The story of Trendnet and its home security cameras that were being used by random internet dwellers to spy on their owners can't fail to send a shiver down your spine.

There you are thinking you've got a pretty nifty safety mechanism in your home - the sanctuary you go to escape all the horrors of the world, the only place you can really and truly relax and be yourself - and the next thing you know you and your family are being ogled and screengrabbed on message boards across the internet.

It doesn't sound real: it sounds like a film, possibly one starring Mark Wahlberg or latter-day Jodie Foster, and it highlighted two things:

1. People are, essentially, awful.

Posting instructions on how to hack into these cameras online was the internet equivalent of finding a wallet on the street and nicking the cash before handing it in to the police.

So busy was Console Cowboys giving itself a pat on the back for out-witting some shoddy lines of code that it didn't stop to think about the consequences for anyone who owned one of these cameras.

But then again, taking this information and running with it (relentlessly searching for boobs, because the internet is nothing if not a pubescent boy) is pretty grim too.

It's non-consensual Chat Roulette. It's installing a two-way mirror in a toilet cubicle. It's being a peeping Tom. It's seedy and it's horrible.

2. You can't take for granted that tech is on your side.

Generally speaking, tech is pretty brilliant. But, like the people who make it, it is not infallible.

Did those people whose videos ended up being discussed on message boards with links to their live feeds alongside, in some cases, map locations put too much trust in the Trendnet cameras and the people who made them?

If the last 12 months with its never-ending Anonymous attacks and PSN outages have shown nothing else, they've proven that no company is 100 per cent secure. In this situation, you have to question whether people should really be leaving these digital windows into their physical lives wide open.

I'm not saying we should call it a day, shut down the internet and go back to carrier pigeons and cassette tapes. But maybe we do all need to take a look at what the technology we've surrounded ourselves with is capable of and ask if the physical hardware is as secure as we're trusting it to be.

People get into the tiny cracks and loopholes left by our gadgets one way or another, and more often than not it's via the internet. That's why we need initiatives like Safer Internet Day that help to educate and, hopefully, stem things like cyber bullying, ID theft and other malicious threats that manifest themselves online where people don't feel like they have to answer to anyone.

Sci-fi would have it that one day our technology will become sentient and turn against us in revenge for the years of being treated like the inanimate objects we all thought they were. If we can't even be decent to one another now while the tech is behaving itself, what hope do we have against the gadgets?

Wolfram Alpha has announced a new pro package for all your knowledge computing needs that brings bulked up results and the ability to search using images, files and other data inputs.

The enriched pro results will come with interactive graphs and the like, as well as the ability to export and download information.

Wolfram Alpha's current free results come with some simple graphs and basic results but the pro edition will give you a lot more control over these, allowing you to show different, relevant datasets on the same chart and export the data rather than simply saving the graph as an image.

Keyboard porn

In exchange for your monthly fee, Wolfram Alpha will also give you an extended keyboard which allows you to use all manner of alternative symbols too, including mathematical signs and the Greek alphabet.

The new pro deal will set you back $4.99 a month (around £3.15) or $2.99 (£1.88) if you're a student, although there will also be a free trial period when it launches on 8 February (Wednesday).

While this will likely prove most useful to students and academics, there's something to be said for an increase in the quality of your pub knowledge about goats in France, P && (Q || R) and, er, Ryan Gosling. Right?

Thousands of Trendnet security camera owners have found themselves the unwitting stars of a Big Brother style life-streaming nightmare as it emerges that anyone could access live footage from inside their homes without so much as a password.

After the vulnerability was highlighted by a blog called Console Cowboys, various forum users began sharing links to live cameras as well as screen grabs and, in some cases, Google Map locations.

Trendnet, which uses the tagline "networks people trust", says it has been aware of the problem since 12 January but has been pushing security updates to close the loop.

Trendnet's director of global marketing, Zak Wood, told the BBC that he thinks fewer than 50,000 people's SecurView cameras are affected worldwide, with 26 models of internet security cameras identified as vulnerable.

"The firmware has been tested and released [on] seven of the models," Wood explained.

"We anticipate to have all of the revised firmware available this week. We are scrambling to discover how the code was introduced and at this point it seems like a coding oversight."

When it discovered the "coding oversight", Console Cowboys was surprised to see that after just a little bit of tinkering with the firmware code "the camera is more than happy to let me view its video stream.

"There does not appear to be a way to disable access to the video stream, I can't really believe this is something that is intended by the manufacturer."

Firmware updates are incoming and, in some cases, already available – check out Trendnet's information page here for more details.

Google has announced that it is ready to begin installing its first fibre-optic broadband network after an extensive planning phase.

The Google Fiber service will be installed in Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri. For those not familiar with the area, the two cities are right next to each other, separated by a river.

Making the announcement on the Google Fiber Blog, Google Access general manager Kevin Lo said, "We've measured utility poles; we've studied maps and surveyed neighborhoods; we've come up with a comprehensive set of detailed engineering plans; and we've eaten way too much barbecue. Now, starting today, we're ready to lay fiber."

Teeny tiny fibres

Those less interested in the diet of the Google engineers and more about Google Fiber might like to know that each cable will be chock full of glass fibres roughly the width of a human hair.

These cables will then form the "backbone" of a high speed data infrastructure that could carry speeds "more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have today."

The first stage of the rollout is installing that "backbone", then Google will start connecting up home across both Kansas Citys.

Last Sunday's NFL Super Bowl showdown was a social networking phenomenon, smashing the record for tweets sent per second during a sporting event.

During the final three minutes of NFL showpiece game between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots, over 10,000 tweets were posted every second, the company has revealed.

