An Ignoble Experiment: 🕵️ Your router snitches

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📬 Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here. Tomorrow: Talking to your phone is three times faster than typing on it. I’ll tell you how to start, plus pro moves for people who already dictate.

Happy Sunday to you, friend. Remember when “motion detector” meant a fancy camera, a spy movie laser grid or your dog barking at nothing? Comcast hired your Xfinity router. Millions of them can detect movement at home. No camera, no mic, no extra gizmo. One person said he noticed a hand raise.

🛜 So how’s your router know you’re moving through the house? A) It listens for footsteps through your smart speaker, B) It reads your phone’s GPS, C) Your body messes with the Wi-Fi signal, D) It smells your socks. Take a guess, the answer is hiding out at the end.

🔒 I don’t set and forget my recommendations: I looked closely at every major VPN this year, and NordVPN is my pick. Fast enough to leave on all day, private enough to trust with my family. Ten devices, one account. I negotiated it down to $3.37 a month. Get 76% off plus four extra months.* — Kim

TODAY’S DEEP DIVE

Ewe are here

Image: ChatGPT/Kim Komando

🤯 WOW! The Faroe Islands have about twice as many sheep as people. So when Google Street View skipped them, one local strapped solar-powered, 360-degree cameras to sheep and posted the photos herself. Five weeks later, Google said it was coming. Ewe can’t make this up.

📖 Read time: 2 minutes

I thought this would be a fun idea for a Sunday.

Picture the Faroe Islands, 18 rocky land masses between Iceland and Norway. Waterfalls dropping into the sea. Grass roofs. Sheep everywhere. (The name even comes from the Old Norse word for sheep.)

Google Street View had been almost everywhere in Europe. Not here. Tourists couldn’t preview the roads. The islands felt left off the map. Literally.

So in 2016, Durita Dahl Andreassen from the islands’ tourism office built a harness with a shepherd’s help and fitted five sheep with 360-degree cameras. The photos went back with GPS tags, and she uploaded them herself. She called it Sheep View 360.

The sheep didn’t move much. (Seriously.) They were supposed to roam the hills. They mostly ate.

Didn’t matter one bit. The internet loved it. Google called it “shear brilliance,” loaned the islands its backpack Street View camera and the Faroes went live on Google Maps.

🐪 Google’s weirdest camera crew

Street View started in 2007 with cars. When the roads ran out, Google got creative. Before the sheep got involved, Google strapped its backpack camera to a camel named Raffia to capture the Liwa desert in Abu Dhabi, where dunes reach 131 feet.

Hikers carried the camera through the Grand Canyon for 9,500+ panoramas. Divers swam it past sea lions in the Galapagos.

And astronaut Thomas Pesquet shot all 15 modules of the International Space Station, about 250 miles up. Inside, it’s as big as a five-bedroom house.

🗺️ Trips to take from your couch

Tap any link below. On a computer, click and drag to look around. On your phone, it opens in Google Maps. Swipe to spin, tap the arrows to walk.

Faroe Islands. You land near Gásadalur, where a waterfall drops straight into the ocean.
Liwa Desert, Abu Dhabi. Explore sweeping desert dunes captured by a camel-mounted Street View Trekker camera.
Machu Picchu, Peru. Walk through the historic Inca citadel nestled high in the Andes. Sure beats my three week hike up to see it.
Yosemite’s El Capitan. Scale the 3,000-foot vertical granite face alongside legendary rock climbers. The only way I’d see this for sure!
Eiffel Tower, Paris. Enjoy panoramic 360° views looking out over Paris from the top observation deck.
Ilulissat Icefjord, Greenland. Drift alongside massive glaciers and floating icebergs.
Google Street View Treks Hub. Access Google's featured interactive indoor environments and behind-the-scenes tours.

To check your own bucket list, open Google Maps, search any spot and drag the little yellow person (Google calls him Pegman) onto a blue line. On your phone, tap Layers > Street View. Who needs a passport when you’ve got Pegman?

What do you call a really fast sheep? A lamb-orghini. (That was so bad, it was good!)

📩 Send this to someone who loves to travel but hates airports.

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IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

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📺 YOUTUBE: THE KIM KOMANDO SHOW

Saved by a Wendy’s receipt

Amadeus was sitting in his own driveway when the cops pulled up. A license plate camera swore his car had just ripped across town at 100 mph. They were ready to cuff him and haul off his car.

His alibi? A fast-food receipt.

Hear Amadeus tell it in his own words. You'll never look at the cameras on your street, or that crumpled receipt in your cup holder, the same way again.

▶️ Watch on YouTube →

WEB WATERCOOLER

🚪 Robots rattle doors: Uh-oh. OpenAI built software smart enough to test locked doors but not polite enough to ask first. The company warned more than 100 organizations that its agents may have rattled their systems, tried unexpected commands, used sites as message boards and evaded security checks. OpenAI says that doesn’t automatically mean compromise. Comforting, like knowing the raccoon in your house might not have rabies. Sure, maybe it didn’t break in, it just licked every doorknob and took notes.

Third wheels, now standard: How bad is modern romance that Tinder had to launch “Group Hangouts” for dating with all your friends? Small groups can match and organize outings together, replacing the solo meetup with a buddy system. On the plus side, it could make meeting strangers safer, funnier and far less intense. The crazy part? Your friends can reject your terrible romantic decisions before they become a three-year mistake and a shared Costco membership.

