Couch potatoes feeling lazy can now change the channel and dim the lights with a flick of their wrists, thanks to a new technology.

The new device allows users to switch the channel, adjust the volume or contrast with the flick of the wrist.

The technology can even be used to run the entire living room, whether it is dimming the lights or moving an image from the TV to a digital frame on the mantelpiece, according to ‘Daily Mail.’

The wrist band contains a small infra-red camera which links to two beacons that are either built into the TV set or a detachable bar that sits beneath it.

The wand then creates a cursor on the set that is used to swipe through a TV channel menu or access the settings such as sound and colour.

Philips, who have created the device, claims, “Consumers sitting on a sofa simply point the uWand in the appropriate direction, click to make selections and move the uWand to interact with screen menus, and manipulate objects such as photos, as if they were actually touching them.”

The uWand is to be demonstrated at the IBC technology exhibition which starts in Amersterdam.

Computer scientists have demonstrated how criminals could hack an electronic voting machine (EVM) and ‘steal’ votes using a malicious programming approach that had not been invented when the voting machine was designed.

The team of scientists from the Universites of California, San Diego, Michigan and Princeton employed “return-oriented programming” to force an electronic voting machine to turn against itself.

“Voting machines must remain secure throughout their entire service lifetime, and this study demonstrates how a relatively new programming technique can be used to take control of a voting machine that was designed to resist takeover, but that did not anticipate this new kind of malicious programming,” said Hovav Shacham.

Shacham is professor of computer science at UC San Diego’s (UC-SD )Jacobs School of Engineering and study co-author. His study demonstrates that return-oriented programming can be used to execute vote-stealing computations by taking control of an EVM designed to prevent code injection.

The computer scientists had no access to the machine’s source code – or any other proprietary information – when designing the demonstration attack.

By using just the information that would be available to anyone who bought or stole a voting machine, the researchers addressed a common criticism made against voting security researchers: that they enjoy unrealistic access to the systems they study.

“Based on our understanding of security and computer technology, it looks like paper-based elections are the way to go. Probably the best approach would involve fast optical scanners reading paper ballots. These kinds of paper-based systems are amenable to statistical audits, which is something the election security research community is shifting to,” said Shacham.

“You can actually run a modern and efficient election on paper,” he said.

“If you are using electronic voting machines, you need to have a separate paper record at the very least,” he added.

There findings were presented at the 2009 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop.

Reports indicate that the Perseid meteor shower, which will be visible on August 11 and 12, would yield more than 80 meteors an hour streak across the sky during the best viewing time.

Meteors are bits of dust or rock that collide with earth’s atmosphere and heat up gas particles to produce a glowing trail.

A handful of meteors can be seen each hour on any clear night, but during a meteor shower dozens may be visible.

The Perseid shower occurs each year when the Earth passes through a stream of debris shed by the comet Swift-Tuttle, which orbits the sun once every 130 years or so and last passed through the inner solar system in 1992.

The meteors generally get incinerated before they can strike the ground, creating the streaks of superheated, glowing air we call ‘shooting stars’.

According to a report in National Geographic News, this year, from any vantage point in the world, you might see more than 80 meteors an hour streak across the sky during the best viewing time, when the moon’s glare will be weakest-late night on August 11and into the wee hours of August 12, local cloud and lighting conditions permitting.

The highest concentration of Perseid meteors hitting Earth’s atmosphere will occur during the afternoon of August 12, when they’ll be largely invisible.

The Perseid sky show is “always the best annual meteor shower,” said Bill Cooke, the lead for Nasa’s Meteoroid Environments Office in Alabama.

“Visually, the best are the Geminids. But December nights are cold, and people don’t want to freeze their rears off,” he added.

The Perseid meteors will appear to originate in the northeastern sky, near the constellation Perseus, and to shoot off in all directions, according to Brian Skiff, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff.

“Since the radiant point is close to Perseus, it is common to see them streaking right along the Milky Way, even as far away as Sagittarius,” he said.

“After midnight, Perseus will have risen higher in the sky, and the meteors can be seen in just about any direction,” he added.

Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, said it will buy FriendFeed, netting a group of prized ex-Google engineers in the fast-growing Internet business.

FriendFeed, an up-and-coming social media startup, lets people share content online in real time across various social networks and blogs.

The service is similar to, though less popular than Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook tried to buy for $500 million in 2008, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed on Monday, but Facebook said FriendFeed would operate as it has for the time being as the teams determine long-term plans.

Facebook’s big gain in the acquisition is the engineering talent at FriendFeed, rather than the actual product, which has won critical praise, but lagged in popularity compared to Twitter, said Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang.

“These guys now how to build scalable, social applications,” said Owyang.

In a statement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he admired the FriendFeed team for having created a service he described as simple and elegant.

“As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use,” said Zuckerberg.

FriendFeed’s four founders are former Google Inc employees who count well known products like Gmail and Google Maps among their accomplishments.

Facebook said the founders will hold senior roles on its engineering and product teams.

FriendFeed had talked with Facebook “casually” for a couple of months, and that it became clear that the teams were “cut from the same cloths,” FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor told Reuters in an interview.

He declined to say whether FriendFeed had been in talks with other companies.

One bridge between Facebook and FriendFeed might have been Matt Cohler, Facebook’s former management vice president. He joined FriendFeed backer Benchmark Capital last year.

Asked what role the connection played in the deal, FriendFeed’s Taylor said the decision to be acquired by Facebook was made entirely by the team at FriendFeed.

Facebook has more than 250 million registered users. In May, the social networking company announced a $200 million investment from Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies that pegged the value of its preferred shares at $10 billion.

Facebook has said its revenue is on track to rise 70 percent this year, and board member Mark Andreessen has said the company will bring in more than $500 million in revenue in 2009.

But Forrester’s Owyang said that Facebook must make the content generated within the site more accessible to the public instead of only to closed networks of Facebook friends, so that the company can sell more ads.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced changes to its privacy controls to allow people to make their status messages and posts viewable to a broader Internet audience.

Thanks to a nifty new silicon gadget, namely a miniature gravity detector, peering beneath the surface of Mars and other planets to reveal buried geological features could get easier.

According to a report in New Scientist, the device, called a gravity gradiometer, has been designed to measure how much the force of gravity changes from place to place, enabling it to map a planet’s gravitational field.

The idea is to take two masses, each hanging from a spring. If one mass is slightly closer to a planet’s surface, it will feel stronger gravity and pull more on its spring than the other mass.

Compare the pulls on the two springs, and the gravity gradient over that part of the planet can be worked out.

A gravity gradiometer aboard the European Space Agency’s GOCE satellite is currently probing earth’s gravity field, but it has a mass of hundreds of kilograms.

Being so heavy, it would be prohibitively expensive to send such a device on a deep-space mission.

So, Jaap Flokstra and his colleagues at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, designed a device weighing just 1 kilogram.

It uses a single wafer of silicon, which can be chiselled using methods developed for microchip fabrication.

In the design, the two test-masses are only a few centimetres apart – compared with half-a-metre in GOCE – so any difference in the gravitational force felt by the masses would be minute.

To detect such small differences, the masses would be held on ultra-delicate springs and the position of each mass measured to within about 1 picometre by a comb-like device whose capacitance varies as the mass moves up or down.

The team calculates that such a device, placed in a spacecraft in orbit around a planet, could sense changes in the gravity field due to geological features of about 200 kilometres across or bigger.

It could detect how deep mountains plunge into the mantle below, say, or look for subterranean oceans such as the sea suspected to lie beneath the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

It could pick up changes in gravity due to geological features of 200 km across or bigger.

“We are aiming at building a demo set-up to use on earth in a few months,” said team member Reinder Cuperus.

Do friends sport the same style in shoes or see the same movies because of their similar tastes, which is why they became friends in the first place? Or once friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt similar behaviours? Social scientists don’t know for sure.
They’re still trying to understand the role social influence plays in spreading of trends because the real world doesn’t keep track of how people acquire new items or preferences.
But the virtual world Second Life does. It is a free 3D virtual world where users can socialise, connect and create using voice and text chat.
Researchers from the University of Michigan (UM) have taken advantage of this unique information to study how “gestures” make their way through this online community.
Gestures are code snippets that Second Life avatars must acquire in order to make motions such as dancing, waving or chanting.
Roughly half of the gestures the researchers studied made their way through the virtual world friend by friend.
“We could have found that most everyone goes to the store to buy gestures, but it turns out about 50 per cent of gesture transfers are between people who have declared
themselves friends,” said Lada Adamic, assistant professor in the UM School of Information.
“The social networks played a major role in the distribution of these assets,” said Adamic, who authored a paper on the research that doctoral researcher Eytan Bakshy
will present on July 7 at the Association for Computer Machinery’s Conference on Electronic Conference in Stanford, California.
“There’s been a high correspondence between the real world and virtual worlds,” Adamic said. “We’re not saying this is exactly how people share in the real world, but we believe it does have some relevance.”
This study is one of the first to model social influence in a virtual world because of the rarity of having access to information about how information, assets or ideas propagate, said an UM release.
The researchers examined 130 days worth of gesture transfers in late 2008 and early 2009. They looked at 1,00,229 users and 106,499 gestures. They obtained the data from Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life.

