Completely worthless article. The author has no evidence whatsoever that there is an authentication chip; he even uses the passive voice to avoid mentioning why he thinks there might be one:

It’s said that Apple’s new Lightning connector has some sort of authentication chip inside that prevents third-party Lightning cables from working.

"It's said?" You shouldn't be writing an article if "it's said" is the best you can do. This is an interface that can dynamically re-assign the function of each pin, on the fly. It seems much more likely that the chips in the cable are providing that function, rather than "authentication".

And the author them compounds the error with more wild speculation:

So essentially, anything that isn’t an official Apple accessory will simply be ignored whenever you plug it into the iPhone 5. We can only guess the reason behind this is so Apple can put a lockdown on cheaper third-party accessories that they compete with.

"We can only guess"? No, actually there's another option...we could research the matter before assuming and writing an article about it. We can only guess that that was just too much trouble for the author. It is plainly absurd to assume that anything that's not from Apple will be "ignored" when plugged into the iPhone 5. There's no evidence at all that Apple would want to lock down the entire accessory market; Apple doesn't even WANT to be the only company making accessories for its products.

Frankly, this article should be flagged, but I'll leave that for others.