Get excited. (Screengrab: HBO.com)

Just in time for the season six premier of True Blood, the UK's Medical and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has given researchers at the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine the go-ahead to try creating synthetic blood with stem cells.

This happened late last month, according to Wired, and either the timing is a total coincidence or HBO has gotten way too into the whole guerrilla marketing thing.

From Wired:

"The license allows the researchers to use already-recognized stem cell technology to create a compound that would both eliminate the risk of infusion-transmitted infections and supplement (if not eventually take the place of) chronically limited blood banks worldwide ... Oh, also? The license permits blood manufacturing 'on an industrial scale.'"

But will each bottle come with a hot Nordic vampire man? Sounds like a great marketing opportunity, HBO!

Photo: Pauladeen.com

Pinterest is known as the magical place where sorority girls and your friend's mom can amass their fave photos of recipes, wedding dresses and craft ideas on their very own online scrapbooks. With immense satisfaction, they then stare at those color-coordinated material items that just might help them to forget the harsh realities of cul-de-sac life.

But the site doesn't just traffic in shabby chic porn for Tory Burch wannabes. Online retailers have found great success with its largely female, middle-class demographic. Enough repins on the perfect Pinterest image can translate into actual sales.

So it behooves companies to find out exactly what kind of images they should use to peddle their products. Lucky for them, a Philly company called Curalate has been tracking Pinterest activity for the past year and gleaning the perfect recipe for a popular photo. Wired reported the results today.

It turns out the alpha and omega of Pinterest images is, drum roll please: a salad from Paula Deen's website. "Aunt Peggy's Cucumber, Tomato and Onion Salad," to be exact.

The photo was repinned a whopping 307,000 times, liked 8,000 times and commented on 300 times, according to Wired. So what's it got that others don't?

Well, according to Curalate, these are the qualities that make this photo such a pièce de résistance: a lack of human faces; minimal background; multiple dominant colors; red hues instead of blue; moderate light and color; and portrait-style alignment.

Wonder how these findings will affect whoever the hell makes those infographics explaining how to perfectly clean a stove top.

Paula Broadwell and David Petraeus together on a plane. (PaulaBroadwell.com)

In spite of her training in military intelligence and West Point education, David Petraeus's biographer and mistress Paula Broadwell apparently never learned about tracing data embedded in emails. That's what ultimately brought the F.B.I. to Ms. Broadwell's door and led to the ugly unveiling last Friday of her affair with the former general and CIA director.

Wired reports the tawdry tale began its downhill slide into public scandal with email harassment:

The affair began to unravel after the Florida woman, Jill Kelley, contacted an FBI friend after receiving threatening and harassing e-mails from an anonymous person who accused her of flirting with a man who was not identified in the e-mails. Kelley is a volunteer social planner for events at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, which is home to the military’s Central Command. Petraeus was commander of CENTCOM from 2008 to 2010, when he left to take his position as head of the CIA.

There were as many as ten threatening emails. They warned Ms. Kelley away from Mr. Petraeus, though the writer never actually mentioned the former four-star general's name. Data in the email headers--likely IP addresses as well as other traffic data--eventually revealed the anonymous sender's location in North Carolina, where Ms. Broadwell lives with her husband, Scott.

Focusing on Ms. Broadwell, Wired reports investigators began watching her online correspondence, which is how they uncovered her affair with Mr. Petraeus.

It's no wonder, as the Washington Post reported Monday, that Mr. Petraeus viewed email as a fundamental form of communication and used it to stay in regular contact with staff, as well as the media. After taking the position at the CIA, the Post reports Mr. Petraeus even "proudly announced that he was the first CIA director to install an open Internet connection in his office."

Considering he was the top dog at the premiere intelligence agency in the world, maybe Mr. Petraeus could have learned a lesson from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who in September proudly admitted to CNN that she doesn't have any kind of online presence. "Some would call me a Luddite but you know," Secretary Napolitano told CNN, "But that's my own personal choice and I'm very unique in that regard, I suspect."

Someday, Bre Pettis. Someday. (Photo: flickr.com/usnavy)

As much as we love the notion of 3D printing ourselves a pizza and sitting down to a 3D printed game of canasta at a 3D printed dinner table, it sometimes seems this snazzy technology is often used to produce little more than tchotchkes.

