QR codes on gravestones. What will they think of next?

Graveyards are becoming interactive with the addition of small Quick Response (QR) codes. Visitors can scan the codes with a smartphone and access memorial pages, obituaries and online photo albums of the deceased.

“It’s just great technology,” according to Lori Miller, a Philadelphia entrepreneur who is launching her own gravestone-specific QR code tagging company called Digital Legacys.

After embarrassing Samsung by ruling that their tablet wasn’t cool enough to be an iPad knock-off, the judge embarrasses Apple by ordering them to pay for Samsung ads for the next six months:

A British judge yesterday ordered Apple to run notices on its UK website stating that Samsung didn’t copy the iPad. The notices—which effectively act as ads for Samsung, points out a lawyer for Apple—must stay on the Apple site for at least six months and must also appear in British newspapers and magazines.

Alice Van Ness, a yoga teacher on the Facebook campus, was sacked for … giving the “tsk-tsk” look to a Facebook employee who used her cell-phone during class.

Hilarious excerpt from the termination notice:

“We are in the business of providing great customer service,” said the notice from the fitness contractor she worked for. “Unless a client requires us to specifically say no to something, we prefer to say yes whenever possible.” 

Gotta say, she should’ve seen that coming. Then again, her response indicates that she probably doesn’t get the whole Mark Zuckerberg thing:

“We’re not talking about the US government here. We’re not talking about Russia is about to bomb us. We’re talking about Facebook. Something can’t wait half an hour?”

Somebody lend that woman a copy of The Social Network, STAT.

Facebook is at it again. You may not have noticed (I sure didn’t), but Facebook’s found a sneaky way to get you to adopt their new email platform. They’ve changed the default email displayed on your profile to an @facebook.com one.

See for yourself:

Just go to your Timeline, click “About” below contact info, scroll down to “Contact Info” and click “Edit.” For each email you want visible, change the crossed-out circle symbol to a full circle; vice versa for ones you don’t want listed.

AKA 5 reasons not to buy the new MacBook Pro (for those of us who couldn’t dream of affording it anyway):

1. It’s difficult to repair
2. It’s expensive
3. Websites and apps aren’t yet optimized for its Retina display
4. Laptops may become obsolete
5. Cheaper Retina displays may be coming soon

This @Sweden project is pretty awesome. What’s even more interesting is that it’s government organized/sanctioned. Even if it isn’t as laissez-faire as it comes across in the article, it says something good about a nation that they are willing to do something like this:

Chances of embarrassment are unusually high when you are @Sweden, the nation’s official Twitter spokesperson.

…

If there is anything to be learned from the @Sweden experiment, a government initiative that entrusts the country’s Twitter account to a new citizen every seven days, it is that there is no such thing as a typical Swede.

One @Sweden posted photographs of his Christmas moose hunt. Another tartly criticized the foreign secretary, Carl Bildt. Another declared that she would like to be making love, so to speak, right that very second. Another, a Muslim lawyer, discussed the ubiquity of the name Muhammad among immigrants and joked that if anyone forgot the names of her six brothers, Muhammad would do fine.

And Jack Werner, the very first @Sweden, attracted thousands of followers and the nickname “the masturbating Swede” after he decided to be honest when listing his favorite leisure activities. (He also enjoys “drinking a lot of coffee” and “hanging out with my friends.”)

“I wanted to show that I’m often kind of immature and often kind of stupid and so is this country, and I bet you are, too, and so are a lot of people around the world,” Mr. Werner, 23, said in a telephone interview. “It’s much more interesting than saying things like, ‘Look at these fabulous pictures of nature.’ ”

Given the amount of information we reveal about ourselves daily, we need to re-examine the false sense of security we have online.

In regards to the recent hacking of LinkedIn:

“If they had consulted with anyone that knows anything about password security, this would not have happened,” said Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research, a San Francisco computer security firm.

Part of the problem may be that there are few consequences for companies with a devil-may-care attitude toward data. There are no legal penalties. Customers rarely defect. And in LinkedIn’s case, its stock price actually rose in the days after the breach.

What especially concerns many people on this particular breach was that LinkedIn was not some green start-up or a company unfamiliar with data. After a highly successful initial public offering in May last year, it has piles of cash. It recruits top talent. And it makes money. It also has 160 million members who share their business connections in the hopes of making a broader and more efficient network. And they want their data to be protected.

“I expected better from LinkedIn,” said Craig Robert Smith, a professional musician and product manager at Buzzmedia. “But I can’t delete my account because it’s the place to be in terms of getting recruited and networking.”

It was not immediately clear how hackers were able to breach the system, how long they had been there, or if they are still poking around inside. LinkedIn does not have a chief security officer whose sole job it is to monitor for breaches. The company says David Henke, its senior vice president for operations, oversees security in addition to other roles, but Mr. Henke declined to speak for this article.

On a grading scale of A through F, experts say, LinkedIn, eHarmony and Lastfm.comwould get, at best, a “D” for password security. The most negligent thing a company can do with users’ passwords is store them in plain text. That was the case with RockYou, a gaming site that lost 30 million user passwords in a 2009 breach. The most basic step they can take to protect passwords is camouflage them with basic encryption — what is known as “hashing” — in which they mash-up a password with a mathematical algorithm and store only the encoded, or “hashed,” version.

Time to change your LinkedIn password, folks. Some enterprising (and idle) individuals have managed to hack the website’s secure - but not “foolproof” - encryption system and has posted 6.5 million passwords for everybody to see.

According to ZDNet’s last update:

LinkedIn confirmed it has suffered a breach leading to a leaked cache of user account details, but did not explain how the data was accessed. The company has disabled affected accounts and emailed account holders with details of how to reset their password.

I still changed mine, just in case. Who knows what hijinks a person could get up to with my staid and professional (read: nothing like my alter ego JustMeThinks) LinkedIn profile?

Have you seen Twitter’s new logo? No more “twitter” or “t”; it’s just the bird now. Not big news, but what gave me pause was the explanation:

The new logo is nothing but a redesigned, simplified version of the site’s iconic blue bird. “Twitter is the bird, the bird is Twitter,” creative director Doug Bowman writes on the official blog. “There’s no longer a need for text, bubbled typefaces, or a lowercase ‘t’ to represent Twitter.”

The bird logo “grows out of love for ornithology, design within creative constraints, and simple geometry,” Bowman went on. “This bird is crafted purely from three sets of overlapping circles—similar to how your networks, interests and ideas connect and intersect with peers and friends.”

Ornithology and geometry. Anyone else completely miss all the significant symbolism in the little blue bird?