| True or false: We sort out five common e-mail claims
You get an e-mail from a friend saying you are entitled to a tax refund because of some phone excise tax you don't understand. Then you receive a different e-mail forwarded from the same friend, appearing to be from the IRS, claiming that you are owed a $163.80 refund.
Are the e-mails correct, or just nasty hoaxes?
The number of fraudulent e-mail schemes aimed at individuals and small businesses has mushroomed during the Internet age. But you can't disbelieve everything you read. Here are five frequently espoused claims. Find out which ones are true and which are bogus.
THE STATE OWES YOU MONEY
This is the closest thing you'll find to a free lunch.
States hold billions of dollars that have gone unclaimed, including more than $1 billion in Florida.
Demography and Emerging Technologies
Perhaps the most glaring paradox in the current debate about emerging technologies is the fact that high levels of public distaste for them -sometimes downright hostility- is coupled in daily life with their enthusiastic adoption: Viagra is one of the most successful drugs of all time. Electronic devices that would have been called nanotechnological marvels years ago are bought without a second thought. Bayesian spam filters and Google's algorithm are gratefully used as informational gateways by most computer users. The demand for products and interventions capable of making us look and feel younger is, as always has been, nearly unlimited. As a society, we generally don't approve of most emerging technologies until we need them and they are available. Then the story changes.
What have image spam and Captchas got in common?
Computers can't understand either of them, because they can't actually read. To a computer, letters that form part of a graphic image are a picture, which it can't process, or read, as it does with text characters. By contrast, a human is able to read both sets of letters in the same way. Captchas (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) are designed to determine whether an input to a web page - commenting on a blog post, or signing up for an online service - actually comes from a human or a computer (probably programmed to post advertisements or other junk). While you wait, the Captcha - a term trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University - generates a graphic on the fly and asks you to read and type in the letters and/or numbers that appear. Which is easy for most humans, but next-to-impossible for a computer.
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