“I need help. Oh my God! I hit a woman with my car,” the fake Bob says. “It was an accident, but I’m in jail and they won’t let me leave unless I come up with $20,000 for bail …Can you help me? Please tell me you can send [Keep reading]
I’m very excited for this episode of Debugger. Kashmir Hill has broken many of the most important privacy stories in the past twenty years, many of them in the pages of The New York Times. She’s been chasing after a secretive company named Clearview AI story for years, and recently [Keep reading]
“Sorry, there’s nothing we can do,” is about the most frustrating phrase a human being can hear. But it’s precisely these words you are most likely to hear if you are the victim of a scam — when you call the police, when you call the bank, when you call [Keep reading]
Who’s on the other end of the line when you get a scam phone call? Often, it’s a victim of human trafficking whose safety — and perhaps their life — depends on their ability to successfully steal your money. A recent UN report suggests there are hundreds of thousands of [Keep reading]
Kathy Book wrote goodbye notes to her husband, son and daughter last December 14, then walked behind her New Jersey home, into the woods, intending to kill herself. She survived, thanks to quick thinking by her husband and local police. (This story and accompanying podcast include extensive discussion of suicide. [Keep reading]
We’ve all had the maddening experience of being shuttled off to a mindless chatbot when we need real customer service help. Few things can raise your blood pressure like a nonsensical automated response designed as a stall tactic when you have a real crisis on your hands. I hope you [Keep reading]
Everything old is new again. There was a time when my parents taught me to be extremely careful with personal checks — never to leave open space in the amount fields, lest someone add a zero, for example. Over the past several years, check writing has fallen deeply out of [Keep reading]
Nearly two years after focusing the world’s attention on Big Tech’s big problems, Frances Haugen remains a powerful force in the technology industry. In today’s episode of Debugger, she tells me how Covid lockdowns played a key role in her difficult decision to come forward and criticize one of the [Keep reading]
Huntington, West Virginia has seen its share of tragedies. Nestled near the Kentucky border, Huntington is the home of Marshall University, which in the 1970s suffered one of the saddest disasters in the history of US sports. A charter flight carrying most of the school’s football team crashed on the [Keep reading]
Machines dehumanize people. I’ve long had a mental experiment in mind that I’d love to pull off one day — force people to walk at a grocery store the way they drive on a highway. You know: cut each other off, flip the bird, breathe (literally) down someone’s neck on [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan