Listener Mail Roundup 2

Chris Bollette. I'm an editor here at how stuff works dot com and sitting next to me as always as senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Well that was quick. No, no, it's Hungarian for hello. Oh okay, I thought you were saying goodbye. Not yet, all right, I don't know. I'm kind of in a fog right now. All right, Well, today we have another one of our famous or soon to be famous listener mail round up jamborees. I think this would be number two, So let's get started, shall we. Sure? Right,

So here's the first one. Hi, guys, currently listening to your April Fools podcast. So I'm so sorry this is ticket so long for me to get to great stuff. I think my favorite podcast so far was your two thousand eight Christmas Picks. I didn't see anything from this listener in my my stocking, but okay. Thanks. On a more serious note, I worked for a small coffee roaster in the Midwest, and I think we almost got involved

in an online scam. Someone emailed a request asking if we shipped to South Korea and specified a freight company we should use for a quote. I did an internet search and found this person's name and email on a website highlighting online scams. I checked out how stuff works dot com. Excellent choice, and to scam the article on how online fraud alerts work, but didn't see anything about

how to report potential scam activity. I went to the IC three website, but we didn't suffer a financial loss, so I didn't know if I should still fell out a complaint. Wow, I can't talk. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks for all your awesome informative podcasts. I've learned I'm a techie at heart. Sarah Well, Sarah, Yeah, we can give you some hints and some some tips. If you suspect that you've encountered an online fraud. UM. Actually, there

are quite a few different opportunities you could take. It all depends on sort of the nature of what the fraud is. But your first assumption to go to i C three that's actually a pretty good one. I see three stands for the Internet Crime Complaint Center, and it's a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National White Collar Crime Center, And uh, usually that's that's a pretty good source to go to if you need

to report an online scam. Yeah, they're they're very specialized toward internet crime, as the name suggests UM, you know, unlike other eight agencies, so you know, it would be very helpful. They also have if you are interested in are not Sarah. They also have a lot of other

scam information on the website. So even if you have not been specifically targeted, but are interested in scams, you can find a lot of information about different stuff that's going on right now, different styles of scams UM and uh, you know, specifics on what to do with regard to

filling out a complaint. The thing is, if you haven't actually been scammed, it's kind of I don't know what they'll actually do if you feel like well, I mean, you can fill out a complaint and and theoretically they're going to investigate it, and if they find there's anything substantive there, then they will proceed. I don't think that you necessarily have to suffer a loss for them to be aware of it. I think it's better that you go ahead and say, you know, this is this is

who I think is trying to defraud me. This is why I think that here is some supporting evidence. I mean, you know, you don't to just throw accusations around, right right. You have to send you have to send some information about who they are and what you think they were up to. And you know, if if you actually, um, you know, go ahead with it and send them information or send them money, they're gonna want to know exactly what you did and when it happened and all that information.

Otherwise it's going to be very difficult for them to investigate it further. But you know, they're gonna want to know specifics, you know, in in as much detail as you can give them to them. That's true. And uh, if um, you know, if that seems like that's not the right course for you, I've got some other suggestions you can unn follow UM. If the business that you suspect is UH is committing fraud or the individual who's committing fraud is either in the United States or Canada,

you can contact the Better Business Bureau UH. If it's outside of that, that's outside of their jurisdiction, so that would not work in that case. UH. Other opportunities you could You could contact the Federal Trade Commission. That's good for fraudulent emails or UM or fraudulent businesses UH, the Attorney General if it's a fraudulent business UM, there's UH. The e consumer dot gov website is a good place to go if it's an international company that you suspect

is committing fraud UM. So that's of course one of the big problems with the Internet. You know, it's a global entity, so not all the the sites or all the companies are going to be found in the United States, which makes it a lot more difficult when you're like, well, how why can we even do about this if they're on the other side of the world. Can we even prosecute anything, you know, any sort of fraud UM. But you can go to like I said, E Consumer dot