Social software and microblogging sites such as Twitter will soon experience disillusionment among enterprise users, market research firm Gartner warns in a report titled ‘Hype Cycle Special Report for 2009.’

The report tracks the progression of an emerging technology from over enthusiasm through a period of disillusionment to an eventual understanding of the technology’s relevance and role in a market or domain.

“Technologies at the peak of inflated expectations during 2009 include cloud computing, e-books (such as from Amazon and Sony) and Internet TV (for example Hulu), while social software and microblogging sites have tipped over the peak,” vice president and Gartner Fellow Jackie Fenn noted.

The research firm says it has examined the maturity of 1,650 technologies and trends in 79 technology, topic, and industry areas.

Besides cloud computing, this year’s Hype Cycle report covers topics such as data center power and cooling technologies, media broadcasting, photovoltaic solar energy, and virtualisation.

“Looking at real benefit rather than the hyped expectations, we see a number of potentially transformational technologies that will hit the mainstream in less than five years, including Web 2.0, cloud computing, Internet TV, virtual worlds and service-oriented architecture (SOA),” Fenn said.

Beyond the five-year horizon, the firm sees RFID, 3-D printing, context-delivery architectures, mobile robots, and human augmentation to be transformational across industries.

Britain’s Royal Opera House (ROH) wants Twitter users to help create the “world’s first online opera.”

The Covent Garden institution, which stages performances of ballet, opera and other classical music productions wants Internet-savvy tweeters to write the words to an opera using 140 characters or less at a time.

“It’s the people’s opera and the perfect way for everyone to become involved with the inventiveness of opera as the ultimate form of storytelling,” Alison Duthie, head of ROH2, the arm of the ROH in charge of developing original projects said in a statement.

Duthie said on Tuesday that the most dramatic moments of the opera will be performed as part of the Deloitte Ignite festival in September and said the experiment aimed to debunk notions of opera as stuffy and traditional.

“People make assumptions about who we are, and it is a case of just getting past those barriers,” Duthie said. “We hope to demystify opera.”

Twitter, the online micro-blogging site used by celebrities and less well-known people to broadcast their thoughts to followers over the Internet in bursts of text 140 characters or less has become a sensation on the web.

Anyone interested in contributing to the Royal Opera piece can sign up and start writing at www.twitter.com/youropera.

So far only Act One, Scene One has been completed with the character William languishing in a tower, having been kidnapped by a group of birds bent on revenge after he has killed one of their number, according to a link on the Twitter site: royaloperahouse.wordpress.com/ .

The first few lines of the opera show the difficulty of stringing together the submissions into a coherent story.

“A small bird twitters over there, He sings without a single care, If only we could be so free, Without the worries and the… concerns of a nihilist. I would bring you flowers, but they would die. I would love you, but, why?”

Google . and Microsoft Corp. are both courting microblogging service Twitter  because of its search ad revenue potential, according to a report Thursday.

A Wall Street Journal blog reported that many experts think Twitter’s instant 140-character format will be next big thing for search, which is dominated now by Google , Microsoft lagging behind.

Earlier this month media reports said Google was in talks to buy Twitter, with figure of $250 million to $1 billion bandied about.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone downplayed but didn’t refute the rumors in a blog post later, writing "It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects," he said. "Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we’re just getting started"

A deal for Twitter has long been rumored. Potential suitors have included Palo Alto-based Facebook Inc., which was reported to have made a half-billion-dollar offer last year.

Facebook has accidentally revealed personal information about its members. The social networking site divulged the dates of birth of many of its 80 million active users, even those who had requested that the information remained confidential.Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, explained that the information was exposed during a public beta test of Facebook new design. “It is essential that users of social networks should have confidence that their privacy will be protected, and it is especially important with information like your date of birth which can be a golden nugget for a committed identity thief.”