Geekly Update - 09 Aug 2017

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

NASA is accepting applications for the position of Planetary Protection Officer. (Yes, really.) Jack Davis, a fourth grader from New Jersey, seems like the perfect candidate. You can read his letter to NASA for yourself.

Canada has a civil search warrant law that allows private companies “access to a defendant's home, without notice, to search for and seize relevant evidence before it can be destroyed.” Three Canadian telecom corporations used that process to barge into one Montreal software developer's home, interrogate him for nine hours, then seize his computer, phone and passwords.

Sgt. Mark Kmatz was fired from his position at the Bernalillo County Sheriff's office for looking at photos of n@ked women while at work. But Kmatz insists that it was research... to identify "a specific group of individuals with distinct tattoos and piercings."

“Living jewelry” -- tiny robots that crawls across clothing to perform tasks such as pulling a hoodie’s drawstring or even changing the pattern on cloth is the latest brilliant idea from the MIT Media Lab. Uh, sure… women just love to feel small things randomly crawling over their skin.

A startup named Booster has secured $20 million in financing for its mission, which involves filling up your car’s gas tank at your workplace. Not a bad idea, but perhaps they were not aware that "boost" is a slang term meaning "to steal, especially a car."

Before the solar eclipse on August 21, make sure your safety glasses are the right kind and certified. The American Astronomical Society says weak protection can result in permanent eye damage, and tells you how to test your eclipse glasses.

"See no evil, say no evil…?" The new Tesla Model 3 has a driver-facing camera, and Tesla won’t talk about what it does.

An app that helps smartphone users position their cameras for the best possible selfies has emerged from the University of Waterloo. Hmmm, anyone thinking high-speed Tesla selfie right now?

DIY recipes for brewing up pharmaceuticals in your kitchen are hitting the Internet, prompting official warnings that you shouldn’t do that. Because, well, you don’t know what you’re doing.

The Wannacry ransomware infected hundreds of thousands of computers but collected only $140,000 in ransom money. Kinda makes you feel sorry for the hackers, don't it?

Marcus Hutchins, the young computer expert who stopped the Wannacry ransomware rampage, now faces up to 40 years in prison for allegedly helping to create and sell malware that targeted bank accounts.

Verizon Up, the mobile carrier’s new name for its old rewards program, pays customers credits for money they spend on Verizon products. But to qualify for rewards, you must opt into the Verizon Selects targeted ads program, which collects a lot of data about browsing and app usage.

Here is how to permanently block all of those annoying requests to show notifications that Web sites throw at you, if you use the Chrome browser.

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