Gov and UH and at least report scams. If nothing else they can, they can raise awareness UM for phishing emails. You can use the the usd S SERT, which is the Computer Emergency Response Team website UH to report that. You can report fraud to the FBI. You know, this sounds like it's really kind of scary, spooky stuff, but

really we're talking about people. People's lives can be ruined by fraud, and it happens all the time, and it's better to go ahead and report something than to stay quiet about and just hope that, you know, no one else gets hurt, Like, you know, we'll eat this loss and we'll just you know, we don't want to suffer the embarrassment of admitting that this happened, or you know, we don't want to go through the paperwork. That's really

kind of irresponsible. It's much better to go ahead and step forward and say, hey, these guys over here are just are taking people for whatever they can and we need to stop it. UM and UH. And then there's a www. Dot fraud dot org, which is the National Consumer League's fraud center that's not a government site, that is a nonprofit consumer sites. Actually one of the oldest ones that exist, and uh, they have a they have a lot of information about fraud, how to spot it,

how to avoid it, how to report it. And you can report something to that center and they will they will take it from there. They'll actually start going through and say, Okay, these are the authorities we should contact. Here's the information that we have to pass along to them. Um. So that's a good resource too. Now I know that we tend to concentrate on the United States, so I actually looked into a couple of other opportunities as well.

So for my friends up in Canada who are still mad that I said that they don't use one, I just mean that you guys don't have emergencies because you're so level headed. Um. No, seriously, I know now that you use. At the time, I wasn't sure and I couldn't get to my computer, so I apologized profusely. Please stop throwing bacon at me. But in Canada, you can again contact the Better Business Bureau or Industry Canada Consumer Connection, which is and I followed by three CS. Do you

think that causes any confusion? There are lots of three I found that out, um. And then over in the UK you can contact the Metropolitan Police or the Office of Fair Trading, or you can go to a website www dot rip Off, tip Off dot net to report scams. And there are many other organizations you can contact. And of course those are just two other countries. Every country has has different departments that you can contact in the

case of scams. Um and a good resource to go to for really any any person in any country is www dot Consumer Fraud Reporting dot org. They actually maintain a list of various countries and the department that you would need to contact if you were to encounter fraud online. And it seems, Sarah that your your instincts were good because you knew something fishy was was going on. And um, I know it's been said many, many, many times and it's sort of cliche now, but yeah, if something seems

too good to be true, it probably is. So you know, trust your gut feeling when somebody offers you something that seems a little out of the ordinary. Uh. You know, as far as a business proposition, I would imagine that you know, businesses have to you know, you're looking for every opportunity to to do more business. Um, you know versus Hello, beneficiary, I want to uh, trade, you know, trade your information. Hello, Mr so and so, I am I am a lawyer for Mr so and so who

was sick in Nigeria. Yeah, yeah, so, I'm sure for for business, it's got to be a little tougher because you're, you know, you're looking for an opportunity to actually, you know, conclude a deal. But uh, you know, you've got to trust those instincts because if something smells a little fishy, you need to to look into it, even if you don't uh, if you don't bite, and it's uh, you know, people know. And I encountered a lot of this back

back when I worked at a different job. I was manned the phones every now and then and occasional and we would get the phone version of this kind of scam where someone asks you a couple of questions and just by saying yes, they go ahead and put down the the you know, the the client agreed to this service, and then they start charging you for it, and people are like, why are we getting charged for this paper

from this vendor? We don't even use this vendor. And it was all based off of this one phone call where they trick someone into saying yes, and that's that is the basis of their agreement. Um, it's pretty scummy stuff, and yeah, you find it. You find it in all walks of life. It's just the Internet makes it, yeah, because you can then scam people all the way across the world. You aren't limited to the people in your area code. Thank you Internet. It sure is moving on.

So our next question comes from Eric, and Eric wanted to know the difference between the terms hardware, software, and firmware. We talked a little bit about firmware in a previous episode and he was just kind of curious, says to, you know, what exactly is firmware? So really you have to talk about all three to kind of explain. So first, let's tackle hardware. That's pretty easy. Yeah, that's why I

wouldn't tackle it first. Those are those are well, in the case of electronics and technology, the machines themselves, the physical devices your monitor, your computer, your iPod, your adapter, cars, tax machine, cables, anything like that, if you can touch it, Um, you know technology, it's it's hardware, right, So that's pretty easy.

