When you update your lights to LED, why not connect them to the web?

Forbes Article "Why LED Retrofits Are The 'Trojan Horse' Of The Internet of Things"

The Internet of Chaos.

Can I make an LED light bulb that's IPv6 addressable?

SEO = Search Engine Optimization = slimey scumbag scamming

So I guess Google has struck a nerve and changed their algorithms enough that they're causing pain to the link spamming SEO companies. According to Techdirt, they're even going so far as to nicely ask webmasters to take down their spammed links.  [ "Oh sure, I'd love to do you a favor"... or not! ]

Here's a link to the article  

They also link to an article on the Awl

Ha!

UPDATE:

The HuffPo had an article about SEO, where they quoted the AP:

While the Federal Trade Commission and several state attorney generals have cracked down on fake endorsements or reviews, they have not weighed in on clicks. Meanwhile, hundreds of online businesses sell clicks and social media accounts from around the world.
...
In 2013, the State Department, which has more than 400,000 likes and was recently most popular in Cairo, said it would stop buying Facebook fans after its inspector general criticized the agency for spending $630,000 to boost the numbers. [OMFG - the IG had to tell them that ?!?!]


...In Indonesia, a social media-obsessed country with some of the largest number of Facebook pages and Twitter users, click farms proliferate.

Ali Hanafiah, 40, offers 1,000 Twitter followers for $10 and 1 million for $600. He owns his own server, and pays $1 per month per Internet Protocol address, which he uses to generate thousands of social media accounts.

US Court: "WiFi is not Radio." "Most Radio is Auditory[sic]" "up is down"

The last one I made up.  The rest, by another idiot.

From Techdirt.  Why wifi sniffing is "wiretapping".  Held by a court, and upheld on appeals.

I can't even begin to comment until I read the exact ruling, but it basically starts with the courts ruling that: "... data transmitted over a Wi-Fi network is not an 'electronic communication' that is 'readily accessible to the general public' ", and then goes on to explain that's exactly what it is: " so long as it is not scrambled or encrypted".

http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20130910/11594924472/appeals-court-upholds-dangerous-ruling-that-wifi-sniffing-is-wiretapping.shtml

Even the US public school system doesn't train people to be this ignorant, they have to genuinely try.

Apple MacBook Bursting Batteries?

Violet Blue ( her blog is NSFW) had her MacBook Battery explode and she wrote about it on ZDNET

Apple's PR Department:  "That's how they work", or the equivalent

Well, I guess now I have a way to replace them.

Twitter removes dumb Direct Message feature a month after release

From TheVerge:
  
Twitter quietly removes feature that lets you receive direct messages from any follower

Only a month after rolling out the feature, Twitter has quietly removed the ability for users to receive direct messages from any follower. For now, the person you want to DM will need to follow you back before you share any private thoughts.
more...

What could possibly go wrong?  I'm glad they realized the problems relatively quickly. How could they do this in the first place?

FireEye gets in on the publication action with a paper linking 11 APT campaigns

From Slashdot:

"FireEye researchers have linked eleven distinct APT cyber espionage campaigns previously believed to be unrelated (PDF), leading them to believe that there is a shared operation that supplies and maintains malware tools and weapons used in them. The eleven campaigns they tied together were detected between July 2011 and September 2013, but it's possible and very likely that some of them were active even before then.

Apple has not necessarily jumped the shark...

But when they delete posts by Lawrence Lessig (Law professor, founder of creative commons) from their tech forum for talking about his rights to get his product repaired, well ?

So this has been a week from Apple hell. Apple did a major upgrade of its suite of software — from the operating system through applications. Stupidly (really, inexcusably stupid), I upgraded immediately. Every Apple-related product I use has been crippled in important ways. ...

http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/65697513808/on-the-pathological-way-apple-deals-with-its-customers