If smart appliances that can be remotely controlled over the internet were to be compromised and used in a botnet, then attackers could cause local power outages or even large-scale blackouts, according to a presentation given by Princeton University researchers at the USENIX Security Symposium.

This new class of attacks was dubbed MadIoT (Manipulation of demand via IoT) by researchers from Princeton’s Department of Electrical Engineering. Instead of directly attacking the supply side of the power grid, attackers could enslave high-wattage IoT devices in a botnet to manipulate the demand side of the grid.

Popular iOS Twitter client, Leaf, has announced today that the app will no longer be getting updates. With the announcement, the developer iPlop, and app designer Surenix have shed some light on what they’ve been working on, but will ultimately never see the light of day.

The duo shared that Leaf’s long-awaited update will never come to fruition due to the recent Twitter API changes. Their official account tweeted:

Due to recent Twitter API changes, we’re sad to announce the end of Leaf. This means some new features will never see the light of day. Although we’ve never got a chance to launch these features, we’d still like to show you what they looked like in development.

Mozilla removed today 23 Firefox add-ons that snooped on users and sent data to remote servers, a Mozilla engineer has told Bleeping Computer today.

The list of blocked add-ons includes ”Web Security,” a security-centric Firefox add-on with over 220,000 users, whoch was at the center of a controversy this week after it was caught sending users’ browsing histories to a server located in Germany.

BY MISCONFIGURING PAGES on Trello, a popular project management website, the governments of the United Kingdom and Canada exposed to the entire internet details of software bugs and security plans, as well as passwords for servers, official internet domains, conference calls, and an event-planning system.

The U.K. government also exposed a small quantity of code for running a government website, as well as a limited number of emails. All told, between the two governments, a total of 50 Trello pages, known on the site as “boards,” were published on the open web and indexed by Google.

This column is going to be a bit unusual. Typically, I write about a broad tech problem and offer some solutions. But this week, I’ve stumbled into a topic that many agree has no easy fix: online comments.

Over the last decade, commenting has expanded beyond a box under web articles and videos and into social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. That has opened the door to more aggressive bullying, harassment and the ability to spread misinformation — often with difficult real-life consequences.

SAN FRANCISCO — With his arms folded, Jack Dorsey paced back and forth in a conference room at Twitter’s headquarters on Friday afternoon.

In a rare look inside one of the social media company’s policy meetings, the Twitter chief executive gathered with 18 colleagues, including the safety team, to debate ways to make the social media service safer for its users. The discussion quickly turned to how to rid the site of “dehumanizing” speech, even if it did not violate Twitter’s rules, whoch forbid direct threats of violence and some forms of hate speech but do not prohibit deception or misinformation.