And then NASA goes and 3D prints some rocket parts. 

Now, they haven't exactly installed a Makerbot at Cape Canaveral. Wired reports the agency is using a technology called "selective laser melting" (which sounds like serious space business, all right) to fabricate parts for the Space Launch System. The SLS is still in development, but the plan is to take it places like asteroids and--hold on to your hat, Elon!--Mars.

The wonky details:

“It’s the latest in direct metal 3D printing — we call it additive manufacturing now,” says Ken Cooper, leader of the Advanced Manufacturing Team at the Marshall Centre. “It takes fine layers of metal powder and welds those together with a laser beam to fuse a three dimensional object from a computer file.”

He heroically restrained himself from brushing his shoulder off and adding, "Yeah, it's pretty cool."

Peter Thiel, are you happy now?

Maru (Photo: Cosmically Chic)

"If one has set out to say something definitive about the relationship between cats and the Internet, it’s important not to be delayed indefinitely by Internet cats," writes Gideon Lewis-Kraus in a thousands-word long Wired piece about cats on the Internet. He studied the cultural impact of Internet cats in Japan, and traveled there to meet with a famous cat band. It is glorious.

Sadly, Maru declined to be interviewed for the piece.

Mr. Graham (flickr.com/pragdave)

Startup soothsayer Paul Graham penned a letter to Y Combinator's portfolio companies about withstanding the fallout from Facebook's poorly-performing IPO. [Business Insider, Hacker News]

Fred Wilson wants to put Mr. Graham's musings in perspective. [A VC]

Apple will yank Google Maps from iPhones later this year, which is just another reason why we're quite happy with our Galaxy Nexus, thankyouverymuch. [Wall Street Journal]

GigaOm rounds up what we know about Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker's video startup, Airtime, set to launch at a press event this morning. [GigaOm]

Oh good, there is an Instagram for animated GIFs. [Wired]

Mr. Langenbach's LEGO lair. (Mountain View Police/Wired)

Remember Thomas Langenbach, the SAP executive who used his tech chops to steal and resell thousands of dollars worth of LEGOs? Turns out he was--unsurprisingly--a bit of a LEGO hoarder, even going so far as to build what "looked like a mini Legoland,” Cindy Hendrickson, Supervising Deputy District Attorney with the Santa Clara County D.A.’s office, told Wired.

According to Wired, a search of Mr. Langenbach's San Carlos mansion unearthed:

meticulously sorted bins filled with Lego pieces, and hundreds of Lego toys, some displayed next to bottles of booze on the family bar, others snapped together in front of a whiteboard as if they were being staged for photography. And many more were in boxes, jammed into an office closet....There were 46 boxes of a lava-like Lego creature called Magma Monster, 35 boxes from Lego’s Indiana Jones-themed Pharaoh’s Quest, and 75 tiny Lego figurines.

As many a commenter conjectured on our previous post, Mr. Langenbach admitted to police that he simply followed YouTube videos that demonstrated how to replace barcodes with those that would ring up cheaper prices.

Why exactly he decided to risk a multimillion dollar career to steal children's toys remains a mystery, but judging from the way he neatly arranged all of those stolen LEGO sets, there's a good shot OCD had something to do with it. After all, who can resist Magma Monster?

(Wikimedia Commons)

Last week, Betabeat received an email from an anonymous source claiming to have leaked an internal FBI report about the virtual currency Bitcoin. The report, published April 24, revealed the agency is worried the currency could become a payment method for cyber criminals in the near future, and could be used to fund "illicit groups." (Wikileaks, anyone?) The FBI also determined the currency to be an "increasingly useful tool for various illegal activities beyond the cyber realm," and could become attractive to money launderers.

The report, titled "Bitcoin Virtual Currency: Intelligence. Unique Features Present Distinct Challenges for Deterring Illicit Activity," was the FBI's first research report on Bitcoin. The report was not classified, but it was marked "for official use only." Betabeat, Wired, and a number of blogs ran with the story without confirming the report's authenticity, but today we got a call back from the FBI. "It is legitimate, but it was not leaked by the government," an FBI representative told Betabeat.

