A few months ago, I wrote about the growing graveyard of “smart” home devices — expensive bits of plastic and silicon that turned into bricks the moment a corporate server in Virginia or San Francisco was switched off. It’s a personal annoyance when your $300 security hub stops talking to your lightbulbs. Scale that logic up to national defence and critical infrastructure, and the stakes shift from a darkened living room to a crippled nation.

Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) by Unknown

The media hype generated by the launch of the Apple Inc. iPad has been seriously irritating me over the last weeks. Apart from the fact that I can not see anything revolutionary about either the hardware nor the software, I can see a number of highly problematic developments with the way Apple is trying to create a total vendor lock-in. ### The evil is in the Store