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Comment Re:Scams are a bigger problem (Score 2) 153

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.

Comment Scams are a bigger problem (Score 5, Interesting) 153

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

Comment Re: Apple is in an impossibel situation (Score 1) 224

Just sell the Chinese ones in non-US markets. Though I know some Americans struggle with a map of the world at times, there are 7.65 billion people on the planet who do not live in the United States.

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.

Comment Re: Meh (Score 1) 238

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.

Comment Except they're wrong (Score 1) 155

> "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.

Comment Location vs Degradation... (Score 1) 56

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...

Comment Re: Makes sense (Score 1) 196

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.

Games

Veteran Software Developer Panic Unveils Playdate Handheld Game Player (daringfireball.net) 91

Veteran software developer firm Panic, which has made its name through high-end Mac software as well as titles such as Firewatch, is expanding its work in games and moving in a very unexpected direction. This week, Panic unveiled Playdate, a tiny, yellow Game Boy-like device with a black-and-white screen, a few chunky buttons, and... a hand crank for controlling quirky games. From a report: Playdate is adorable and exciting and fun and technically impressive. They're making their own hardware (in conjunction with Swedish device makers Teenage Engineering). They wrote their own OS (there's no Linux). It has a high resolution 400 x 240 black and white display with no backlighting. It has a crank. It's going to cost only $149 -- $149! -- and that includes a "season" of 12 games from an amazing roster of beloved video game creators, delivered every Monday for 12 weeks. The idea of a new upstart, a company the size of Panic -- with only software experience at that -- jumping into the hardware game with a brand new platform harkens back to the '80s and '90s. But even back then, a company like, say, General Magic or Palm, was VC-backed and aspired to be a titan. To be the next Atari or Commodore or Apple.

In today's world all the new computing devices and platforms come from huge companies. Apple of course. All the well-known Android handset makers building off an OS provided by Google. Sony. Nintendo. Panic is almost cheating in a way because they're tiny. The Playdate platform isn't competing with the state of the art. It's not a retro platform, per se, but while it has an obviously nostalgic charm it is competing only on its own terms. Its only goal is to be fun. And aspects of Playdate are utterly modern: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, apps and software updates delivered over-the-air. They're taking advantage of an aspect of today's world that is brand new -- the Asian supply chain, the cheapness of Asian manufacturing, the cheapness of CPU and GPU cycles that allows things like Raspberry Pi to cost just $35.

Comment Re:IText (Score 1) 132

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.

Comment Re:Cite the NASA story, not some parasite's blog (Score 1) 225

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.

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