I live in an area with a lot of older folks and I try to talk to them. One thing I've heard is how many of them have been scammed or know people who have gotten conned by phishing, tech support fraud, Medicare schemes, etc. Sometimes even their whole 401k or life savings. It's maddening to think there are individuals in this world taking advantage like that.

I built Ward to start to tackle this. It’s a Chrome extension that can either run locally on your machine (with Gemini Nano) or use a hosted cloud-based endpoint.

So far, it can pick up on a bunch of the top techniques used with little false positives. It’s for people who have older folks, young kids, or anyone less tech savvy in their life that Ward could help.

I’ve put off monetizing and am bootstrapping and covering costs for the first couple hundred users to improve Ward. When stuff inevitably gets past server-side filters, Ward works really well for client side edge defense.