Some fake Telekom workers showed up at my grandma’s place in person recently, wearing uniforms and all, saying they need to “perform maintenance on the TV connection”. Luckily, grandma’s still super sharp, recognized that something was off, and just shouted “Peter, the TV people are here” into her flat, even though she was alone and Peter had died decades ago. They made some excuses and left immediately when they thought they were no longer just prying on a single brittle old lady.
Super proud of her, but also so scary to think that a bunch of asshole scammers were so close to just walking around in her flat.
Ha, something similar happened to my grandmother, though they claimed to need to read her meters. My grandmother is in her 90s and has a lead a hard as fuck life, she takes zero shit. So she immediately thought it was odd that they didn’t say which utility meter they needed to look at, nor did their uniforms have anything more than vague identifiers on it. So she said oh? which meter? What utility? She said they stammered a bit but said water, and she said, ok, the water meter is right there, pointing to the meter in the back of her car-port. Then they tried to come up with some BS about how they need to get the “other” meter readings at her water-heater. She knows that isn’t a thing. So she said there isn’t such a thing, you need to leave. They immediately started to argue and she said “I have no qualms shooting two men trying to rob me”. They left, they were yelling they would tell the police, their utilities company, the department of public works, etc. She said she needed to take her heart medication right afterword, but was otherwise fine. Well guess what? Nothing came of it. Thing is, she keeps a small gauge shot-gun next to the door and would have, indeed, shot them if they tried to get inside.
I hate it so much. I want to do one simple search. Instead I get bullshit ad google links that are irrelevant, then MS MS Edge pushes me into Copilot for more garbage, which I have to mouse out of. Stract has become by search engine to get back the nostalgia of when the web wasn’t all shit
Thanks for the suggestion. What differences have you noticed compared to Google. Do you always find what you’re looking for. Have you tried searching niche stuff like some really old painting or an obscure compiler error etc.
Weird that it gave me a link to franchise a taco joint when I searched for tacos near me.
I wouldn’t consider “tacos near me” a representative search; google specifically optimizes searching for products and especially local food.
I just searched for “first speedrun” and the first few results are decent but wrong, and the videos, shorts, and related searches after the first 2 entries are complete garbage.
Being served 70% links to products sucks when searching anything related to a product isn’t fun either.
Oh, whoops, I wasn’t comparing Stract, I was comparing Google. Those are the reasons I don’t use Google search, I hadn’t tried Stract yet.
After trying it, it seems cool. Not the best at broad meanings though. “Ram” returns an Indian politician as the “answer”, a site in Japanese for the first link, and then mostly results for Random Access Memory after. No reference to the Dodge Ram (thank Odin), but also no reference to male sheep.
It also feels very anti-store, which is a nice change, but might ve an artifact of the seemingly anti-SEO stance, with random results from anywhere. Maybe that’s just the European focus?
It also has issues with getting context from multiple keywords, and doesn’t prioritize say “street car” over pages that happen to contain both “street” and “car”. Excluding keywords with “-” works though, very nice. Quotes can help with phrases to, so " “street car” " finds exactly things called “street car” with the space. Both still miss streetcars though. Misspelling corrections are offered but not assumed, which is very nice.
Definitely the biggest issue is the seemingly random results. This might be good if you’re searching for an exact string that is only present in a few places, but anything common and it’s a crapshoot. It’s nearly unable to find anything to do with shamrocks, prefering to find business’ named Shamrock.
You realise that this is because Microsoft spent billions of dollars on what amounts to a new version of “Clippy” and it’s just as helpful as the original.
If you’re unfamiliar with the abomination, it’s a dumber version of Copilot.
Oh, I’m somewhat familiar. Our school computer lab when setup had all windows 95 machines and I later got a xp at home so I got to play with office 2000 and such.
Iirc it never was able to help me with something. I thought they put in a interactive mascot or something. Like a mini-game you can play with while typing a letter to your principal.
Copilot has been little helpful sometimes though when I want to generate images of things made out of jeans.
Yeah, likely they’re using the same backend to provide voip services (maybe skype’s backend just scaled up) . Teams must’ve borrowed something from skype given how haphazardly it was developed and released.
MS Teams actually makes use of WebRTC. That’s a standard for VoIP (and similar) via web browsers. Mozilla and Google standardized that a few years ago and implemented it in their browsers, so what Microsoft did, is that they basically shipped a whole Google Chrome to users.
I believe, they did rip some code from Skype for Business for the integration into Windows, though. In the early days, the OS would say that the Teams notifications came from Skype for Business.
yep and running teams would have skype services running…here is MS PR
Transitioning from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams To deliver smarter calling and meeting experiences with intelligent communications, we are bringing Skype for Business capabilities into Microsoft Teams
I mostly use it to make international calls cause sometimes the country my folks are living in shuts down the cellular internet for some reason when major exams/riots are happening and whatsapp stops working.
Imaging telling a whole nation of people they can’t use internet on their 500+ dollar phone. The fuck did they buy them for, playing temple run?
Btw you can suggest them the Briar messenger app. It can send messages via nearby peoples phones if they also have Briar. So if enough people installed it, a city could have it’s own messaging network even when the official one is down
It’s still one of the best options for video calling. Available on all the major platforms, no time limits, the quality is great. International call rates are some of the cheapest out there.
I just say my name is Bigus Dickus whenever they call me. They usually hang up or insult me.
For the “car’s extended warranty” I just tell them it’s a 1969 Wayne Industries Batmobile. They usually just say they don’t provide coverage for that car and hang up.
It’s gonna happen to you and your grandkids are gonna be wondering how you managed to get scammed by such obvious AI mimicking government entities with it’s own complex ecosystem running milliseconds behind reality.
My family member who I often lock horns over politics was almost scammed. Everyone eas giving him a hard time and he was anxious about me giving him shit. I told him, it wasn’t his fault someone tried to steal from you. Theyre in the wrong, not you. He was very taken back and grateful. It can happen to anyone those Cock Dinosaurs try to induce fight or flight.
despite being tech savvy and knowledgeable about various scamming methods I once nearly fell for an obvious scam.
I was expecting a package and when I woke up in the morning I saw on my phone that there was a delivery attempt. Clicked the link to redirect/retry delivery and only when it asked me for my banking details it hit me- what the hell was the postman doing at 5am trying to deliver packages?
anybody can get scammed, hell, the famous “i troll scammers” youtube guy once fell for a scam and nearly lost his youtube account! Getting cocky is the worst you can do
I like that Cory Doctorow is pretty open about having been scammed despite being quite well informed, because it really can happen to anyone. It just takes the right convergence of factors.
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