And then software are programs and applications that run on hardware. Um, so this is like all the different programs things that you rely on day to day operating systems can be you know, that's software as well. Um, so this is all the little happy programs that make your technology useful. So it could be anything from like software on computer, software on a mobile device. Uh, you know, even on

some watches things like that. I mean pretty much any electronic device that can do us to phisticated sort of task, it's using some sort of software. So the the hardware is the machine that without the software, it couldn't do anything. So that you know, the software is the program that runs on the machine and gets it to do things. What is firmware? Yes, it's kind of um, yeah, firmware is this this gray area that you know, there's no definitive point where you can say this is firmware and

this is software. Right, Well, it's sort of a combination. It's it's literally a combination of the two, but only for a very specific part of the hardware and a very specific part of the software. Yeah, and it tends to be these tend to be very tiny applications that are hard coded into some part of the hardware on your device, sort of like a driver. Really, it could be very much like a driver or you know, a

microprocessor has machine code coded onto it, otherwise it can't work. Um. You know, when you're running a program, ultimately it's getting translated into machine code and then translate back into whatever, you know, whatever the program is doing. But um, that's you know, that's the very core of how a computer works. So the firmware is the stuff that is hard coded part of the device. Uh. You know, you can't remove it,

you can't write over it. It's it's what it's what allows software to communicate with the hardware so that you get results. Yeah, it's um, it's actually stored in ROM, which is read only memory and UM, so it can only be found on him on a ROM that's inside of your machine. So it's uh, you know, it's not something that's on your hard drive or anything like that.

It would actually be in the chips themselves. Right. You can think of things like, um, I I would you call say, a cartridge game, would you call that firmware because it's hardcoded onto the cartridge? Well, um, that's a really good question you answer for you mean, like, yes, don't say the game. I'm not But those were those cartridges, those older cartridges up until you know I guess Nintendo sixty four era type stuff. Um, you know those those

you can't write to those cartridges. I mean you can, but you have to have a burner to do it, and it's a pain in the neck. You're you're putting it inside your game machine. You're not writing to them. Those are those are rams? Um, and uh so technically yeah,

they're kind of fit in that area. I think though that people would tell you if we went to talk to a programming expert, um, they would say that something inside the on the on the chips itself that tell the chips how to handle that would actually be firmware where the software is on the actual fair enough. So what what about a RAM chip that you would find in an old fashioned arcade game? See now that I'm thinking would probably be technically firmware. Somebody's gonna write to us.

Just make make sure you put attention Pallette. So, yes, if you would like to clarify our position, you know, were not this The thing is that really firmware is kind of it's a it's a little bit of a fuzzy term because there are some points where you're where you might say, well, is a driver really firmware or is that software because drivers are what allow you know,

devices to interact with programs. So this goes back to our our our semi definition that we're making up as we go along, which is, um, if you download a driver for your printer, you're storing it on your hard drive, software on your hard drive that your computer hardware uses

to access the printer. But say you have to update the firmware in your wireless router, and that way, you know, you're having to download information that gets stored written back onto the router to make it, you know, do what it needs to do to interact with your computer and stuff. Eric, I'd like to thank you for breaking text stuff. Well, very much impressed, you know, I I will admit, uh, you know, hey, I didn't really know everything about firmware and I still don't, but I know a lot more

now from doing research changes questions. So if you have a clarification and want to help out, if you're a programmer expert, you know, please drop us a line. And it may very well be that certain. You know, within different industries you have different definitions of what this really means.

I mean, that's true. I was using a general Yeah, because because someone might think of firmware one way for say a laptop, and a different different way of thinking about when you're talking about say a mobile phone or or an Xbox three sixty. I mean, you know, we have game consoles now they get firmware updates to correct for problems. So you know, this is no longer just

the realm of the computer. Um, it's really lots of different devices, but it's it's essentially chip instructions versus the software that actually runs, you know, when you open a program on your machine. So thanks a lot, Eric, I hope that muddy up the waters a little bit. Yeah, yea, Well, we have one more ready for the last one. Right, Hey guys, I'm a new listener, but have only six more of your podcast to listen to keep quick Yeah,

caught up really quickly. I can't get enough information. So thanks on your Rechargeable Batteries podcast, I was hoping you'd address one aspect of charging. The scenario is I've been playing on my eye Touch all okay, I guess that's the iPod Touch all night, and I realized it's getting late and I need to charge it so I can take it with me tomorrow and have enough battery to last the day. But if I plug it in now and leave it in all night, I'm worried I'll overcharge

the battery. So my question is can you overcharge batteries? Thanks for your help, Aaron. All right, Aaron, Well, um, so we're talking about rechargeable batteries. Whether you know, we we talked a lot about what was the best way to charge them. You know, how charge is lost over the duration of the lifetime of the battery, that kind of thing. You remember this podcast? I do remember that podcast. So, um, so yeah overcharging. Uh, first of all, you asked, can

you overcharge batteries? The answer to that is sometimes, Well, the answer to that is yes, but it's sort of it's very difficult to do it because depending on the kind of battery you have, and depending on the machine you're using to charge it. Um, It's it's unlikely that you're gonna do that. Um because most chargers have some

