Samsung Douches Up Australian Apple Store With Paid Galaxy Flashmob [Update]

There's no chance Apple customers in Sydney will get a lie-in this morning. Get it?

Jibes at the iPhone and its users clearly aren’t enough to attract the attention of Apple’s customers, so Samsung is taking a more direct approach. Today the Korean company sent a screaming flashmob equipped with big “Wake Up” signs to protest outside of an Apple retail store in Sydney, Australia.

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Apple Needs To Think Different About Chinese Workers, Say Protesters

The Raging Grannies at the Palo Alto Apple store.

Apple fans and journalists asking them why they stood in line overnight weren’t the only ones outside retail stores for the debut of the latest iPad.

Consumer groups protesting labor conditions at the factories in China where those shiny new tablets were made were also out making their voices heard.

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These Raging Grannies Shake It Outside The Apple Store For Worker’s Rights [Interview]

Raging Grannies protest outside the Palo Alto store Feb. 13

If you happen by the Palo Alto Apple Store Monday afternoon, that group of elderly women dressed in white dancing the robot to techno music on the sidewalk aren’t some funky flashmob.

They’re Raging Grannies, and they’re are mad as hell about worker conditions in China where Apple products are made.

Galvanized by a recent Mike Daisey story on NPR about Foxconn, they’re staging monthly protests outside the Palo Alto Apple store. They’ll be on the sidewalk grooving to bring more attention to Apple’s labor policies in China at 3 p.m. on March 12.

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Apple Supplier Foxconn Got Hacked For The Lulz

As if Foxconn didn’t have enough to worry about with the protests today and labor conditions controversies of the past few weeks, it looks like their network servers suffered a huge security breach last night by a mischievous hacker group called SwaggSec that exposed the usernames and passwords of Foxconn’s clients and employees. What motivated the group to expose Foxconn’s vulnerabilities? Were they looking to make a statement on labor conditions?

Nah, they just wanted to screw with Foxconn for laughs.

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Jailed Russian Blogger Tweets Instagram Pic from Police Van

Protesters inside the police van via Instagram. Photo: Alexey Navalny.

The smiling faces make it look like a rowdy night out, but this jubilant photo was snapped with an iPhone in the back of a Russian police van.

Yesterday, Moscow-based blogger Alexey Navalny was carted away by the authorities while documenting the massive protests following the country’s contested parlimentary elections.

“With my lads on the police bus. They all say hi,”  Navalny tweeted in Russian. An hour later, he posted another Instagram photo, this time a group portrait in the Izmailovo jailhouse of everyone arrested.

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