Geekly Update - 28 October 2015

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

The robot insurrection will have to wait another year. Amazon will hire 100,000 temporary (but human) workers for the holiday shopping season, 25% more than last year and 30,000 more than second-place Target.

In Seattle, there is now a Little League for aspiring professional video game players. This confirms my theory that children of the future will have huge thumbs and small brains.

What should a self-driving car do when its only choice is to plough into a group of children or swerve into a wall, probably killing its owner? Ethicists are wrestling with this question and more complex ones like, “What if there are also kids in the car?”

What did your best friend eat for lunch three years ago yesterday? Now you can find out, and probably relive those exciting photos, too. Facebook is indexing all two trillion of its members’ public posts to make them searchable. It remains to be seen just how good the search algorithm is.

Who's watching the watchers? Millions, possibly billions, of CCTV (closed-circuit surveillance) cameras are infested with botnet malware as a result of the Shellshock bug that was discovered over a year ago. It's not clear whether this allows hackers to view the video streams, but we do know that the vulnerability is being used to perpetrate ultra-high speed denial of service attacks.

Turns out Grandma was right, when she warned that a watched pot never boils. Cornell physicists have confirmed one weird prediction of quantum theory – that a system can't change while you're watching it.

Yale, the lock company, has entered the doorbell-camera market with a new product called the Look Digital Door Viewer. Its outdoor component features a motion sensor, a peephole that doubles as a camera, a mic and speaker for the intercom, infrared night vision and—of course—a doorbell button. The intercom and smartphone apps allow you to communicate with visitors from just about anywhere.

Toshio Yamamoto has searched for the perfect ramen noodle since 1996. His website, i-ramen.net, contains in-depth reviews of 5,653 ramen brands, and he’s not stopping. The site is in Japanese but Google Translate can help with that.

Facebook now sends members scary notifications when the social network thinks a member is being targeted by government-sponsored hackers. Among other advice, Facebook recommends turning on two-factor authentication of logins.

AVG Security has released its list of the top 10 performance-killing, battery draining Android apps. Actually, there are two lists; one for apps that hog resources in the background and one for apps that must be initiated by the user.

"License and registra... what the heck?" A Tesla car running on autopilot got the first speeding ticket issued to an autonomous vehicle, for doing 75 mph in a 55 zone on a Florida turnpike. I wonder if the car is programmed to stop and roll down the window when approached by a trooper?

Henceforth, the FCC will publish a weekly report including the phone numbers of the companies that garner the most complaints about telemarketing robocalls. Of course, the FCC doesn’t expect any consumers to retaliate using this information.

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