💥 Your computer is replaceable: Your data isn’t. People drop $1,800 on a laptop but won’t spend a few bucks to protect the family photos and tax documents inside. I use Carbonite for unlimited, encrypted, automatic cloud backup. Real backup. Not sync. Not mirroring. Get 50% off now.*

📱 Budget phones, bigger bills: Cheap phones aren’t so cheap anymore. Samsung and Google are raising prices on budget models. The Galaxy A17 5G jumps from $200 to $270. The A57 goes from $550 to $600. Google’s Pixel 10a climbs a full $100 to $599. Blame the memory chip shortage, which some say could last until 2030. Shopping for Mom or a kid’s first phone? Lock in a deal now, before prices creep even higher. Your wallet will thank you.

📸 Say cheese, skip fees: You may never pay for another school photo package after seeing this. Parents are skipping the stiff poses, bad lighting and pricey print bundles by taking quick phone pictures of their kids and asking ChatGPT to add polished studio backdrops. The result? Professional enough for the fridge, holiday cards and grandparents, without dropping $40 on portraits that make your child look like a nervous junior accountant. Picture day will be another thing we explain to grandkids like paper maps and checkbooks.

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DEVICE ADVICE

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Write that email now, let Gmail send it later. On desktop, click the arrow next to Send > Schedule send. On mobile, tap the three dots at the top right after composing > Schedule send. Pick a date and time. One less thing to remember on Monday. Look at you, already organized.

📘 AI is rewriting your job: The question is whether you’re steering or scrambling. I’m implementing NetSuite in my own business, so I know firsthand what it can do. Download the free guide, “Aligning for the Agentic Era,” and see what’s coming before your competitors do. It won’t cost you a dime.*

Remember the laugh, can’t find the video? You’ve got hundreds of clips and want exactly one. Your iPhone can search them by sound. In Photos, tap the magnifying glass at the bottom right and type “laughing” or “clapping.” Open a video from the results. The blue section in the playback bar shows where that sound happens. Finally, a search for “you know, the one where everyone cracked up.”

📱 One screenshot, not six: That recipe scrolls forever, and you’re stuck snapping picture after picture. Using Chrome on Android? Tap the three dots > Share > Long screenshot. Drag the handles to cover the section you want, then tap Confirm and Save or Share. Works on most web pages. Receipts, recipes, instructions, all in one image. No more hunting for Page 3 among all those photos of the dog.

📺 Local news, lost signal: Roku quietly pulled out-of-market local news stations from its free Live TV guide. You used to be able to watch stations from other cities. Now you only see your own market. It hits Roku TVs, Roku players and The Roku Channel app on other devices. Changing your zip code won’t help, because Roku checks your internet connection’s location. Roku hasn’t said why. It’s money.

📋 Copy once, paste forever: You copied an address, then a phone number, and poof, the address is gone. Go to Settings > System > Clipboard and turn on Clipboard history. Now press the Windows key + V anytime to see the last 25 things you copied, text and images included. Click one to paste it. Pin the ones you use every day, like your email address. Your clipboard just got a memory upgrade.

KIM’S DAILY DEALS

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WHAT THE TECH?

Image: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

🏺 Grave expectations

“I miss you, Dad” has been hitting hard for at least 1,700 years.

Archaeologists in Egypt’s Dakhla Oasis uncovered a Roman-era tomb containing a 19-line poem in ancient Greek, written by a son named Sarapion for his father, Pisechtes. The poem praises Dad’s wisdom and kindness before ending with: “Listen, father!”

The tomb came loaded with an ancient Egyptian care package for the afterlife: protective spells, offerings and a Constantine coin.

We have iCloud. Sarapion had stone. His backup lasted longer.

LOGGING OUT …

🎓 What you learned today: 🎓 What you learned today: Five sheep got a trillion-dollar company to show up, OpenAI’s agents are jiggling digital doorknobs, your phone plus ChatGPT can beat a $40 picture day, and a 1,700-year-old poem proves missing Dad never goes out of style. Not bad for one email. Tomorrow, I’ll show you how to talk to your phone and skip the thumb-typing for good. Tomorrow, I’ll show you how to use dictation, so you can stop thumb-typing like it’s 2009.

🛜 Answer: C) Your body messes with the Wi-Fi signal. Your router is constantly talking to stationary gadgets like smart speakers and thermostats. Each of those invisible links becomes a trip wire.

When you walk through a signal, your body bends and blocks it, and software flags the change. The feature is opt-in and off by default, but here’s the kicker: Xfinity’s fine print says it may share that motion data with law enforcement or in a court case without telling you. My Wi-Fi knows when I walk to the fridge. Now the dog AND the router judge me.

Wi-Fi sensing is an industry standard, so expect this to become the usual for routers. Two Wi-Fi antennas got married last Thursday. The reception was fantastic! (lol)

🛡️ Your VPN from three years ago is not the VPN you’d pick today: I reevaluated every major option, and NordVPN came out on top. Two clicks, everything encrypted, 10 devices covered. Thirty-day money-back guarantee. Get 76% off.* That’s $3.37 a month plus four extra months.

🐑 Five sheep and one stubborn idea beat a trillion-dollar company’s to-do list. Never wait your turn. Have a restful Sunday. — 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.

HOW’D WE DO?

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Simple Modern, Cosori, Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

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