Did you buy a useless $400 "smart" juicer and now feel the need to accessorize it with more extrusions from the Internet of Shit timeline? Then The Leaf from Teaforia is just the thing: it's a tea-maker that uses DRM-locked tea-pods to brew tea in your kitchen so you don't have to endure the hassle of having the freedom to decide whose tea you brew in your tea-brewing apparatus, and so that you can contribute to the impending environmental apocalypse by generating e-waste every time you make a cup of tea. Read the rest

Chinese state media reports on a $28/RMB188 app that browses webcams whose default passwords haven't been changed, allowing subscribers to watch the goings-on in stores, living rooms, bedrooms, children's rooms, and anywhere a CCTV might be installed. Read the rest

The independent, Congressionally mandated Health Care Industry Cybersecurity Task Force released its report last week, setting out their findings about the state of security in America's health technology (very, very, very bad) and their recommendations (basic commonsense cybersecurity 101). Read the rest

For 13 years, I've been writing about Adam Greenfield, one of the world's smartest critical thinkers on what we're calling "The Internet of Things" this decade -- but since the first glimmers of the idea of networked people, places and objects, Greenfield has been writing smart things about the subject, most recently in Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, a book that Verso will publish next week. Read the rest

Dan Hon (previously) took note of a sponsored tweet in The Atlantic's Twitter feed: "SPONSORED: The future city: What changes when everything is connected? #MSFTCloud #ad" and decided to have a go at answering the question. The results were fantastic. Read the rest

Whoever created the Wcry ransomware worm -- which uses a leaked NSA cyberweapon to spread like wildfire -- included a killswitch: newly infected systems check to see if a non-existent domain is active, and if it is, they fall dormant, ceasing their relentless propagation. Read the rest

25 NHS trusts and multiple doctors' practices in England and Scotland (but so far, not Northern Ireland or Wales) report that they have had to effectively shut down due to a massive Wcry ransomware infection that has stolen whole swathes of the English healthcare system in one go. The infection appears to exploit a bug that the NSA discovered and deliberately kept secret, only to have it revealed by the Shadow Brokers. Read the rest

The anonymous individual behind the must-follow Internet of Shit Twitter account now has a column in The Verge, and has devoted 1,500 words to documenting all the ways in which Apple's signature walled-garden approach to technology has created an Apple Home IoT platform that is not only manifestly totally broken, but also can't be fixed until Apple decides to do something about it -- and once you opt for Apple, you can forget about plugging in anything Apple hasn't greenlit, meaning that your choice of smartphone will determine what kind of toaster and lightswitch you're allowed to connect to your smarthome. Read the rest

Persirai is a new strain of Internet of Things malware that infects more than 1,250 models of security camera, all manufactured by an unnamed Chinese manufacturer that has sold at least 185,000 units worldwide. Read the rest

The Nixie Machine 2 is a huge (1.2m long!), expensive ($30,000!) nixie clock whose tubes are modern Nixies, scratchbuilt by Czech engineer Dalibor Farny. Read the rest

Cloudflare presents a primer on "anti-patterns" that have transformed IoT devices into ghastly security nightmares. Read the rest

The Mirai Worm is a seemingly unstoppable piece of malware that targets the garbage-security Internet of Things gadgets that have proliferated through the world; these gadgets then used to deliver equally unstoppable floods of traffic that endanger whole countries. Read the rest

Bose's $350 wireless headphones need an app to "get the most" out of them, and this app monitors everything you listen to -- the names of the podcasts, the music, videos, etc -- and sends them to Bose without your permission, according to a lawsuit filed this week in Chicago by Kyle Zak. Read the rest

Aga is an iconic European over-maker famous for a longstanding, ostentatious design that required the owner to burn fuel around the clock to maintain temperature across the cooker's titanic thermal mass, so much so that owners of British country homes integrated them into their household heating systems. Read the rest

Charlie Miller made headlines in 2015 as part of the team that showed it was possible to remote-drive a Jeep Cherokee over the internet, triggering a 1.4 million vehicle recall; now, he's just quit a job at Uber where he was working on security for future self-driving taxis, and he's not optimistic about the future of this important task. Read the rest

Wordfence, a security research company, discovered that the reason Algeria is the country most often seen in attacks on WordPress blogs is that the country's largest ISP distributes home routers that are locked in an insecure state, with an open port that lets attackers seize control of them and use them to stage attacks on higher-value targets. Read the rest

Bruce Schneier takes to the pages of Technology Review to remind us all that while botnets have been around for a long time, the Internet of Things is supercharging them, thanks to insecurity by design. Read the rest