Geekly Update - 25 March 2015

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

Hertz quietly started installing Webcams in new versions of its “NeverLost” navigation devices in mid-2014. The cameras can record activity throughout a rental car’s interior, but Hertz says it has no plans to activate that function.

A 12 year-old girl is charged with attempted murder for twice poisoning her mother, who had confiscated the girl’s iPhone.

Cuba’s first legal, free public WiFi hotspot has opened at a Havana cultural center run by Kcho, a respected local artist. ADSL service in Cuba runs about $900/month. Hooray for totalitarian dictatorships!

Target Corp. will reimburse $10 million to customers who were victims of the retailer’s 2013 data security breach. The maximum payout is $10,000, but that's only if you can document actual damages, including time spent dealing with the fallout. Target limits the latter to two hours and values your time at $10 an hour.

Undersea cables carry 99 percent of international communications traffic. Here’s an interactive map of all 299 submarine cables on a quaint Mercator projection.

"And the survey says…" GoogleFeud turns Google Search’s auto-complete function into a game of “Family Feud.” It’s more fun than it sounds, as you try to guess what the rest of the Internet is thinking.

YouTube now supports 360-degree videos and Google is working with makers of cameras like Bublcam, Giroptic’s 360cam, IC Real Tech’s Allie, Kodak’s SP360 and the Ricoh Theta to make it easy for their users to upload 360 vids to YouTube.

More than 366,000 taxpayers have received phone calls from scammers claiming to be with the IRS this year, says the tax agency. Amazingly, more than 3,000 actually gave up their credit card numbers to pay bogus tax bills by phone. That’s not how the IRS works, of course.

3D printing is so over; the new thing is CLIP — Continuous Liquid Interface Production — is a breakthrough technology that grows parts instead of printing them layer by layer. It’s much faster; parts are stronger; and the choice of materials is far broader. Carbon3D has more details.

Windows 10 will recognize your face, iris, or fingerprint instead of your password, if you so desire. Windows Hello is being pitched as more convenient and more secure than passwords. (No doubt, hackers are quietly rejoicing at this development.)

The Blackberry SecuTablet is actually a Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 with Secusmart’s Security Card voice/data encryption, IBM’s “app wrapping” that segregates work from non-work apps, and a $2,300 price tag. Hey, when your market share is less than one percent you may as well go after the one-percenters, right?

Android is getting a smart lock upgrade that uses a phone’s accelerometer to detect when a user puts the phone down, and does not require re-entry of a password as long as the user is carrying the phone.