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.
Hackers stole 30 million password vaults in the worst breach the industry has ever seen. Almost none of them opened. The people who got robbed had one thing in common, and it wasn’t the password manager.
That unordered package on your porch isn’t a shipping error. It’s proof a scammer already has your name and address, and the new ones ship with a QR code the FBI says can plant malware. Keep the item, skip the code, then lock down your passwords.
Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Evan Spiegel, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg all ration screens at home. Your kid’s average? 7.5 hours a day.
Your carrier isn’t a filing cabinet. AT&T keeps basic voicemail 14 days, T-Mobile says deleted messages “cannot be retrieved” and Verizon won’t take the blame even for ones you saved. Here’s how to turn a loved one’s message into a file you own forever, in a minute or so.
There are three different products in the identity protection aisle, and the companies would rather you not learn the difference. One watches. One fixes. One pays. Most people buy the cheapest and assume they bought all three.
Samsung unveils its new folding lineup July 22, and Apple’s first folding iPhone lands this fall for north of $2,000. Here’s the plain-English guide to what a foldable is, who it’s for and who should wait.
A verified X ad and a routine browser habit are being used to hijack Mac users and Microsoft 365 accounts alike. Here’s exactly how both attacks work and what stops them cold.
New FTC data reveals scams starting on social media cost Americans $2.1 billion last year, and Facebook tops the list. Losses have exploded eightfold since 2020. Here are the exact settings that cut scammers off.
Banks watch how you type, swipe and hold your phone to catch fraud before it happens. Behavioral monitoring is invisible, it’s everywhere, and a thief can’t fake your rhythms.
Data brokers turn your private life into a product. Here’s what they know, who’s buying and how to yank yourself off the shelf.