It's likely that the report was leaked by someone in law enforcement who got the report from the FBI. "FBI intelligence documents are meant for use primarily within the law enforcement community to provide situational awareness," the spokesperson told us. "These documents are not for release beyond law enforcement and public safety personnel. We provactively gather intelligence and share information with our law enforcement and intelligence community partners related to a wide range of potential threats."

The report was disseminated to 11 agencies including the Australian Federal Police, New Zealand Police, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Serious Organised Crime Agency. It was prepared by the Domestic Threats Cyber Intelligence Unit, Technology Cyber Intelligence Unit, and the Financial Crimes Intelligence Unit of the FBI.

The report contains a basic explanation of how Bitcoin works, noting that its decentralized nature presents some challenges for law enforcement. One of the biggest problems, the FBI noted, is the risk of people stealing Bitcoins from each other; also, the report notes the unauthorized use of computer equipment to mine Bitcoins. The FBI estimates the Bitcoin economy is worth between $35 and $40 million.

The FBI has seen this kind of threat before. The report notes that criminals may adopt Bitcoin alongside other virtual currencies such as WebMoney, "which they have little reason to abandon." All in all, the report leaves little impression that the FBI is afraid of Bitcoin or considers it an extraordinary threat, though it does note that "If Bitcoin stabilizes and grows in popularity, it will become an increasingly useful tool for various illegal activities beyond the cyber realm," citing child pornography, human trafficking, gambling and terrorism.

That exoneration, however, did not remedy the harms caused by a full year of censorship and secret proceedings — a form of “digital Guantanamo” — that knocked out an important and popular blog devoted to hip hop music and has nearly killed it.

The back story of how the government continually failed to prove cause in its case against Dajaz1 is certainly creepy enough to feed into the web's long-standing paranoia regarding federal efforts to control sharing content online. Los Angeles-based federal prosecutors were able to keep the site shuttered so long by obtaining extended time on three separate occasions--and they did it in secret.

Dajaz1's attorney termed these actions equal to "seizing the printing press of the New York Times" because the Times referred readers to concerts given by promoters who didn't pay A.S.C.A.P. fees for performances.

Attorney Bridges's remarks end with a direct statement regarding recent government efforts to make new laws supposedly aimed at piracy:

This entire episode shows that neither the government nor the recording industry deserves any additional powers with new so-called “antipiracy” legislation, especially in the context where copyright law has been expanded and new anti-piracy remedies have been crafted ***16 times*** since 1982. This episode shows that the copyright establishment and the government are very much the “rogues” that deserve to be reined in.

Critics of S.O.P.A. and its successor, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (C.I.S.P.A.)--one a failed attempt at shoring up digital piracy laws, the other a similar attempt that could well succeed--might consider a statement like that a rallying cry.

(blog.thedaysman.com)

People who care too much about social media will argue that a low Klout score is an embarrassing blight on your Internet presence, but apparently a subpar number derived from a startup's questionable algorithm can now also ruin your life.

According to Wired, a man named Sam Fiorella had 15 years of experience and was interviewing for a VP job at a marketing firm. When the boss saw that his Klout score was an abysmal 34, he basically terminated the interview right there, and ended up hiring someone with a much more impressive score of 67.

Oh, but that's not all:

Matt Thomson, Klout’s VP of platform, says that a number of major companies—airlines, big-box retailers, hospitality brands—are discussing how best to use Klout scores. Soon, he predicts, people with formidable Klout will board planes earlier, get free access to VIP airport lounges, stay in better hotel rooms, and receive deep discounts from retail stores and flash-sale outlets.

So.... let's get this straight. An imaginary number determined by how much of your life you share online may now be responsible for how you get treated IRL? Yikes.

Luckily, only marketers care about people with high Klout scores, because it makes it easier for them to identify influencers--the people they want talking about their brand. If you're unconcerned with becoming an unofficial brand spokesperson just because you once tweeted "I love Starbucks!" to your thousands of followers, then you probably also don't care about your Klout score.

The types of people who would gun for and brag about a high Klout score have always existed--they're the Type A self-promoters with whom you can only spend 15 minutes before feeling overwhelmed and slightly icky. Let them have their high Klout scores. The rest of us don't mind toiling away in Internet obscurity.

As for Mr. Fiorella, we think he dodged a bullet--who would want to work for a company that cares so much about a fake Internet number?