Geekly Update - 9 July 2014

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

Zack Danger Brown's Kickstarter campaign description says: "Basically I'm just making potato salad. I haven't decided what kind yet." He has raised almost $60,000 in less than a week.. Anyone remember the Million Dollar Home Page, and all the clones it spawned?

Last October, an Oklahoma farmer accidentally dropped his iPhone into a huge grain silo, and figured it was gone forever. But days ago, he got a phone call from a worker at a grain mill in Japan who found the phone, and mailed it back to him. That's nice, and it probably also explains all the grainy photos.

Try getting THIS through airport security! YouTube user "Arganalth" has a suitcase filled with old floppy and hard drives that can play Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven", complete with lots of harmonic distortion.

Nine out of 10 persons’ whose online communications are intercepted, analyzed, and stored by the NSA are not the targets of any legitimate surveillance, the Washington Post revealed after analyzing a trove of raw data supplied by hero/traitor Edward Snowden. Furthermore, the NSA thinks it’s perfectly OK to share this “by-catch” data with other government agencies.

OMG! Facebook manipulated members’ emotions by tweaking the percentages of negative and positive stories that appeared in their news feeds! The world is terribly upset about something that all marketers have done since the first advertisement appeared. But as Information Week reports, that’s hardly the worst that online marketers do to us.

GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons caught flak for hunting elephants and leopards back in 2011. Now it’s the turn of 19 year-old Texas cheerleader Kendall Jones, whose Facebook photos of her fifth African safari is the target of outraged and outrageous comments, petitions for its removal, and even death threats. Jones says she started the infamous page to promote a TV show she hopes to host.

T-mobile has “crammed” bogus charges for premium text-message services onto customers’ 50-page bills since at least 2012, the Federal Trade Commission charges in a federal lawsuit against the cellular carrier. T-mobile, of course, says the lawsuit is “without merit.”

Qualcomm bought Wilocity, a startup whose product isn’t finished yet, sparking widespread interest in WiGig – gigabit-speed wireless communications. We’re talking theoretical maximum bandwidth of 7 Gigagbits per second without wires. But don’t get too excited; WiGig can’t penetrate most walls, so it’s essentially Bluetooth on steroids. Still, it will be good for streaming HD video to your TV.

Just three decades from now, the top species on Earth will not be human. That’s the prediction of physicist and author Louis Del Monte and other futurists. By the year 2045, machine intelligence will exceed that of the entire human race and we may be considered “an unpredictable and dangerous species.”

Plasma TVs are about to join Betamax VCRs on the scrap heap of history. Citing “changes in market demands,” Samsung has joined Panasonic in ending production of plasma units. LG Electronics plans to phase out plasma displays next year. I say good… that sticky plasma is so hard to get off the walls and floor.

Unintended Consequences... Argentina’s equivalent of the U.S. music/video industry’s lobbying arm, the Chamber of Phonograms and Videograms, won a court order that forced 11 ISPs to block IP addresses and domains controlled by The Pirate Bay. So someone hacked the Chamber’s site, transforming it into a Pirate Bay mirror.

Microsoft got a temporary restraining order that gives it control of a Dynamic Domain Name Service (DDNS) known as No-IP.com. The latter has long been notorious among security researchers as the source of millions of malware infections and host of many rogue Web sites. Microsoft is now filtering all No-IP domains’ traffic, re-routing known threats to oblivion.

Your thoughts on these topics are irrelevant, but robots may find them humorous. So kindly post your comment or question below...