone gimbal(21% off, $59) keeps videos smooth, doubles as a selfie stick and even charges your phone.
Dashboard upgrade: This mini adapter(22% off, $28) turns wired Apple CarPlay or Android Auto into wireless. No more cable fumbling every time.
💡 Set the mood: Linkind’s color-changing LEDs(30% off, $24, four-pack) work with Alexa and Google and use less juice than a regular 60W bulb.
Cord commander: A flat power strip(36% off, $9) adds six outlets and tucks behind furniture without bulging out. Perfect for small spaces.
Prices and deals were accurate at the time of publication.
DEVICE ADVICE
⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Stop pecking at your phone keyboard one letter at a time. Drag your finger from letter to letter, release to finish, and your phone figures out the word. On iPhone, it’s called QuickPath, and it’s on by default. On Android, try it or turn it on under Settings > Keyboard > Swipe to type.
⏳ Your antivirus shouldn’t take hours to run a scan. Really. If it does, it’s using a 10-year-old “bloatware” model. People always ask me why Webroot is so fast. It’s cloud-based. It checks for threats in seconds, not hours. Get my exclusive offer: 62% off Webroot Essentials now.*
Put YouTube on a shorter leash: Before you hand over the screen, turn on Restricted Mode. It helps filter mature videos with drugs/alcohol or violence and hides comments, too. On PC, click your profile icon, turn on Restricted Mode, then go back and hit Lock Restricted Mode on this browser, so tiny hands can’t switch it off.
👨💻 Be tech support without driving over: Helping someone fix a computer? Use the built-in remote tools. On Windows, hit Ctrl + Win + Q to open Quick Assist. On Mac, go to System Settings > General > Sharing, turn on Screen Sharing and open the app. Safer than sketchy downloads. Grandma’s printer drama: handled.
Fire TV remote tricks: A few button presses can save you from digging through menus. Hold Home for the system menu. Hold Up + Rewind for 10 seconds to change resolution. Glitching out? Press Select + Play/Pause to reboot. And when it’s fully frozen? Hold Back + Right to factory reset. Use that one carefully.
🧪 Chrome has a hidden lab: Feeling adventurous? Type chrome://flags into the address bar and hit Enter. You’ll find experimental features Google is testing before they go mainstream. A fun one to try: Search for Smooth Scrolling and Enable it. Just don’t go flipping every switch. Things can break.
WHAT THE TECH?
Image: Hypershell
🫠 Robot hips for the trail
Climbing Everest is so last century. Hypershell launched the X Series, AI-powered exoskeleton hips you strap on before your hike.
The HyperIntuition system syncs to your gait in 0.31 seconds, delivers up to 1,000 watts of movement assist and supposedly cuts your oxygen use by 39.2% and your heart rate by 42.7%. There are dedicated modes for snow, sand dunes and merely going fast.
The top model runs $1,999 and carries you about 10.9 miles per charge. After that, you’re on your own. I guess that’s what they mean by a hard pass. You can see how they work here.
LOGGING OUT …
🔜 Tomorrow: Identity theft isn’t always a stranger in a hoodie. Sometimes it’s someone who knows your birthday, address and mother’s maiden name. I’ll show you the free checks to run and the one move to stop new fraud cold.
Tomorrow’s trivia is about how far Steve Jobs would go to prove a point to engineers.
💥 Your hard drive is going to crash. It’s not a question of if, but when it decides to die. When it does, every photo, document and piece of financial history you have ever saved is gone forever. I use and trust Carbonite. It runs automatically, backing up every file to the cloud without you lifting a finger. Get total protection right now and save a massive 50%.* Don’t wait for the inevitable, go do this today!
🐱 The answer: C, for Cat. Yes, really. The CIA spent millions implanting a microphone in a cat’s ear, an antenna in its tail and a battery in its body. The mission: Stroll past Soviet diplomats, and record their conversations.
The program was called Acoustic Kitty. It ran through the 1960s and took years to develop. The first field test ended when the cat wandered into traffic. Declassified documents from 2001 call it a “remarkable scientific achievement” that was “completely useless.”
Every cat owner could’ve told them that for free. I think my cat might be a communist. He won’t shut up about Mao. Drop a rating below and a comment if you want. I read them all.
🚀 You don’t need permission to start. You merely need to start. I believe in you! — Kim
Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily
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Keep a civil tongue.