Geek Weekly: Our top tech stories for 2 October

Technology Decisions’ weekly wrap of IT fails, latest tech, new must-have gadgets, ‘computer says no’ moments and more.

Hand over your children. In a test to see how well members of the public scrutinise the terms and conditions of free usage at Wi-Fi hotspots, six people unwittingly handed over the rights to their firstborn child. The researchers from F-Secure set up a cheap hotspot at a cafe and waited for people to log-on. The clause the six people missed said: “In using this service, you agree to relinquish your first born child to F-Secure, as and when the company requires it. In the event that no children are produced, your most beloved pet will be taken instead. The terms of this agreement stand for eternity.” How does that old saying go? - A fool and their offspring are soon parted.

The cosmic clock. Researchers have come up with an optical-lattice clock that is so accurate, it would lose only one second in 13.8 billion years - about the present age of the universe. Big deal. Now, if they could only make time slow down so that it took a lot longer for me to reach my next birthday. And anyway, as Douglas Adams wrote, “Time is an illusion - lunchtime doubly so”.

Fall of the robots. It seems Microsoft has quietly dropped development of robotics technology, only seven years after Bill Gates wrote in Scientific American that every home would have one, and that robots “could have just as profound an impact on the way we work, communicate, learn and entertain ourselves as the PC has had over the past 30 years”.

Google full of hot air - and proud of it. Well, not exactly hot air - helium is more accurate. In balloons. Lots of them, floating around the Earth providing relays for communications and the internet to people in remote places or otherwise without good communications infrastructure. The company plans to have a more-or-less endless procession of the high-altitude balloons circling the globe, carried by wind currents. It’s called Project Loon.

Quick, call the doctor. The US government is suffering from bloating, having so far spent around US$2.1 billion on the so-called ‘Obamacare’ website (healthcare.gov) and associated programs, says a Bloomberg analysis. That’s a lot of money. Think of how many balloons or optical-lattice clocks they could buy with that kind of dough.

Image courtesy Google