📦 Not bad for a side hustle: A California mom bought a few Amazon return pallets, listed the items on eBay and made $10,000 in the first month. Now, she runs a multimillion-dollar e-commerce business. Love American success stories like this. Do you have one? Let me know here.
Dark Web deep dive: Hitmen, hacking and credit cards
Kim Komando
Yesterday I told you all about the Dark Web. Missed it? Part 1 is here. As expected, so many of you asked me, “Why the heck would you even go on the Dark Web?”
It’s my job
No, really! The fine folks at the Daily Mail asked if I’d do a Dark Web deep dive and report back. The reason is probably the same one you had for opening this email: It’s intriguing.
I’ve been doing this long enough that I can bring you all the Dark Web craziness without putting myself at risk. I’m not recommending you go digging around. I’m sharing for the curious among us who know better.
Follow the links
There’s a whole network of aggregators that list marketplaces, Dark Web versions of media outlets and everything else, with names like The Hidden Wiki, Onion.Live and Dark.fail. I started on Reddit with a search for “.onion search aggregators.”
Finding live sites takes trial and lots of error since they refresh their URLs all the time to evade law enforcement.
Now, let’s jump into what else I found.
👉 Are there hitmen for hire?
In theory, absolutely. In reality, you’d have to dig deep to find a real person willing to commit murder or another heinous crime on your behalf. I have to assume most of what pops up in Dark Web search engines are scams or honeypots meant to lure in someone up to no good.
One site I found had a list of rates posted for arson ($10,000 to $20,000), assassination ($10,000 to $50,000), assault ($1,000 to $5,000) and kidnapping ($15,000 to $25,000). Wild that the starting rate for assassination is less than kidnapping.
Kim Komando
👉 They’ll hack anything
I spent a day on the Dark Web [Part 1]
Kim Komando
When I say Dark Web, what comes to mind? A hacker in a hoodie? Digital drug deals and hitmen for hire? Usually what our imagination cooks up is a lot more dramatic than reality. But when it comes to the Dark Web, not so much.
POV: You just got eaten by a shark
Divers off the coast of Freeport, Bahamas, were feeding tiger sharks when one took a huge bite out of a 360-degree camera. You can see the camera filming inside the shark’s mouth and capturing divers from its belly. Wild.
$100 million
In sales for the first-ever AI real estate agent. The Portuguese company using it says a bot knows more about each of their 5,000 properties than a real human could — and is available 24/7. Speaking of … What does a house wear? Address. (I heard a groan!)
💻 Hey, students and coding nerds: Google’s Gemini Code Assistant is now free for everyone. It fixes mistakes, explains errors and recommends code changes.
Peter Pan always flies because he never lands: A former Disney engineer thought he was downloading an AI image generator. It was malware. Hackers stole his personal info and Disney data, then dumped it all online. That’s not even what got him fired. He was watching porn on his work computer. Dummy.
💸 Avast sold your data: If you bought the antivirus software between Aug. 2014 and Jan. 2020, you might be entitled to a cut of a $16.5 million settlement. Watch your inbox for a claim ID, then fill out the settlement claim form by June 5. I use this antivirus.
$0.00
For non-dairy milk in your coffee at Dunkin. Starting March 5, swapping almond or oat milk comes at no extra charge. In queso missed it, about a year ago, they paid out a class-action lawsuit for discriminating against lactose-intolerant customers. No whey!
Kim Kardashian’s Instagram mistake: No, she didn’t post an unedited pic. Instead, she posted about Texas death row inmate Ivan Cantu, who was convicted of murdering two people and executed around this time last year. Turns out the picture she posted was a different guy, same name, who is very much alive and now suing for slander and libel. Talk about a false bottom.
400 million
Weekly active ChatGPT users. Whoa. That’s double their numbers last August and more than Reddit. The AI train has left the station, folks.
Smart Alexa: Might be coming soon to an Echo near you. Today, Amazon is dropping all the details on the next version of Alexa that can actually hold a conversation (not holding my breath). No livestream, but I’ll share all the intel here Thursday. I bet there’s a pay version.
NASA’s new mission to deal with space junk is Apollo G: Over 11,000 satellites orbit Earth. When they crash into each other, it creates junk. (We’re talking 40K pieces of debris in low orbit.) The fix: ELROI (Extremely Low Resource Optical Identifier). In you and me terms, it’s a solar powered, stamp-sized device that’s a license plate for space identification and communication.
50 states
Have introduced right to repair laws. Most require companies to sell parts and release repair manuals so you don’t have to pay someone else an arm and a leg to fix broken tech for you. So far, they’ve been passed in Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California and Oregon.
🤖 Rosie from the Jetsons is here: How’d you like to have your own 5’5” robot to make your coffee, vacuum and put away the groceries? Meet NEO Gamma. No price yet. Check out the video. Would you want one in your house? Let me know when you rate today’s newsletter at the bottom.
Don’t look up: Chinese scientists built a surveillance camera that can see your face from space. In a ground test, it locked onto a target 62 miles away and picked up tiny details with scary accuracy. It’s supposedly “100 times” better than today’s top spy cameras and lens-based telescopes.
25GB
Data a new car can produce per hour. Compare that to 3GB hourly for your smartphone. Crazy, right? The biggest data hogs are the sensors that gather biometrics like fingerprints and face scans, along with all the devices we hook up to our vehicles.
I’d tell you a joke about unemployment, but it doesn’t work: To get attention on LinkedIn, post a funny video about working. Video content is up 36% this year on the platform and comedians are going viral on the site. Hiring? Use my link to post a job free.