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Let's start with the basics. A 1969 study of colour naming by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay concluded that languages evolve through a fairly limited set of possible trajectories for naming colours, determined largely by the biology of the human visual cortex. They begin with a distinction between just two tones, light/warm and dark/cool (there is a disputed claim that the Pirahã language of the Brazilian Amazon hasn't got past this stage).

New research suggests that the majority of personal computers infected with malicious software may have arrived at that state thanks to a bustling underground market that matches criminal gangs who pay for malware installations with enterprising hackers looking to sell access to compromised PCs. Pay-per-install (PPI) services are advertised on shadowy underground Web forums. Clients submit their malware—a spambot, fake antivirus software, or password-stealing Trojan—to the PPI service, which in turn charges rates from $7 to $180 per thousand successful installations, depending on the requested geographic location of the desired victims.

On Tuesday night, the world's largest carrier's providers and websites are switching on IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol that's needed to deal with the looming address shortage. Most enterprise networks aren't ready, according to a survey from trade association CompTIA, which found that only 23% of business IT departments in the U.S. have actually begun to implement the new protocol.

Looks like it’s a lot harder to protect privacy than I thought. That’s my impression after spending a day at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, held this week in Berkeley, Calif. I knew privacy protection is not something I can take for granted when using Facebook or Google (more on that coming up in Spectrum’s June special issue on social networks and the Web).