Early September always fills me with a strange kind of dread. There’s a flood of horrid memories jumbled together with admiration and wonder for all the love and courage that each 9-11 anniversary churns up. I find the Tribute in Light over the World Trade Center a hauntingly beautiful, irresistible [Keep reading]
Facebook profits from advertisements it knows, or should know, are fraudulent, a federal lawsuit filed in California alleges. The social media giant makes it easy for criminals to target consumers who are not only likely to click on certain kinds of ads, but also likely to follow through with purchases, [Keep reading]
For many decades, economists wandered around in the dark, confused that their elegant formulas about consumer behavior failed again and again. They’d yell at their calculations in dark rooms, frustrated that people didn’t actually move through the world as rational actors, like the data they fed into those formulas. Then [Keep reading]
Some people just don’t know when to cut their losses. OK, basically no one does. Sunk cost is not only a powerful concept, it’s a bad habit written into all our subconscious minds. I don’t think you can escape its powerful grip, but you can learn to live with it a [Keep reading]
There will be no avoiding the inflation conversation during the next few months. Prices are going up all around us — lumber (wait, they’re down suddenly), cars, my favorite chicken with mixed vegetables entree from Asia Sushi down the block. As I’ve written before, folks old enough to remember the [Keep reading]
What do you do if you think your friend is bugging you? I don’t mean bothering you. I mean…bugging you…using a device to listen to you, maybe e1ven recording your conversations, when you visit their home. Well, that’s the world most of us live in now. Personal assistants, many modern [Keep reading]
While much attention has been paid lately to the role of cryptocurrency in fraud, gift cards are still the tool of choice for many Internet criminals. In fact, the BBB says gift card fraud reports tripled between 2017 and 2020. And about one in four fraud victims who had money [Keep reading]
This looks like a normal office full of workers doing normal office-y things. But it’s a scammer phone bank, set up to rip off people all around the world. If you didn’t see it for yourself, you wouldn’t believe it. But thanks to a European tech worker who calls himself [Keep reading]
Get used to seeing this pop-up, and millions of others like it: Sometime soon — perhaps this week, perhaps tomorrow — Apple will turn on a simple feature that has the potential to shake up the very business model the Internet is built on: surprise surveillance. To users, it could [Keep reading]
This is part two of a six-part series based on my new podcast, Debugger. I am on a quest to find the Original Sin of the Internet with a series of experts who were there at the beginning of the Internet age. Next up: Bill Woodcock from the Packet [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan