Geekly Update - 29 January 2020

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

If you shopped at any of the 850 Wawa convenience stores in the past nine months, your credit card might be for sale on the dark web. Krebs on Security is reporting that card-stealing malware installed in stores and fuel dispensers led to the breach of 30 million cards.

Surveillance cameras seem to be everywhere. It's common to see them on utility poles, attached to the outside of a building, and in places of business. Video doorbells are more and more popular. I've read stories about vacation rentals with hidden cameras in smoke detectors. (Yes, that's illegal.) You'd probably not expect to find a surveillance camera hidden in a tombstone, a car seat, or a shop vac. But they're out there.

Everyone knows that Macs don't get viruses, right? Wrong. According to Kaspersky, 10 percent of all Mac computers are infected with the Shlayer Trojan, which sneaks in via a fake Adobe Flash update. Wait, everyone knows that Adobe Flash should be avoided like the plague, right? Wrong again, it seems. For extra credit, here's a list of ten Mac OS malware outbreaks discovered in 2019.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is demanding that Microsoft "upcycle" the Windows 7 source code, and release it as free software, to atone for the company's "ten years of poisoning education, invading privacy, and threatening user security." Someone at the FSF needs to put this on their screensaver: "You catch more flies with honey than vinegar."

But it looks like Windows 7 is not quite dead yet. Yesterday, Microsoft rolled out an update for Windows 7, two weeks after the "end of life" date for the 10-year-old operating system. The folks at Redmond said the update fixed a bug in its "final" patch, which caused problems with wallpaper.

And in recognition of the fact that 25% of Windows users are sticking with Windows 7, all the major antivirus software makers have announced that they will continue to support their products on that platform, for at least two years.

Product Hunt's winners of the 2019 Golden Kitty Awards have been announced. The Golden Kitty highlights new and innovative products that have launched in the past year, across 23 product categories.

Photo sharing website Flickr had a contest too. Check out the winners and other amazing photo entries in their 2019 Your Best Shot contest.

Facebook has rolled out a new privacy tool called "Off-Facebook Activity" that lets you manage how Facebook tracks you across the internet. The tool, orginally billed as "Clear History" allows users to turn off and delete tracking information related to websites you visit outside of Facebook.

Dozens of colleges are asking students to install location tracking apps on their phones, as a way of tracking class attendance. SpotterEDU is one such app, which uses only short-range Bluetooth signals, so the apps cannot track students' locations once they leave class.

At “some point in the future” the Google Translate app for Android will have a live transcription feature. Translation: you could listen to a conversation in one language, and read it in another, as it happens. This would be great for those times when I suspect my Spanish-speaking friends are telling Bob jokes. "Bob es gracioso, pero las apariencias no lo son todo."

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