Geekly Update - 30 May 2018

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

The emergency alert system in Lake Worth, Florida was hacked during a recent power outage. Residents were warned of "extreme zombie activity" in the area. Officials claim that employees were not responsible, but have no other leads.

Iouri Petoukhov just wanted to make his father's life a little easier. So he invented a machine to cook him breakfast. It's made almost entirely of Lego blocks. Bacon and eggs, anyone?

“Fake news has reached epidemic proportions worldwide and this is in large part due to the underlying online advertising economy, which rewards abuse, fraud, and misinformation,” says Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, in a report on what’s wrong with the Internet. Furman suggests a conversation about "lean data vs. fat data" and wants consumers to demand online companies to collect less data, or not keep it as long.

Siempo is an app for Android that promises to help break your smartphone addiction. “Siempo reverses some of the persuasive, psychologically addicting techniques that have been built into our phone software and mobile apps by developers,” says this Techcrunch review.

With apartments getting smaller, countertop space is getting tight. So who wouldn’t want a single machine that makes, coffee, lattes, dry soda, chai, horchata, and beer?

Alexa and Google Home are finally getting male voices, which users can select instead of the standard female voices. (But who is to say the standard voices are not male already?)

About a dozen Google employees have resigned in protest of the company’s involvement in a Pentagon contract to create an artificial intelligence to target people for drone strikes.

Ask, “Are you spying on me?” and you will get nearly identical answers from Alexa and Google Home. Apple’s Siri, in contrast, has just one word to say.

The annual cost of Amazon Prime is going up to $119, but Prime members will soon get 10% off on select items at Whole Foods.

Microsoft will start blocking Flash, Shockwave, and Silverlight in Office 365 documents beginning in September, 2018. Desktop versions of Office 2016, Office 2013 and Office 2010 are not affected. Adobe is ending Flash support in 2020, and Microsoft is ending support for Silverlight in 2021; major browsers stopped supporting Silverlight in 2016, according to Microsoft.

This just in from the "Thanks for the Fish" department: After taking 22,000 pre-order payments for their "3D" headphones, the developers at Ossic have burned an estimated $10-12 million and abruptly shut down. “This was obviously not our desired outcome,” they say in a farewell letter.

The location data of 200 million Americans was exposed by a bug in the website of LocationSmart, a California firm that buys location data from cell phone carriers and makes it available to “legitimate” parties. This business model is even more shocking than the data breach.

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