Each week, Farhad Manjoo, technology columnist at The New York Times, reviews the week’s news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry.

Good morning, readers!

We’ll get to tech news in a bit, but let’s start somewhere else. My wife is a doctor who studies cancer, and one of the few things I’ve learned from her job is this unhappy little maxim: You can get cancer pretty much anywhere. Some cancers everyone has heard of. Breast, prostate, brain, lung — these are the calamities we’re familiar with. But did you know you can get cancer under your fingernails? Or in your appendix? There is even a cancer of the heart. (Don’t worry, it’s very rare.)

I bring this up because I’ve noticed an analogous ubiquity on the internet: Just about everything online could be a scam. This observation isn’t revolutionary; you’ve known to be on the lookout for internet scams since the first time you made friends with a Nigerian prince. The internet is a global gathering of strangers and money, which means that a fraud, a trick, a swindle, a grift or a graft is obviously never far.

And yet it is surprising how often, and how completely, many of us can be deluded into letting our guard down, thinking that what we see online really is on the up and up.