Geekly Update - 08 October 2014

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

The controversial “iPhone 6 bending” phenomenon finally has a rational, scientific explanation, according to notorious spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller. He claims that it's not Apple's fault at all. Rather, "the energy and excitement" of millions of iPhone consumers has "stirred up their mental forces" causing the iPhones to bend. Oh, and he's offered to help Apple deal with the bad press, if they'll hire him.

JPMorgan Chase revealed that 76 million customer accounts were compromised in a hacker intrusion discovered last summer, not the one million accounts the bank first reported. The hackers got control of 90 servers before the invasion was discovered. The bank says there was "no evidence of fraud" involving the use of stolen customer information. I guess that weird phone call I got on my unlisted number from a woman who asked for me by name, and claimed to be "from Chase" doesn't count as fraud.

To see if people actually read “Terms Of Service” notices, researchers slipped into one a clause that said the free public WiFi service offered in a busy café was provided only if "the recipient agreed to assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity". Six people agreed during the 30 minutes the experiment lasted. "As this is an experiment, we will be returning the children to their parents," said the tech security firm that ran the experiment, F-Secure.

Hot on the well-rounded heels of the “iPhone BendGate” story comes “HairGate” -- users whining that their hair is getting caught in the gap between the phone’s glass display and aluminum chassis. Repeat after me: “It's a feature, not a bug.”

Google received a $100 million lawsuit threat from an attorney claiming to represent a dozen female celebrities whose nude photos were ostensibly leaked from iCloud, posted all over the Web, and indexed by the search giant. The letter charges that Google has been unresponsive or too slow in responding to DMCA demands for takedowns of links to the embarrassing material. Google says it’s removed “tens of thousands” of such links, most in a matter of hours. Is this a silver lining for the affected celebs, or just a lining of the attorney's pockets with silver?

Paypal has been besieged by Square Cash, Google Wallet, and now Apple Pay; the venerable e-payment system is increasingly irrelevant to the critical 18-30 year-old demographic, with less than one-quarter of them using Paypal. Now eBay has announced that it’s going to spin off Paypal as a separate company. Could this be the end for “the world’s most loved payment system?”

Google Fiber’s introduction of gigabit-speed Internet access at bargain rates in the Kansas City market has highlighted the economic “digital divide,” according to two door-to-door surveys of KC residents cited by The Wall Street Journal. Unsurprisingly, poor people don’t have $70/month for 1 Gbps service or $300 for installation of Google Fiber’s “free for three years” 5 Mbps service.

Before purchasing a used iPhone, plug its serial number into Apple’s new “Activation Lock Status” Web server to see if the phone is unlocked and ready for you to use.

3… 2… 1… and it’s all over for Lotus 1-2-3, the 30 year-old spreadsheet program that provided the first really good reason to buy a business personal computer. IBM finally ended support for the venerable product last week, ending an era.

"Lie, Damned Lie or Statistic?" According to NeoWin, Internet Explorer remains the most widely used Web browser in the world, leading Google Chrome and Firefox by a 3-to-1 margin. Unless you believe StatCounter, W3Counter, or Wikimedia -- all of which show Chrome leading by a more than 2-to-1 margin.

Users of iOS 8 are reporting a serious bug in the “reset all settings” function of their iPhones. Despite a prominent assurance that “no data or media will be deleted,” resetting all settings to their factory defaults has deleted files stored on iCloud Drive. Copies of files stored on synced devices vanish, too. Whoopsie!

“How Google Works” is a book, not a user manual. Co-authored by legendary Google execs Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, it reveals the rhyme and reason of Google’s culture, strategy, hiring tactics, decisions, communications, and more. It discusses Google’s response to the censoring demands of the Chinese government and the intrusiveness of the NSA. It even explains why the popular Google Reader RSS service was killed, and why Google thinks Hangouts is going to catch on.

Your thoughts on these topics are welcome. Post your comment or question below, or I'll downgrade your router to dialup speed...