Hello, hello! Happy to spend some of this beautiful Friday with you. Trivia time first! The Pulitzer Prize is the biggest award in journalism, and two winners this year used AI. Was it to … A.) Write their first drafts, B.) Analyze aerial photography, C.) Survey police files and/or D.) Generate images? Two are right! Find the answers at the end.

🥳 Let’s party like it’s Friday! I’m livestreaming today at 11:30 a.m. Pacific (2:30 p.m. Eastern). Come say hi on YouTube, Rumble or Facebook. It’s a blast. Now, let’s get into the tech smarts. Today’s top story is a very important one you really need to share with your family and friends. — Kim

Come with me. Imagine you rush to the emergency room, but after five hours, they tell you to find another hospital. Or you check in at your specialist’s office for a chronic condition, only to find they’ve lost your entire medical history. Both of these scenarios just happened.

Yesterday’s cyberattack on one of the largest health systems in the U.S., Ascension, was bad — really bad. Before you say, “Another data breach? So what, Kim?” know that having your records sold on the dark web is the least of your worries.

Code red

The hack on Ascension sent its 140 hospitals and 40 senior facilities into full-blown chaos. It took down patient record systems and medication prescribing systems, forcing doctors and nurses to rely on paper charts and handwritten records to keep things running.

One patient, Zackery Lopez, checked himself in at an Ascension-run hospital in Southfield, Michigan. He was suffering from internal bleeding and thinking his cancer had returned. Zackery waited a grueling seven hours before a nurse could help him. As he waited, he saw patients checking themselves out.

Keep your health records safe

When hospital systems get hacked, it’s a matter of life and death. And it’s happening more and more often. Keeping physical records sounds old-school, but if digital systems go down, it could save your life.

• Start with a list. Make a list of all your meds, including dosages and names, and keep both digital and physical copies. Store a physical copy in your purse or wallet if you’re currently in treatment or in case of emergency.

I also recommend compiling your full medical records and having a printed copy on hand. If you have an iPhone, you can sync them to your Health app:

Add your health records

• Open the Health app on your iPhone or iPad.
• If you're on your iPhone, tap the Summary tab, then your profile picture in the upper-right corner. On iPad, tap Profile in the upper-left corner.
• Scroll down to Features > Health Records > Get Started.
• Search for your hospital or network, then tap it. FYI: It’ll ask you to add location services to find hospitals and health networks near you, but you don’t have to enable it to search.
• Under Available to Connect, choose Connect Account. Sign in to your health care provider's website or app.
• Wait for your records to update. It might take a minute for your information to appear.
• Repeat these steps for each supported provider. Start by going to Features, then tap Add Account.

View your health records

• Open the Health app on your iPhone or iPad.
• If you're on your iPhone, tap Browse. On iPad, open the sidebar.
• Under Health Records, tap a category.
• Tap an item to see more information about it.

I have medical reporting dating back to 2012 in my account, and it's a 66-page PDF! Yes, you really do want that much detail.

Android folks: Google doesn’t have a built-in Health app equivalent. Sorry. Lots of folks like the free CommonHealth app, though, which connects with 15,000 providers.

No jokes today. If you haven’t been impacted by a health care breach yet, odds are, you will be. Share this with your loved ones, and keep reading this newsletter to stay on top of this crisis in health care.

I’m a big fan of lighting. I was clicking through Amazon, looking for something to brighten up a dark corner, and stumbled onto a new-to-me category: Bathroom novelty lights.

Vanity light: This string of 10 LED bulbs attaches to your mirror with adhesive strips. With 10 brightness levels and three color temperatures, give your bathroom a dressing-room vibe. They’re 20% off ($11.92).

Roll light: A battery-powered nightlight ($12.89) that cleverly replaces your regular toilet paper spindle. It’s motion-activated and shuts off automatically after two minutes.

Rim light: Hang this little light over your toilet rim and never wonder if the seat is down again. It’s motion-activated, and you can cycle through its 16 colors or choose your favorite. A two-pack is 37% off ($13.77).

A Dell, rolling in the deep: A new data breach affects up to 49 million Dell customers. Names, physical addresses, Dell hardware and order information all were swiped. Good news: Financial deets, emails and phone numbers are safe. Stay alert for phishing scams and suspicious mail now that scammers know where you live.

🔞 OpenAI’s getting into porn: They’re seriously talking about letting users create “responsible porn” with ChatGPT and DALL‑E. We’re talking erotica, extreme violence, profanity and the like, all under the banner of “creative freedom.” Remember when OpenAI said it would strive to use AI to “foster greater empathy and respect”?

