Geekly Update - 27 January 2021

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

Just over a year ago, I published Here's Why Desktop PCs Just Won’t Die, with my reasoning for why reports of the death of the personal computer have been greatly exaggerated. (Hat tip, Mark Twain) Research firm Canalys agrees, stating that shipments of desktops, notebooks and workstations jumped for the third consecutive quarter, rising 25 percent over the same period in 2019. The past year saw 297 million units shipped, the highest volume since 2014.

DuckDuckGo, the privacy focused search engine that promises not to track or sell your search activity, is gaining in popularity. For the first time, DuckDuckGo handled more than 100 million searches in a single day. That milestone was reached on January 11, and is almost double the number from a year ago. They still have a way to go to catch market leader Google, which handles over five billion daily searches. As of December 2020, the top search engines in the U.S. were Google (88% market share), Bing (6.5%) and Yahoo (3.%) and DuckDuckGo (2.3%).

Online gamers gamed GameStop's stock price. Users on Reddit worked up a frenzy of interest in GameStop, widely panned by Wall Street analysts, causing the price to jump dramatically. Six months ago, the stock price was about $4, today it’s over $300. Some analysts believe the social media-driven surge is a Ponzi scheme.

Police from the UK, EU, US and Canada disrupted one of the most dangerous hacking networks worldwide. For years, the Emotet network used malicious email attachments to gain access to computers, which were then used to deploy other cybercrime activities including ransomware.

Avi Loeb, known for his expertise in astronomy and astrophysics, doesn’t agree with the popular opinion that Oumuamua is just a space rock. His new book “Oumuamua, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” lays out his case that it’s actually an alien light sail, sent toward us by an extraterrestrial civilization.

Nothing to see here? Carl Pei, founder of smartphone maker OnePlus, has announced that his new tech company is called Nothing. Details are sketchy, but Pei calls what is soon to come “a giant reset button for all things innovation.” It could be nothing, but it will definitely be Nothing.

If you have $11 million burning a hole in your pocket, you might consider buying Bloodhound, a rocket-powered car that hopes to reach a top speed of 1,000 miles per hour, breaking the current land speed record of 763 mph. After a decade of effort, the current owner of the Bloodhound Land Speed Record project is tired of throwing money at it, but he thinks there’s still potential.

Prior to 2019, Facebook collected phone numbers from users who turned on the two-factor authentication option for additional account security. But due to a security flaw of their own, a database containing over 500 million of those phone numbers was extracted, and they’re now for sale, starting at $20 a pop.

Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Dizzy Dean famously challenged someone who didn’t believe that curveballs actually curve. "Stand behind a tree 60 feet away,” Dean said, “and I'll whomp you with an optical illusion." Now you too can shoot around corners with NERF’s new Rival Curve Shot blasters. An adjustable barrel lets you change the angle of your shot, to shoot around corners, or lob squishy projectiles over a target.

TechNewsWorld reports that robot lawyer DoNotPay is facing legal troubles of its own. A consumer in Illinois claims that he received several unsolicited text messages from the company, attempting to solicit his business. He contends that DoNotPay “launched a mass telemarketing campaign that sent text solicitations to consumers without their prior express consent.”

This just in from the Fourth Dimension Department: Engineers at the University of Maryland have created a new shape-changing or “morphing” 3D printing nozzle that enables what they call 4D printing.