technology built in to keep you from overcharging your battery. Yeah, it'll detect how much of voltage your battery is storing, and if it's over a certain amount, it'll stop sending a charge to that battery. Essentially, laptop batteries are pretty smart in that regard because they can they generally have some technology built in to say, oh, well this is

this is enough, you don't need to charge anymore. So let's just say, for sake of argument, that your charger, the voltmeter no longer accurately measures the voltage in your battery. So let's say that you've kept the the device, computer, whatever plugged in for like a day. Uh, what's the worst thing that can happen? Okay, So the best thing that can happen is that your battery overheats a bit and it damages the battery and your battery life suffers

as a result. And that's probably going to be the most common thing that happens. That's like, by and large, the best best case scenario. Worst case scenario, the battery bursts into flames and burns down half of Detroit, um, even if you lived in St. Louis. No, that's that's that's a bit of an exaggeration. Uh No, No, it really could. Though. It could burst into flames. I mean that is a possibility. It's not likely to happen, um, but it is. It is a potential danger that every

lithium ion battery really has. It's that if you overcharge it, it might it might burn up. Actually, you make a good point, because I forgot to mention that the research that I did was speci typically for lithium ion batteries, which is the most common battery found in laptops and portable electronics, you know, chargeable stuff. Now, there are other kinds of chargeable batteries, so your mileage may vary. Battery

is actually a little more dangerous, I think. But the nickel acadmium, yeah, well they're not used as much as they used to be either. Um and and lithium ion also has a you know, you've seen those laptops that have burst into flames. Um that's called thermal runaway. And I had one. They burst into flames and just cut Yeah, they got extremely hot, and that's uh, that can actually happen by itself when you're not charging, but that requires

a serious breakdown in the battery itself too. You know, we're talking about chemical reactions that kind of cause the stuff to happen. So that's unrelated to the charging. Well I guess we're charging. Yeah, So anyway, Yes, it is possible. It's not easy to do, so you probably don't need to worry about it. But in general, don't leave anything plugged in for twenty four hours. Yeah, you'll if you

read the instructions that with your portable electronic device, computer, etcetera. Um, you'll you'll get instructions and a lot of them will tell you, yeah, go ahead and plug it in and charge it overnight for the first time or you know. I think if you come home, your batteries run down, you plug it into the charger, and then the next morning before you leave, you unplug it. I don't think that's gonna cause a big problem. It's when you leave it plugged in for days and days and days and

days and days, especially when it's something that's less intelligent. Um, like if you've just had batteries sitting at home in a charger and they were just well, you know, I'll leave them in there so they're always ready. Probably not leaving your laptop plugged in all the time is not probably gonna cause a big problem because it's a little smarter than that. Yeah, so in general you're probably okay, Um, don't leave your your device is plugged in for twenty

four hours or more at a time. Just to avoid that, because that's that that can cause damage. Even if it doesn't damage the battery directly. Uh, it might, you know, the charger, It might wear the charger down fast, I mean or the battery. Yeah, or the battery. That's true. The battery life can suffer if it overheats for an extended period of time. That can that can cause the chemical reactions to be less efficient, and then it doesn't hold a chart as much of a charge as it

used to. And that's a simple way to tell. I feel it. It's the battery. Yeah, you know, if it's a little warm, you know, oh that's kind of warm. Wow, that's that's that's pretty dark. If you're using a device like I don't know, the HTC G one Google Android Farm. Uh, if you're using like that with all of its functions going, it can warm up all on its own. So that's not necessarily a sign of the battery overheating. Um, that's a sign of the processor getting really hot. I found

that out the hard way. So now I don't use nearly as many functions at a time. Well, I use uh, you know, my my laptop at home is a as an Apple aluminum case laptop, you know, and then there's that you know, working in the summer wearing shorts, thing going well, that is awfully warm, So that's you know,

they're use your head. But yeah, I mean, if you feel your battery and it's warmer than it should be while it's charging, and you know, for example, you're not actually doing anything with the battery, you know, it's just plugged in, that's that's a bad time. So that about wraps it up for this this podcast. I think you don't have anything else in So if any of you have any questions or concerns, or you want to try and get something off your chest, like the image of

Chris and Shorts working on a laptop. If you want to get that you know out there, just go ahead and send us an email tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. Remember we've got blogs up. You can access those from our homepage how stuff works dot com and we have articles about all these sort of subjects there to check them out, and we will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands

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