Geek Weekly: Our top weird tech stories for 12 February
Technology Decisions’ weekly wrap of IT fails, latest tech, new must-have gadgets, ‘computer says no’ moments and more.
If it can happen to him … There must be red faces in the offices of Twitter this week, and none redder that that of the company’s CFO, Anthony Noto, whose Twitter account was hacked. Whoever got in started sending out auto-replies to other users, containing links to spam sites. Twitter locked the account after 20 minutes and stopped the tweets.
Too tight with your money? More red faces, this time in Scotland at Tesco Bank, which apparently locked around 300,000 people out of its online services a week ago. The problem occurred while the bank was migrating its online savings accounts from the Royal Bank of Scotland’s system to its own.
So that’s why my flight was cancelled. You might remember the mess that was London’s airspace in December, when an apparent computer glitch resulted in the National Air Traffic Services’ System Flight Server going down. Well, the investigation has found that it wasn’t just one channel of the server that broke, it was both channels - the first time such a simultaneous double failure has occurred. One hundred and twenty flights had to be cancelled, 500 were delayed and 10,000 passengers were affected.
Hair trigger has to go. The USA has around 900 land-based nuclear missiles, each of them on a ‘hair trigger alert’ that could see them launched within minutes of an order being given. The hair trigger concept stems from the Cold War, when it was seen as necessary to get the missiles launched before incoming enemy missiles destroyed them. In a blog post, Ken Kimmel, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, argues that this system has to change to prevent accidental firings - which almost occurred in the US in 1979 and in the Soviet Union in 1983.
Spooky robot. Clever, but a bit spooky at the same time, this quadruped from Boston Dynamics (which is owned by, who else, Google) is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. And it can run:
Spacey robot. One giant step for robots, one small can of beer for the Moon:
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