Geekly Update - 28 April 2021

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

The FBI is using breach alert service Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) to alert victims of the now defunct Emotet botnet, which was dubbed the world's most dangerous malware by security experts. The FBI provided the 4.3 million email addresses harvested by Emotet to HIBP, to make it easier to alert those affected. You might want to check at HIBP to see if your credentials were caught up in that mess.

In December 2019, I gave a list of reasons Why Desktop PCs Just Won’t Die. The pandemic caused a surge in PC sales, and that trend seems to be continuing. Vive la PC!

The privacy-focused Facebook alternative platform MeWe grew by 36% in the first quarter of 2021, and now boasts a membership of almost 18 million members. MeWe promises “No Ads. No Spyware. No BS” and differs from Facebook in that users control what happens in their newsfeed.

An article at BBC News asks the question: “What will happen to all the dead batteries from electric cars?” The lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles are hard to recycle, because they contain hazardous materials, and have “an inconvenient tendency to explode if disassembled incorrectly.”

Lax security and ongoing data breaches that reveal millions of consumer’s personal details make it easy for almost anyone to unlock a “frozen” Experian credit file. Security blogger Brian Krebs explains why “Experian’s credit freeze security is still a joke.”

Zoom has announced Immersive View, a new feature that puts up to 25 meeting participants in a shared virtual room that can create the feeling of being in a classroom, a boardroom, or auditorium. It’s similar to the Microsoft Teams “Together Mode” but it’s available on free Zoom accounts.

Manuel Lucio Dallo is a software engineer who built a custom messaging device for his 96-year-old grandmother who is both tech-averse and hard of hearing. The Yayagram allows for sending and receiving messages using what looks like an old-fashioned switchboard interface. Under the hood, the box uses a Raspberry Pi processor and the Telegram messaging service. But don’t tell Yaya.

Four astronauts aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon have successfully docked at the International Space Station. This is SpaceX’s third astronaut mission under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, and the first time SpaceX has reused a craft for a crewed mission. The four new aarivals join seven others on the ISS, and will spend six months in space conducting science experiments.

A web designer in Argentina was surprised when he was able to buy google.com.ar, Google’s domain name in that country, for 270 pesos, or just under 3 US dollars. For a few minutes, he owned the domain legally, before it was (mysteriously) transferred back to Google. Sorry, no refund.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, we now have “deepfake geography.” Falsified satellite images are fake but look like genuine images of real places. Researchers at University of Washington warn that such images, “created by different people, for different purposes” could become a growing problem. Thanks, I'll add that to my list of things to worry about.

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