Geekly Update - 19 July 2018

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

In my eleventh-grade English class, I had to read the classic "Death of a Salesman." In it, Willy Loman says, "Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it’s broken! I’m always in a race with the junkyard!" Not much has changed since that book was published in 1949. This report shows the phones with the highest failure rates.

A rocket-shaped robot has decided the patrol the grounds at a Shell gas station in San Francisco, and nobody seems to know why.

A video camera lets you take a breathtaking ride on the tail of the world’s largest airplane.

Parents get the harsh news that Internet filters do not keep kids away from adult content. A recent study at Oxford Internet Institute found that Internet filtering technologies did not reduce children’s exposure to online sexual content.

This just in from the Overly Attached Boyfriend Department: A California man learned how NOT to end a dating relationship. Raul Hernandez was charged with stalking after sending his ex-girlfriend over 4000 text messages, and hacking into her social media and Paypal accounts.

Sensitive military documents relating to the Pentagon’s drone, tank, and tactical programs were stolen because someone forgot to change the router’s default admin password. In related news, an online app named “Shodan” conveniently locates such poorly-secured networks for you.

Fifteen scientific facts about everyday life include the reason Post-it Notes are reusable and how many people you'd need to cram into your house to heat it without using the furnace. (They failed, however, to delve into the more important "ratio of body heat to body odor" discussion.)

InstaPaper, the original digital paper, was sold to Instagram and left to die. Now its inventors have bought it back, but is it too far behind competitors to catch up?

The Google Assistant app now offers a visual graph of your day, including appointments, travel times, and bills to be paid.

Change your Venmo settings right now to make your payment transactions private. By default, the Paypal-owned peer-to-peer payment service assumes you want the entire Internet to know how you spend your money.

Mark Zuckerberg was asked why InfoWars is allowed on Facebook despite its business model of propagating hoaxes. His answer will scare you.

Apple has yanked from its App Store a 99-cent conspiracy-aggregator app named QDrops. It remains in the Google Play Store for now, presumably until after it drops off the top-25-sellers list.

Your thoughts on these topics are welcome. Post your comment or question below...