Little Tokes: The internet is swarming with fake Little Tikes websites. Ads on Google, Instagram and Facebook offer amazing “deals” but link to lookalike sites with hard-to-catch typos. Yeah, you never get what you order. Be safe: The official site is littletikes.com.

200 injuries so far: The FDA has recalled the Tandem Diabetes Care t:connect iOS app. It’s been crashing and relaunching, causing the compatible t:slim X2 insulin pump to shut down prematurely. If you're affected, update your app to version 2.7.1 or later ASAP.

💰 Don’t waste your money: Meta’s now pitching its built-in AI features that help you create full ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. That includes image and text generation. I wouldn’t trust it, but watch your ads and spending very carefully if you do.

📎 Clippy’s back … Kind of. Winpilot, a third-party tool that helps optimize your Windows OS, now includes a built-in assistant called — you guessed it — Clippy. Much like the original Office 97 assistant, it mostly assists with stuff you can do already in your Settings menu. But it can help you remove Windows 11’s built-in AI assistant, Copilot. Assistant-on-assistant crime: You hate to see it.

Too much power: Advertisers can now use Walmart's shopping data for targeted ads on Disney+ and Hulu. Disney Advertising and Walmart Connect’s partnership gives marketers access to 145 million customers. They say they’ll match users’ data “without violating their privacy,” but they always say that.

🧠 Lost the thread: Neuralink says its brain chip has already malfunctioned in its first human patient. Some of the “threads” — hair-thin electrodes meant to monitor his brain activity — stopped working. Neuralink tweaked the chip’s algorithm and now says its performance is “better than ever.” I hope this is true and not PR BS.

Sit, shoot, roll over: The U.S. Marines' special ops division is testing armed robot dogs. Seriously. For now, they’ll still need a human to pull the trigger. The “Terminator”-like pups rely on AI to identify targets before asking their human operators whether to fire.

🖼️ All eyes on you: Use Google Photos? See all the pics you took in a specific location. Open the Google Photos app. In the bottom bar, tap Search. Under the Places section, tap View All.

Every dollar counts: Next time you need to return an Amazon order, think twice about where you do it. If you go to a UPS Store when Whole Foods, Kohl’s or Amazon Fresh is the same distance or closer, you’ll have to pay a $1 fee.

🤖 Sorry I missed your call: Hackers can use your "voice fingerprint" to access voice-protected financial records or rip off your relatives. Pro tip: Delete your outgoing voicemail message if it uses your voice, and replace it with a generic robot-voiced default.

What’s your function? On a PC, F2 lets you rename a selected file or folder, and F3 allows you to search within an open or active application. Alt + F4 closes your active window, and pressing F5 lets you refresh or reload a page or document window. Now you know.

End your password frustrations now: I use a password manager and you should, too. It automatically fills in all your passwords on all your devices and lets you know when those passwords are on the dark web. Get your first year of Keeper Security* for just $17.50 (that’s 50% off!) right now.

The days of easy virus detection are long gone. It’s not about sticking to “safe” sites anymore — malware can even pop up at the top of your Google search results. That’s why you need a trusted antivirus solution on your side.

I’m not talking about free options you can find in the app store, by the way. At best, they aren’t good enough to keep up with today’s threats. At worst, they’re stealing your info or even planting malicious software.

I use and trust TotalAV. You get total protection on five devices — and it’s only $19 for the first year. Amazing deal that I negotiated just for you!

From Tom in San Antonio: “My wife said when we run out of something to ‘put it on the fridge so we don't forget to buy it.’ She never said anything about a list.”

The answer: B.) Analyze aerial photography and C.) Survey police files. Two winning investigations teams — one from the New York Times and another from the City Bureau and Invisible Institute — each built proprietary AI models to help with their analyses. About 10% of this year’s Pulitzer Prize finalists shared they’d used AI in their reporting. Think ChatGPT will win a Pulitzer one day? Me, neither.

🔨 Let me tell you, AI will silently take over a lot of industries until it gets to carpentry. Then, everyone will suddenly start coming out of the woodwork! (Oh, I just crack myself up sometimes!)

Have a question you’d like to ask me? Reply to this email or drop me a line. I read every single note you send. Thanks for letting us in your inbox, and I’ll see you tomorrow with a neat tech DIY to set up timesaving shortcuts on your phone. Until then, continue to be the wonderful you! — Kim