Plus: Russia’s $10M spy campaign, scammers as victims, my fave carpet cleaner | In partnership with hear.com | | Hi, hey, hello, it’s Saturday, friend! Let’s grow our minds with this brainteaser going viral on social media: “7 men have 7 wives. Each man and each wife have 7 children. What's the total number of people?” Think about it, and you’ll find the answer at the end. 📻 You + me = Smarts! My national radio show is airing all across the country this weekend on over 420 top stations. Find your local station or catch the show as a podcast. Btw, I’d love to go for a walk with you! — Kim 📫 First-time reader? Sign up here. (It’s free!) IN THIS ISSUE 🖌️ AI or human-made? 🕵️ Russia paid U.S. political influencers 🖨️ Print a site without the ads |
TODAY'S TECH HACK Fool me once, shame on me Forget trying to spot if a pic of a model was photoshopped. (It was.) Now we can’t even trust if the person we see in a photo or video is real. Fear not, I’m here to help you navigate the pixelated wilderness. Let’s look at the seven telltale signs an image is AI-generated. 7 signs that should make you say ‘Hmmm’ Perfect symmetry: To the point that you could fold an image in half and it would be perfectly mirrored on both sides. Landscape photos and close-up shots are prime candidates. Real people aren’t perfectly symmetrical. Distortion: There’s usually a little wonkiness or distortion hiding in an AI image. Look at the faces in a crowd; you’ll likely find someone who looks like they went for a swim in an oil painting. Unusual proportions: Objects might seem too big or small, like cars as tall as homes or doorways too tiny for anyone to squeeze through. Shadows and light: Real-world photos play nice with the laws of physics, but AI? Not so much. Shadows tend to go in all directions. Unnatural textures: AI has a way of making textures appear suspiciously flawless (and we’re not talking about your skin with that Instagram filter). Images might appear too smooth, with no natural textures or color variations. On the flip side, it can have the opposite effect; hyper-realistic portraits with zoom-worthy wrinkles, pores and blemishes are also a thing. Watermarks: Most free AI image generators stick watermarks onto their creations. You’ll usually find them in the bottom left or right corners in the form of a logo or text pointing to the source site or app. Weirdness: Look for oddities like strangely shaped features, too many fingers or accessories that don’t match. It’s always the small things! Tools you can use If you’re still feeling iffy about an image’s origin, I’ll leave you with a few AI-detection tools that caught my eye. They’re also free. Score! AI or Not: Simply drag and drop, upload, or paste an image URL into the search bar, and AI or Not will tell you if it's legit. Maybe's AI Art Detector: Pretty much the same as AI or Not, but it will give you the AI verdict in percentages (e.g., “20% human and 80% artificial”). Oh, and don’t forget about our old friend, Google’s reverse image search. If Google returns the same image from credible sources, chances are it's real. But if it points you to an AI site, you might want to sound the alarms. Here’s how to check on iPhone and Android. ✅ Over on my site, I’ve got one more trick only the pros know: Inspect the metadata embedded in the image itself. I’ll walk you through it. 😂 In every koi pond of four or more, at least one koi is always fake. You’ve got koi A, koi B, koi C and then the D koi. (That was so bad, it was good!) |
DEALS OF THE DAY So fresh and so clean, clean I’m gonna wash that dirt right out of my life! Folex is the stain remover for carpets and a big bottle is only $7. There’s a reason it has almost 85,000 reviews on Amazon and is a No. 1 bestseller. For clothes (and messy kiddos), you want Miss Mouth’s Messy Eater Stain Treater. The Pink Stuff (11% off) works, period. I just used it to clean the splatters off the side of a pan and gunk off the faucets. These skinny cleaning brushes (under $10) are better than your old toothbrush for nooks and crannies. De-stink your garbage disposal the easy way — under $4 right now! |
