Scammers operating within a country can be prosecuted when identified, which tends to limit how aggressive or widespread they are. In contrast, scams originating from abroad often face fewer legal consequences, allowing them to be more brazen and scalable. Historically, many of these operations have also shown linguistic or stylistic cues, partly because they’re run across language barriers.

Classic examples, like the “Nigerian prince” emails, weren’t about targeting a specific group. They were mass-sent messages that nearly everyone with an email address in the early 2000s encountered. More recently, common marketplace scams (like fake payment or Zelle verification schemes) follow recognizable scripts and patterns, often revealing themselves through consistent tactics or language cues. Up to now, these scams have been somewhat predictable and identifiable.

What’s changing is the technology. The internet made it cheap and easy for scammers to reach across borders. Now, AI is making those interactions far more convincing, removing many of the signals people once relied on to spot fraud.

Scams have become way more convincing, which will lead to larger losses to theft. No longer can you identify scammers by broken English, or other obvious markers.

I had one recently that seemed legit until I went off script and he started dropping âoesirâ more than a normal conversation. Another hacked a friendâ(TM)s account and had a convincing post about how his uncle died and was selling cars and various items that heâ(TM)d hold for a deposit.

It will be much easier to scam grandpa when you can deepfake his grandkids

And other companies have been caught lying about AI efficiencies as a cover for moving work to 'low cost countries'. Just because they're saying it's because of AI doesn't mean it's actually because of AI.

Speaking of being US-centric, Apple is not as popular outside of the US and a handful of other 1st world countries. For example, in India, which is 1.5 billion of those people, they only have a 4% market share. China, which is another 1.4 billion is at 24%. So, they probably sell more iPhones in China than the US, but they sell fewer in India than the US. The US market is a pretty hefty chunk of their sales.

"117 extant entities in the database". So, 57 of 117 entities produced 80% of emissions (not just CO2) reported in the database. Who approved that blatantly false headline?

I used to live in Florida. You act as if New Yorkers never drive there. Thanks for the laugh.

You can drive across a lot of states without filling your gas tank, so we're already living with people paying taxes in states they're not driving in. For noncommercial vehicles, you'll do most driving (and gas filling) near your residence.

> "They appear to be premised on the assumption that renewable energy was disproportionately responsible for the state's February power outages, a thesis that has been unequivocally discredited."

This was an early media claim based on a misunderstood statistic, but the Ercot post-mortem proved the opposite. When the emergency started, a majority of the wind power was offline, and all other sources were at maybe 20% offline. Because of that, the frequency started to drop and put the grid under strain. As the frequency dropped, that tripped the other generators causing them to fail. At the end of the day, if even 60% of wind was online, it would have been fine. The statistic at the end made it look like the non-wind generators were also to blame, but ignored the fact that those only failed because the wind generators were disproportionately offline to begin with and forced them offline.

Therefore, if they're going to hang their hat on wind, they need more cost sunk into ensuring that the wind generation fails at a rate reasonable with relation to other power sources so that they aren't pulled down with it. Those expenses need to be included in the cost of wind.

Maybe I'm missing it, but this doesn't appear to be a measure of network congestion causing degradation. It's city-wide averages, so it's detecting people moving from university/work connections to home connections. Yes, our suburban, old, home network connections in Austin are lousy compared to the connections provided in our workplaces. AT&T has gigabit in the area, but never bothered to install it down my road. All of the UT students had great connections on campus, but now aren't using those. This feels more like a measure of work vs home than a measure of congestion degradation...

"anything added/altered by js after the page is loaded won't work"

That was a requirement for search engines, not accessibility.

You're thinking of ARIA, which was an extension for both HTML and XHTML. HTML5 embraced a lot of the ARIA semantics and built them into the core element set (e.g., the tag), but the rest is still supported by HTML5.

You were completely misled and did the wrong thing. It has been possible to make a javascript enabled website accessible since 2001. ARIA made it much easier to enable custom widgets since about 2014, and was built into Dojo's core widget set.

Whoever told you that you had to go back to the stone age was basing that on a federal procurement law from 1998. That wasn't the industry standard for accessibility, and only applied to sales to the federal government and some state entities (both understood how out of date those standards were and accepted more accessible solutions). That law was finally brought up to date in 2017.

Hold your finger down on the screen for a dropped pin. Tap on that for details about that pin location, including lat and long.

The problem with iText is that it used to be MPL, but the maintainer got ticked off at commercial users several years ago and changed to license to AGPL. Apparently now they're relaxing the license for a fee, but they've changed their mind before - no guarantees that they won't change it again.

Considering that this is a statement made by a US agency, and the primary purpose of such an article is to convince the people that are defunding them, primarily the US taxpayer, to continue to fund them, the football field unit is completely appropriate. This is particularly true because most US high schools, and some middle schools have a permanent football field near them, and even parks have football fields temporarily set up from time to time. Anyone in the US who has tried to get an education, and even those who have slept during class, are likely to have walked by football fields enough to understand what the size of them is.

It is certainly more likely that someone in the US will have a feel for the size of 1/2 a football field than 50 yard sticks or 150 ruler lengths. There are very few other standard sized objects on that scale that people have real world experience with. The reality is that most in the US that understand 50 meters will approximate that to 50 yards, and then imagine that distance compared to a football field. NASA is just doing that conversion for those that don't have a feel for meters, and for those that don't realize that a football field is 100 yards.

Same here. I run Fedora, and I haven't had trouble with any of the above in years - it just works (though I don't watch many DVDs on my laptop, so, to be fair, I can't comment there). Fedora has come a long way in terms of networking and video, and I've heard that Ubuntu has as well. In fact, I've found that some of my cellphone videos play fine on my Fedora laptop, but don't work at all on my wife's Windows 7 laptop. When I moved away from Windows, I piloted with a Mac for awhile, and while the UI was pretty, it drove me absolutely nuts. The editing keys and shortcuts were different for every application. Also, Apple has no concept of a true docking station/port replicator, so every time I had a meeting, I had to unplug and re-plug ten different cables. I also had to carry around a bunch of extra accessories, like a dongle just to connect to a projector. It was so frustrating that when I was told that I had to choose, I happily sent the Mac packing and have used Fedora ever since.

It would be nice if I could get Quicken and Word for Linux, but I found that Word on Mac converts strangely to Windows also, and in some cases worse that OpenOffice, so I didn't see that as a worthy advantage.