Geekly Update - 10 March 2021

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

After breaching Instagram and Twitter, the thought police have invaded TikTok. A new feature will chide users before they post a comment that might be “inappropriate or unkind.” A popup encourages users to “reconsider posting” the potentially offensive comment, but gives the option to “Post anyway.”

This just in from the Revelation 13:16 Department: Amazon wants to do a little more palm reading. The company is expanding Amazon One tech that lets customers pay in stores by scanning their palm. Hopefully they’ll expand this to include an optional mark on the forehead.

T-Mobile is stealing a page from the AT&T and Verizon playbooks. Starting April 26th, they’ll begin sharing selling customer information to third-party advertisers, to provide you with more relevant advertisements. Customers who don’t enjoy having their digital assets exposed to data brokers must manually opt out.

Long-time Reader's Digest fans may be thinking "Your slip is showing." Hackers gained access to live video feeds from over 150,000 surveillance cameras inside jails, hospitals, schools, police stations and Tesla factories. Verkada, the cloud-based security camera service exposed an unprotected internal development system to the Internet.

John McAfee, creator of the popular McAfee computer security software, has found himself embroiled in a series of controversies since selling the company ten years ago. He has fabricated numerous hoaxes, been accused of having his neighbor killed, and was arrested for tax evasion. Now he’s facing new charges of cybercurrency wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering that could land him in prison for years.

SpaceX wants to expand the Starlink satellite internet network by beaming cat videos (and possibly mean tweets) into moving planes, trains, and automobiles.

Speaking of SpaceX, you might be wondering why Starship SN10 exploded several minutes after completing what seemed like a near-perfect high-altitude test flight and vertical landing. Elon Musk explains what went wrong, and how they plan for a smoother SN11 touchdown.

Would you like to live in a 3D-printed house? TechNewsWorld says build times can be reduced from 8 weeks to 1-to-3 days; costs drop by 85 percent, and construction waste is reduced by 59 percent.

In a rare display of bipartisan cooperation, two U.S. senators are asking the FTC to protect people who have experienced abuse and stalking, made easier by “invasive people search sites.” The effort could help affected people remove their personal information from online data brokers.

How does your brain turn a rigid wooden pencil into rubber? Here’s how the rubber pencil illusion works.

If you find yourself in need of a few trillion random numbers, and you need them NOW, here’s good news.

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