Geekly Update - 27 October 2021

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

The winner of last Saturday's race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was an algorithm. Self-driving Formula One style cars competed for a $1 million prize in the first Indy Autonomous Challenge. A team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) won, even though EuroRacing's Dallara IL-15 was faster. Due to a coding error, the car only completed five out of six laps.

This just in from the "It's Raining Tylenol" desk: Wing, the drone delivery arm of Google's parent company Alphabet, announced Wednesday that it will partner with Walgreens to begin making deliveries via drone in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Even if a robot takes your job, you still might have to hang around and look over its shoulder.
Authorities in the UK are seeking to remove a legal provision that allows citizens to challenge decisions made by artificial intelligence. But computer experts think ending human oversight of AI is a Very Bad Idea.

Remember the speech President Nixon made after the Apollo 11 moon landing disaster? You don't, because it never happened -- until now. A high-tech studio used AI to generate a realistic rendering of Nixon delivering the speech that never happened. The effort was intended to show how deepfake technology raises ethical questions.

Google’s Threat Analysis Group has disrupted a phishing campaign that was targeting YouTube creators with cookie theft malware. Hackers lured their targets with a demo for anti-virus software that turned out to be malware, allowing them to steal browser cookies and hijack the Youtube channel. The hackers would then sell it to the highest bidder or use the channel to broadcast cryptocurrency scams.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory telescope has discovered what may be the first planet outside of the Milky Way galaxy. M51 is a Saturn-sized exoplanet about 28 million light years away from Earth, but that's not the only reason you shouldn't plan to visit. A nearby star that's likely to explode may blast M51 with intense radiation, ruining your day.

Fast Radio Bursts are an unexplained cosmic phenomenon puzzling astronomers. These mysterious flashes occur in the radio wave spectrum and emanate from galaxies far, far away. One Chinese observatory detected 1,652 bursts from a single source in 47 days. Are they messages from another civilization, or just random emanations from hyper-magnetized neutron stars?

Police have arrested 150 suspected drug vendors and buyers, after the closure of DarkMarket, the dark web’s largest illegal marketplace. Millions of dollars in cash, crypto, and drugs were seized as a result of a 10-month investigation.

Shark attacks on humans may be just a case of mistaken identity, say researchers at Macquarie University’s Neurobiology Lab. They've developed shark-vision models indicating that humans surfers and swimmers may look like seals and sea-lions. One anonymous seal interviewed for this story cast doubt on the study, and encouraged more humans to swim in the ocean.

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