Geekly Update - 05 July 2011

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

You know Twitter has jumped the shark when the Pope signs up. You can follow the Papal Tweets account, which already has about 70,000 followers.

What goes around, comes around... News Corp. has sold MySpace for $35 million to Specific Media (a group that includes Justin Timberlake) although when they bought it 6 years ago it cost them $580 million. Huh, I thought Myspace went away three years ago.

The hacker group LulzSec announced on Pastebin that they are disbanding, but not before releasing names and passwords from such sites as Battlefield Heroes and Hackforum.net. Other information they will make public are internal AT&T files, details of 90,000 IBM and the NATO Bookshop, and some IBM files.

The Yankee Group's latest European Mobile User Study included participants from France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. It determined that 40% intend to purchase an iPhone as their next mobile phone, with 19% preferring Android-run devices and a mere 17% wanting Blackberrys.

The Supreme Court overturned a California law this week stating that they could not restrict sales or rental of violent video games to minors. They determined that the games, like books, are protected under the First Amendment. I'm not sure yet if parents can be jailed for banning the games in their own homes...

If your laptop is getting older, Dell has some suggestions to extend its life. Some of them are to defragment at least every two months, clean your battery contacts, and turn it off when not in use.

The HTC Status is AT&T's first attempt at launching a phone with a dedicated Facebook button. The phone allows sharing status updates, location, photos and music, and that button means instant access to it all.

Online journal PLoS ONE has released a study that says that college students who use technology such as texting, emailing and hanging on Facebook for about 10 hours a day develop popcorn brain. The result is IAD (Internet Addiction Disorder) as craving takes precedence over the brain and gray matter seeps away.

Lenovo has big summer plans that includes their IdeaPad K1 tablet being launched late this month as well as a ThinkPad Tablet and IdeaCenter nettop PC.