WEB WATERCOOLER 🚨 If that’s how it is, Soviet: Russia’s propaganda machine paid a Tennessee media company $10 million to post pro-Kremlin content. Tenet Media has a roster of popular right-wing influencers, including Dave Rubin, Tim Pool and Benny Johnson. The hosts say they had no clue Russia was paying them. FYI: Since November 2023, they’ve posted nearly 2,000 videos, racking up 16 million views on YouTube alone. Human-trafficking scammers: What a sad story. A Ugandan man was lured to Thailand with the promise of a $2,500-a-month data entry job. In reality, he was trafficked into working as a pig-butchering scammer. He made $400 a month working 17-hour shifts, seven days a week (paywall link). If his productivity dropped, he was punished with hundreds of push-ups and forced runs around a parking lot. After seven long months, he escaped and is now telling his story to warn others. If your pics or music are on a hard drive: Data company Iron Mountain says 20% of the hard drives they get from the ‘90s are dead on arrival. Even when stored in perfect conditions, these drives deteriorate; most last only three to five years. Don’t let this happen to you. Use an adapter to transfer your files to a new external drive. 🍏 Weapons of time distraction: Apple’s iPhone 16 preorders opened on Friday, and within 35 minutes, all colors and configurations of the iPhone 16 Pro Max were sold out. Shipping estimates are stretching into early October. If you still want one, try selecting “in-store pick-up” at checkout, or head to an Apple store on release day. I snagged the iPhone 16 Pro Max, but my delivery isn’t until Sept. 30. It could happen next week: The Netflix app may soon stop working on the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone X, iPad Pro (1st-gen) and iPad (5th-gen). Blame the upcoming iOS 18 release. Details for my geeks: Code strings show they’re dropping support for iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 devices. The workaround? Fire up Netflix on Safari or another web browser. Satellite puns never land: For the first time ever, a T‑Mobile smartphone used a Starlink satellite to send an emergency alert. The message traveled 217 miles into space, got picked up by a Starlink satellite and was sent back to Earth in seconds. Look for a full cellular satellite system with SpaceX this fall. 🗺️ Awesome save: A woman who fell 60 feet down a mountain was saved because of the navigation app what3words (iOS and Android). The app divides the world into 10-foot squares, each named with a unique combination of three words to pinpoint an exact location (e.g., 51.520847, -0.19552100 ←→ filled.count.soap). With the coordinates, emergency responders knew precisely where the woman was located. 50% off alert: My home security pick, SimpliSafe, is having a massive sale. Get all the gear to lock down your home for half off, plus score a free home security cam with your purchase.* |
TECH LIFE UPGRADES Redacted: If you ever send a password to a colleague, family member or friend in a chat or text, delete the message after they’ve copied it. There are more secure ways to share a password, but let’s be honest: Everyone shares them this way (even me!). A reason to update: Activation Lock on iOS 18 ties your phone’s battery, camera, display and everything else to your Apple ID. That means it’s useless to a thief who wants to steal it, take it apart and sell it off in pieces. If you have an iPhone 12 or later, get iOS 18 starting Monday. Wahoo! Ditch Hulu’s algorithm and browse by channel: Click Browse > Networks, then filter from A‑Z. What’ll it be? Renovations on HGTV? Recipes on Food Network? Rom-coms on Lifetime? Feels like old-school channel surfing! 🔖 Bookmark this: You want to print the content on a site but not the ads and junk. Drop the URL into PrintFriendly.com. You’ll get a clean, print-ready PDF. Sweet. 🥸 It’s not just emails: You can mark texts as unread, too, so you don’t forget to reply later. On iPhone, swipe right on a conversation and tap the Mark as Unread button (it looks like a thought bubble). On Android, hold down on the convo, click the three-dot icon in the corner, then select Mark as unread. |
DIGITAL LIFE HACK | | When you delete an email, is it gone for good? Think your deleted emails are gone forever? Think again — Big Tech is holding onto them, and they’re making money off every last one. Play now (9:38) → |
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WHAT THE TECH? New emojis coming soon: A face with eye bags (love it), a fingerprint, a purple splat, a beet, a spooky tree, a harp and a shovel. |
UNTIL NEXT TIME ... The answer: I say it’s 63. This one is tricky because it depends on how you interpret the question. If each man is married to one woman, it’s a total of 63 people. If you read it as each man has seven wives, then the sum is 399 people. 🍎 You know what they say: “Any family tree produces some lemons, some nuts and a few bad apples.” My goal with every newsletter is to have you take away something you can start using. If there’s anything you want to know, reply to this email or drop me a note here. Yes, I read them all. Thanks for being here with me and the best darn tech newsletter in the USA! — Kim |
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