Re/code reports that Apple has agreed with the Federal Trade Comission to refund $32.5 million for unauthorised in-app purchases.

Re/code obtained a copy of Tim Cook’s memo to Apple employees. Although Apple had taken action to rectify the concerns raised by customers, FTC stepped in and sued Apple.

It doesn’t feel right for the FTC to sue over a case that had already been settled. To us, it smacked of double jeopardy. However, the consent decree the FTC proposed does not require us to do anything we weren’t already going to do, so we decided to accept it rather than take on a long and distracting legal fight.

Despite the perceived unfair treatment, Apple has decided to do the right things, simple because it was the right thing to do.

Apple is a company full of disruptive ideas and innovative people, who are also committed to upholding the highest moral, legal and ethical standards in everything we do. As I’ve said before, we believe technology can serve humankind’s deepest values and highest aspirations. As Apple continues to grow, there will inevitably be scrutiny and criticism along our journey. We don’t shy away from these kinds of questions, because we are confident in the integrity of our company and our coworkers.

Apple should be applauded for doing more than what its competitors have. If the FTC is so zealous about the issue, they should investigate other companies as well.

TechCrunch reports that smart appliances are starting to spawn spambots and make the home vulnerable to hackers.

Example A: according to a new study by security firm Proofpoint, hackers have already started crackin’ away at smart appliances in hopes of further expanding their zombie spambot armies. Between December 26th, 2013 and January 6th, 2014, Proofpoint says they detected upwards of 750,000 spam emails being sent from over 100,000 compromised routers, multimedia centers, smart TVs, and, in one case, a smart fridge.

There needs to be a way for users to secure the connected home network. Rolling out automatic updates would make keeping the softwares up to date easier.

ReadWrite reports on Facebook’s announcement of its new “Trending” feature.

After hashtags and embeddable posts, trending is the latest Twitter feature that Facebook has adopted. This is a step towards Facebook’s goal of becoming more than just a place for friends and family to connect.

Twitter’s success stems from it being a way for people to talk about themselves, and a way for people to find out what is going on in the lives of others. While users have been using Facebook in a similar way, it has been hard for Facebook users to aggregate that information. Hashtag was the first step in allowing users to tag their posts. The new trending feature will help users to find trending news.

I doubt I would be using Facebook much for trending news. Do you think it would be useful for the way you use Facebook? Or will it end up being shunned by users like what happend to hashtagging?

I’m still waiting for a way to search my old Facebook entries instead of having to manually scroll through my timeline.

Tech in Asia reports on Tencent allowing WeChat users set up an investment fund through TenPay using their smartphones.

Tencent joins Baidu and Alibaba in offering a personal finance product.

Baidu does not have any widely popular products or services that require user registration; it’s mostly still used as a search engine. Alibaba’s Taobao and Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat are both massively popular and require registration, which gives them a captive audience.

Baidu’s Baifa offers the highest interest rate while Alibaba’s Yuebao is the most popular service for now. However, Tencent boasts of a larger user base, giving its Caifubao service the potential become the leading personal finance product in China.

Yes, I use Safari on my iPhone to access Twitter most of the time.

Before using this method, I switched from the default Twitter client to TweetBot, which is awesome.

A quick word of caution:

• Whether this method is suitable for you or not will depend on what you use Twitter for. I use it mainly for reading news articles

• If you’re constantly posting status updates and retweeting stuff, this isn’t the ideal solution either. I still use TweetBot to tweet personal updates.

In iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, Safari gets a new Shared Links feature. This shows you a list of links that are shared by the people you follow on Twitter. The experience of Shared Links on iOS and OS X are pretty similar, but I’m going to focus on the iOS version here.

Opening links from an app in iOS usually opens the page within the app itself, rendered by Safari. This is useful as it keeps you within the app, but there are two important features I always use from the Safari app which aren’t available when the page is loaded within the app:

• Reading Mode: I can’t stress enough how much I love this feature

• Bookmarks: I use this to send links to Pocket when I want to read the article later

I have previously been using two methods to address this issue:

• After the page has been opened within the app, press the share button and open the page again in Safari, which gives me the functions I want. OR

• Configure TweetBot to open links directly in Safari

Both options mentioned above work, but they present me with two issues:

• Having to switch between apps is tedious if you do it often, and I read a lot of articles when I’m in the train

• I always worry that it wears out the home button on my iPhone. I’ve had to replace the home button on my iPhone 4 countless times, though so far my iPhone 5 is holding up pretty well

Why using Shared Links on Safari works for me:

• I stay within Safari. There is no need to switch between apps

• If I was previously using Reading Mode and switch to another Shared Link article, Reading Mode is automatically activated for the next article

• I use the Pocket bookmarklet to save any article I want to read later. I could use Safari’s reading list, but my experience with that has been hit and miss.

What’s missing from Shared Links:

• The ability to retweet an article. This is slightly surprising since Shared Links on Safari in Mavericks offers the ability to retweet, but I guess Apple will introduce the feature sometime in the near future. You can still press the share button and use the iOS Twitter share feature, but that basically just tweets the link without any context.

Bonus: Any alternatives?

I’ve been fiddling with TweetBot recently, and managed to adjust the settings to achieve similar results too. Here’s what I do:

• Enable Readability. Gives me a Reading Mode similar to what Safari offers. I feel it’s inferior, but better than not having it at all

• Set my Read Later settings to save to Pocket

Should you do this?

It really depends on how you use Twitter, but I feel it’s worth a shot. I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

Marco Arment questions the use of App Store’s star ratings.

Matt posted previously about whether we should rate apps when prompted by the app. Developers add prompts to get users to rate the app because having a higher rating would increase the chances of their apps being found and downloaded.

Eliminating the star ratings but leaving the written reviews would eliminate a lot of developer headaches and much of the motivation behind the annoying “Rate This App” epidemic that’s interrupting and annoying iOS customers and infecting, embarrassing, and devaluing almost all modern iOS apps.

Amazon’s review system is a good example of an excellent, peer-reviewed system. Yes, Amazon uses a star rating system as well, but users can also vote whether the reviews are helpful. This allows the system to show the most helpful favourable and critical reviews, providing shoppers with feedback that addresses the pros and cons of the products.

In my opinion, the App store would benefit greatly with a peer-reviewed system. However, I would suggest replacing the star ratings with a choice of whether the reviewer would recommend the app. A star rating system is too arbitrary. What is the difference between a four-star and a five-star rating?

Let’s say there is a good writing app that does not support Markdown. Reviewers A, B and C love the app. Reviewer A relies heavily on Markdown. Reviewer B uses Markdown at times, while Reviewer C has no idea what Markdown is. Reviewer C gives 5 star because the app blew him away. Reviewer B gives 4 stars because he feels the app could be improved with Markdown support. Reviewer A gives 3 stars because of the lack of Markdown support. Three different ratings, even though they agree it is a great app.

Now we look at what the results would be if the reviewers only chose “Recommend” or “Do not recommend”. While they have differing views of how good the app is, all three reviewers agree they would recommend the app. Instead of an average of four stars, the app gets three recommends. To me, three recommends is more meaningful than a score of four stars.

This along with peer-reviewing of the feedback would certainly transform the App Store reviews into something useful for shoppers.