And, in the final minute when the Giants took a dramatic last minute lead through an Ahmad Bradshaw touchdown, tweets peaked at 12,233 per second. In 2008 the peak was just 27 per second.

Overall, 13.7m Super Bowl related tweets were posted during the game, Twitter announced in a blog post on Monday.

The previous record was set in January when Tim Tebow mania was in full flow and his Denver Broncos ousted the Pittsburgh Steelers to advance to the next round of the NFL play-offs.

Madonna vs Manning

Aside from the game itself, which the Giants won 21-17, Madonna's performance at half-time also resonated with the Twitterverse, sparking 10,245 posts per second at its peak.

Away from the Super Bowl the all-time record for tweets per second came in 2011 during the finale of a Japanese TV show called 'Castle in the Sky,' which brought in 25,088tps.

Redbox completed the biggest day in the company's history on Monday by announcing it has bought the rival NCR Corporation, which runs the Blockbuster Express kiosks.

The company, owned by Coinstar, has paid $100m for all of NCR's entertainment assets and takes control of the 9,000 rental kiosks owned by the company.

It now also owns all of the retail contracts and disc inventory in a move which further boosts Redbox's penetration in the cheap, nightly disc rental market.

It's a pretty safe bet that all Blockbuster Express kiosks will now be re-branded as Redbox services, following NCR's own purchase of the kiosk arm of Blockbuster's failing business last year.

The acquisition is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2012 and will give Redbox a monopoly on the in-store kiosk market.

Huge day for Redbox

The announcement follows confirmation that Redbox and Verizon have signed an agreement to launch a new service which combines an on-demand offering with physical disc rentals.

The partnership, which will launch in the second quarter of this year, will take on Netflix by offering subscriptions to streaming and disc packages.

Verizon will team-up with Coinstar, the owners of the Redbox disc rental company, to offer a new video entertainment service to launch later this year.

The heavily-rumoured deal will see the pair combine Redbox's in-store physical disc machines with an all-new on-demand offering from Verizon.

The duo will debut the service in the second half of 2012, but details are pretty thin on the ground as to what the partnership will actually entail.

The official press release says it will provide "an easy-to-use, flexible and affordable service that will allow all consumers across the U.S. to enjoy the new and popular entertainment they want, whenever they choose, using the media and devices they prefer."

Netflix rival

From that paragraph, it seems that the plans will enable customers to sign up to a subscription to grab Redbox discs at their convenience, while also streaming shows to their TVs and portable media devices.

Redbox disc rentals currently cost $1.27 per night from rental kiosks situated in a host of retail stores across the United States.

The deal will put Verizon and Redbox in direct competition with Netflix, which itself made bold new strides in a new arena by making its first original show available for streaming.

Netflix has officially made its first foray into original programming with its first series Lilyhammer now available for US streaming customers.

All eight, 45-minute episodes of season one are available to view in their entirety, which sees a change to the week-by-week format we're used to seeing in episodic TV shows.

Lilyhammer stars former The Sopranos favourite and E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt reprising his gangster persona once again.

Van Zandt plays a mob boss who is relocated to Lillehammer in Norway as part of the witness relocation programme, after he turns in his former associate.

Big in Norway

Lilyhammer, as Van Zandt's character calls it, is only available to US-based Netflix customers at the moment, but it has already been a huge success on Norwegian TV.

The show has pulled in a record 1.2m weekly viewers in the country.

UK-based mob fans will be able to watch the show on BBC Four after Netflix signed a distribution deal with the corporation.

The price of broadband and phone rentals could drop in the UK and it's all down to Ofcom's insistence that BT lowers how much it charges internet providers for the use of its lines.

In a new report by communications regulator Ofcom, it is suggested that BT should drop the current cost of using its broadband and phone lines from £91.50 a year to £87.41.

And if a company is only looking to snap up its broadband lines, then this should be reduced from £14.70 a year to the more palatable £11.92.

Fair rate of return

BT has released a statement about Ofcom's proposals and is unsurprisingly not very happy about the idea of reducing its prices.

"We disagree with some of the underlying assumptions that they have used to determine these charge controls," it said.

"Our primary concern throughout this process is to ensure that we are able to achieve a fair rate of return in order to continue our investment in the future of the UK's communications infrastructure.

"We will consider all options available to us, including appealing, after Ofcom confirms its final decisions."

Although these changes are subject to approval – they have to go to the European Commission – it looks likely that the new prices will come into effect from April 2012.

BTjunkie has shut up shop after seven years of torrent-indexing action.

The site, which styles itself the world's largest BitTorrent database, posted a notice explaining that the shut-down is voluntary, simply saying that the time has come to do so.

"This is the end of the line my friends," the site's statement says. "The decision does not come easy, but we've decided to voluntarily shut down.

"We've been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it's time to move on."

Torrential

It may only be February but it's been quite a year for file sharing sites already, with the suspension of Megaupload and the voluntary shut-down of FileSonic.

BTjunkie's founder explained to TorrentFreak that legal action against sites like MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay played a big part in his decision to shut down, suggesting that he wants to get out while the going's good.

But if the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and other rights holders think that torrenting is about to die a death, they could be in for a rude awakening, with BTjunkie's founder adding that "the war is far from over".

Rather than hosting the pirated files as Megaupload did, BTjunkie aggregated download links in a similar way to Newzbin, subject of a controversial website blocking court order in the UK.

Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay remains active with new plans to pirate "physible" objects like trainers and "personal massagers" that can be printed out using 3D printers. Well, it always pays to diversify.