The victims typically bank with smaller regional institutions, which typically have fewer resources to detect scams. Scammers hack into phone systems and then call victims, playing prerecorded messages that say there has been a billing error or warn them that the bank account has been suspended because of suspicious activity. If the worried customer enters his account number and ATM password, the bad guys use that information to make fake debit cards and empty their victim's bank accounts.

This week, David Pogue finally writes about netbooks, a topic the Standard has been pummeling for months. Pogue's shtick is clever: He plays the role of the buffoon who has belatedly wandered into the action long after he should have, much like P.J. O'Rourke covering the Middle East for Rolling Stone in the 1980s. Like O'Rourke, Pogue serves as a proxy for his reader: Not an insider, but an outsider with questions that would make insiders roll their eyes in contempt.

Pogue takes the hit for his readers. They're not the early adopters on Geoffrey Moore's technology adoption curve. They're the pragmatists and conservatives. The mass market. The horde of buyers who actually make gadget manufacturers rich. Pogue lets them feel normal which, statistically, they are. He answers the questions they've only now come around to asking out loud.