Geekly Update - 19 April 2017

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

AT&T says it has blocked one billion robocalls in five months for its customers. They've also improved their call blocking tech so that it now works for customers on landlines.

An 8-year-old boy in Ohio says he learned to drive by watching Youtube videos. The lad had a burger craving, and Mom and Dad were both asleep. So naturally, he drove the family van for a quick ride over to McDonalds, with his 4-year-old sister coming along for the ride. No tickets were issued.

This just in from the "What's My Job, Again?" department: "I am always confused as to what smartwatches are for when we have smartphones," said the chief executive of Huawei’s smartwatch group on the day his company releases a new smartwatch. Click here if you agree.

A mechanic doing repairs on a California man's car found an iPhone 4s that had been lost in the airbag compartment for several years. Some clever Internet research helped to reunite the phone with its owner.

Dallas area residents were awakened at midnight by the ear-splitting sound of more than 150 emergency alert sirens triggered by an old-fashioned analog tone hack.

Score one for the Good Guys. Russian hacker Peter Levashov was arrested in Spain on April 14, 2016. His worldwide botnet, known as Kelihos, will now be dismantled by the Dept. of Justice.

That way you tilt your phone as you tap on it can reveal your password or PIN to hackers. Researchers at Newcastle University in the UK say they are able to guess 4-digit PINs with 70% accuracy on the first guess and 100% on the fifth.

Windows Vista will receive no more patches as it has reached the end of its product life cycle. If you’re still using Vista, it will only become more vulnerable from now on.

On April 11, 2017, Microsoft released a patch that plugs a vulnerability in all versions of Microsoft Word. Hackers have used this hole to infect users with the Dridex malware, which steals logins to financial sites. Update your copy of MS Office if you haven’t done so lately.

A Burger King TV commercial triggered Google Home devices with the question, “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?” The devices answered with the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry for “Whopper burger,” which anyone can edit. BK may want to re-think its cunning plan.

“I built it one piece a time, and it didn’t cost me a dime.” Inmates at Ohio’s Marion Correctional Institution can make that boast, as two working computers built from parts smuggled out of a vocational class were discovered in the ceiling above a training room closet. The inmates also strung over 1000 feet of Ethernet cable to enable them to mess with the prison’s network.

Here’s a handy guide to the default functions that the F1-F12 keys on your keyboard can perform.

BuyMeOnce.com is Web store that stocks only products that last a lifetime. Or at least 30 years, in the case of t-shirts.

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