USC researchers found you overpay on nearly 1 in 4 prescriptions, because a middleman sets your copay higher than the drug’s real price and pockets the difference. Pharmacists couldn’t tell you until 2018, and still aren’t required to bring it up. The six-word question, price-check apps and no-middleman pharmacies inside.
Flock’s cameras scan more than 20 billion license plates a month, and they’ve found kidnapped kids and closed murder cases. They’ve also tracked police officers’ ex-girlfriends, shown up in a Virginia woman’s front yard uninvited and nearly ended up on 350,000 Ubers. Now, 30-plus cities have pulled the plug, the company is scrambling to add rules and its own CEO reportedly keeps his plates out of the system. Here’s the whole story, plus the free map that shows every camera near you.
Consumer Reports testers caught one dozen eggs selling at five different prices, at the same store, at the same moment. About 75% of grocery items showed different prices to different shoppers, and that can cost a family of four up to $1,200 a year. The FTC found pricing systems that read your location, your abandoned cart and your mouse movements. Here’s how to price-check like the pros.
A Catholic sister in a full habit has 198,000 TikTok followers, and one convent video pulled 3.4 million views. The twist: Her order has been chasing the newest media for over a century, from printing presses to trending sounds. Meanwhile, monks in the Wyoming mountains run a thriving online coffee business. How the most unplugged people in America mastered the most online thing there is, without letting it master them.
Turn it up, now it’s blasting, turn it down, have to rewind, “what did she SAY?” A survey found over half of Americans keep subtitles on, mostly because the audio is muddled. The real culprits: razor-thin TVs with speakers firing at the wall, theater sound mixes crammed into your living room and streaming compression.
Homeowners are opening nonrenewal letters triggered by photos taken from planes and satellites: moss on the roof, a tarp, yard clutter. One insurer-backed imagery network says its cameras cover about 99% of the U.S. population. Nobody knocks, nobody calls, the letter just arrives. Four moves fight back, starting with demanding the photo.
ChatGPT will find open tables, book them and even join a Yelp waitlist without you leaving the chat. Here’s how to do it, the prompt that gets the best results and the catch about cancellations.
It’s America’s most-argued tech question. You mention dog food once, and the ad shows up an hour later. Scientists tested 17,000 apps and found zero secret recordings. But one media firm bragged about “Active Listening” tech, Apple paid $95 million over Siri misfires, and 2,230 companies are quietly feeding Facebook your shopping habits. The way ads REALLY find you is creepier than a hot mic. Plus the 5-minute settings fix.
Tonight, Earth plows through a comet’s dust trail: the Perseid meteor shower, up to 100 shooting stars an hour, visible from every state. This year’s peak lands on a new moon, the darkest viewing in years. When to look, where to look and the phone camera settings that can catch a falling star.
The largest security update in Microsoft’s history landed with almost no fanfare. Microsoft turned AI loose on its own code and found holes that had sat there for years. Apple is quietly doing the same thing to your Mac. Here’s the two-minute fix and the gap no patch will ever close.
Your smart TV has a setting called ACR that’s spying on everything you watch. It’s on by default, and every brand buries it somewhere different in settings. Turn it off and nothing changes except the ads get dumber.
Two of the biggest names in home security, breached four months apart by the same crooks using the same trick. Not malware. A phone call to an employee. Here’s what they took, and the five rules that keep you out of the follow-up scam.
GoGuardian watches about 27 million students, roughly half of America’s K-12 schools, and it doesn’t clock out at 3 p.m. Gaggle scans essays, emails and chats in about 1,500 districts, and kids have been flagged for song lyrics and a Bible verse. Four house rules protect your family, starting with the postcard talk.
The average household pays $69 a month for streaming, and 73% are fed up with the price hikes. Nielsen says free services like The Roku Channel beat some paid giants, and Tubi alone has 300,000 free titles. Cancel your least-watched app for 30 days and try one of these instead.
Hackers hit 30+ Minnesota water systems over two days. Here’s what could’ve happened, along with your 15-minute prep plan.
Every blinking clock and standby light is on your electric bill. A $10 gadget stops it and doubles as a burglar deterrent while you travel.
Crooks run AI-generated videos of senior FBI officials and copycat versions of ic3.gov, all aimed at people who already lost money once. The bureau issued the alert on July 20. Four rules keep you out of danger.
Three maxed-out credit cards. A $250,000 mortgage application. And a full set of dentures in Florida, ordered by a woman using Barry’s name. He did nothing wrong. It still took months to undo. Here is exactly what we did, in order.
An estimated $10 trillion crosses these cables every day, and roughly 60 ships on the entire planet keep them running. Ship anchors do more damage than sharks ever have, and Starlink’s whole fleet still can’t match one cable’s capacity.
A 20-minute setup stops half the panicked calls. A carrier with a real human who answers stops the rest, for your folks and for you.
