📸 In hot water: Tea, the viral app for women to warn each other about sketchy men, just leaked 72,000 images, including 13,000 selfies and IDs, that they admit to. Plot twist: It wasn’t hacked. The pics were sitting in an open cloud folder, completely unsecured. The app went from leading the App Store to the “oh no” list.
The great iPhone rapture
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It starts like any typical night out. You’re sipping something overpriced and half-listening to your friend’s relationship drama. Then, you check your pocket. Empty. You think maybe it was a pickpocket. But the reality is far stranger.
Dozens of iPhones stolen in cities like Washington, D.C., New York and Chicago have resurfaced thousands of miles away, deep inside religious communities in southern China. That’s the interesting part.
📍 A sinful trail
Folks whose iPhones were stolen are using Apple’s Find My app to track their phones’ travel across the world.
In one case, a man watched his iPhone move from a D.C. bar to Latin America, then Southeast Asia, and finally land in a building linked to a Chinese church. He had never heard of the town, let alone visited it.
Other people reported nearly identical patterns, with their phones pinging from the same region.
So how did stolen iPhones end up in churches on the other side of the globe?
✌️ Peace be with iOS
Turns out, there’s an entire international pipeline designed to launder locked iPhones. These phones are pretty useless in the United States without the original Apple ID credentials. But in the hands of skilled hackers or digital middlemen, they can be exploited.
And many, it appears, are routed through church groups in China, getting them as part of larger electronics shipments.
⛪️ So why churches?
It’s not just about slipping past customs. It’s about creating cover. Spiritual sanctuaries don’t exactly scream “criminal enterprise.”
Get 100% free tech support 24/7
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Today is National System Administrator Appreciation Day, but this special day will soon be off the calendars. Thank you to all the unsung heroes updating, plugging and unplugging things and reminding us, “No, you can’t use 123456 again.”
3x
That’s how much Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses sales grew in the first half of this year. Zuck wants your face real estate (paywall link). Apparently, we also want our sunglasses to take selfies and hear voices. Meta is staking its claim before your sunglasses start running ads, really.
📢 Check for recalls: The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission site is worth checking now and then. You can search by categories, filter by date or hazard and sometimes get a refund or replacement. And if there’s ever a big recall, don’t worry, I’ll warn you here in my newsletter, too.
Four payments and a data leak
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Buy now, pay later (BNPL) apps are everywhere. See something shiny? Tap tap, and BAM, you own it in four “easy” payments. Zero interest, no credit card shame spiral. What a dream, right?
But here’s what they’re not telling you: While you’re breaking up your payments, they’re also breaking up your data and sharing it with companies you’ve never heard of.
YouTube sleep timer: You can play white noise before bed without it running all night. While watching a video, tap the cog icon (on mobile and desktop), select Sleep timer and choose a time like 30 minutes or End of video. Fingers crossed, no loud ad sneaks in to ruin your dreams.
10 hours a day
That’s the amount of screen time Americans are averaging. Apparently, “Netflix and chill” now runs concurrently with “Slack and panic.” Multitasking is also at an all-time-high. Whether they’re streaming the latest hit show or doomscrolling on social media, folks are plugged in like never before. Thank goodness for Wi-Fi. Without it, America might have to rediscover the outdoors.
8,000 vs. 120
That’s the USA vs. China satellite count. SpaceX is casually orbiting 8,000 Starlink satellites. China? Still stuck at 120 (paywall link). It’s a space race where one kid showed up on a rocket bike and the other forgot their shoes. China’s grand plan for 27,000 satellites is stuck at 0.4% complete. Talk about taking a red-eye.
Term life, whole life, compromised life: Allianz Life says a hacker tricked its way into a third‑party cloud CRM two weeks ago, compromising the addresses, birth dates and possibly SSNs of the majority of its 1.4 million U.S. customers, plus financial pros and some employees. You know the drill. They’ll send you a letter saying they’re sorry. You better freeze your credit and get ID theft coverage. I use NordProtect.*
Coder in Cellblock D: Preston Thorpe might be serving an 11-year sentence in Maine, but that didn’t stop him from landing a full-time software job at a VC-backed startup based in San Francisco. The company found him through his open-source contributions. The kicker? He codes from prison as part of a state rehabilitation program.
2
That’s how many skeletons were found fully intact in Israel’s Tinshemet Cave. Hands clasped like they were posing for a burial photo shoot, they looked eerily peaceful for being 100,000 years dead. Archaeologists still aren’t sure what species they were (Homo sapiens, Neanderthal or Android users), but one thing’s clear: Someone buried them like they mattered.
📺 Skip the app-hopping: Stream HBO Max, Paramount+, Apple TV+ and more, all inside Prime Video. Just log in on the web, click the Channels tab at the top and follow the prompts to subscribe. Now (almost) all your shows are in one place. So much easier.
We may earn a commission from purchases, but our recommendations are always objective.
Absolutely no fundamentals: GoPro’s stock ripped 58% in 48 hours last week because meme stock energy is so back, baby. No earnings, no innovation, just internet hype. r/wallstreetbets revived the rally that once made GameStop briefly worth more than Delta.
27 leap seconds
That’s how many extra seconds we’ve added to our clocks since 1972 to keep up with Earth’s slow spin. It’s like adjusting a watch that never quite ticks right. But Earth’s speeding up, and for the first time, we might have to take a second away. So we might all time travel on a technicality.
Goodbye, gentle parenting: “FAFO parenting” is going viral, and no, it’s not a Montessori method. Think: tough love (paywall link) with a code of conduct. Short for “F– Around and Find Out,” FAFO (pronounced “faff-oh”) favors natural consequences over endless negotiations with participation trophies. Kids act up, they have to straighten up or else. Nope, there’s no belt hanging on the doorknob.
79%
That’s how much traffic a top-ranked site can lose when it’s bumped below an AI summary. New AI Overviews are less “helpful assistant” and more “content pickpocket.” Why click a link when the robot already did the reading for you? At this point, calling it “search” is generous; it’s more like passive-aggressive copy/paste.
TV turning off on its own fix: If it’s like clockwork, it might be a setting you didn’t mean to enable. On most smart TVs, go to Settings > General and look for something like Sleep Timer, then turn it off. Still happening? It could be a bug. Try Settings > Support > Software Update.
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🔍 Tour de Fraud? Cycling officials are now X-raying sweaty bikes for secret motors. Tadej Pogacar’s winning ride once got flagged, alongside seven others. Mechanical doping (like riding a stealth-mode eBike) is the new fear (paywall link). One guy’s whole job is catching battery-powered frauds at the finish line. What happened to good old-fashioned steroids?