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Simple.TV allows up to five simultaneous connections so your family can all log in and watch live TV or recorded shows. Everyone can watch live TV at the same time, as long as it’s the same channel. When watching recorded shows, up to five different programs can be streamed at once.

The Color Genius App

Because you really are kinda worth it, L’Oreal Paris introduces a new app that helps you effortlessly match your makeup to your outfit. And gives a lesson in making a stylish demo video.

It’s hard to do your banking when the nearest branch is a day away and you don’t have any electricity. These new cash machines run on the sun’s power, and can bring some modern banking to truly out-of-the-way places.

For many villagers in rural areas of India, personal banking is pricey in ways American could never imagine. First, there is the cost of reaching the nearest branch. Bus fares are expensive, and a day’s labor is lost in the journey. Simply installing ATMs in villages that don’t have reliable electricity (or don’t have at all) is problematic, while building bank branches in every hamlet is out of the question.

Indian engineering company Vortex has taken on the challenge by creating solar-powered ATMs. Superficially similar to the cash dispenser in your corner convenience store, these rugged little bank tellers are a distant species altogether.

So far, Vortex has deployed about 450 across almost every state in India, mostly in small towns about 60 kilometers from bank branches, reports Yale Environment 360. Vortex officials say they plan to install about 10,000 more within the next two years, while an international expansion is also underway.The Gramateller ATM is lean, efficient and designed to live almost anywhere humans do. It carries its own solar panels, alongside four to eight hours of battery storage. Despite the ability to operate in temperatures as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit, it never needs cooling, unlike most ATMs. Clever engineering also means it’s 90% more efficient than conventional machines, consuming about $10 of electricity per month in India. The ATM also comes with a fingerprint identification system, making it easy for those unfamiliar with digital devices to withdraw cash.

Convenience cash may never be far away. The poor living in far flung locations just need to be able to earn enough of it to withdraw.

With the mission of helping banks reach out profitably to unbanked & under-banked regions, and years of R & D ably supported by IIT Madras, Vortex has designed ATMs which are highly reliable, rugged, easy to use and eco-friendly. They consume up to 90% lesser power and hence can be economically operated using solar power. Vortex ATMs are currently serving even the remotest parts of rural India – using technology as an enabler to improve quality of life.

Vortex’s innovative ATM portfolio comprises Gramateller Indi ATM, Gramateller Duo ATM, and solar power options for both these models. Additionally, the company provides related software solutions to help banks roll out end-to-end ATM services.

The company has been selected as one among the 10 start-ups that will change your life by TIME magazine, is one among 31 visionary companies selected as Technology Pioneers 2011 by World Economic Forum, and was a finalist of the Wall Street Journal Asia Innovation Awards 2010.

Rayfish Footwear is looking to offer consumer customization, not by dye or stitching, but at the genetic level. On their site, you can mix and match various patterns of stingrays, and Rayfish will combine their DNA to match the design of your choice, actually growing you a genetically manipulated pair of stingrays to harvest as the leather for your shoes. The colors are bold. The patterns are intricate. And every pair is inherently unique.

“It would not be feasible for ordinary people to code their desired pattern in the DNA, so we made a design tool that allows them to create a pattern that we can actually grow on the stingrays,” says Dr. Raymond Ong, head of Rayfish Footwear. That tool eschews esoteric DNA snippets for a graphic-laden UI, allowing you to drag and drop up to nine patterns into your shoe, selected from a library of 29 styles of leather. With so many choices combining into such an array of designs, the possibilities seem endless, though obviously there are some natural limitations to just how specific users can be about a shoe that is ostensibly grown.

“We cannot breed any desirable shape or logo on the fishes, as our patterning process works by recording and recombining DNA of existing animals…. Squares are for instance not possible, as the expression of the DNA on the skin doesn’t allow it,” Dr. Ong explains. “Also, the patterns that grow on the actual fish sometimes slightly differ from what you see in the design tool. Although it is almost perfect, we are still developing the mapping between the design tool and the DNA encoding further.”

For these practical reasons, Rayfish is honing their product while soft-launching their line with a series of design contests. You can go on their site now, try out their tool, and submit your own stingray shoe design. Winners will be given a free pair of shoes, which is a hefty prize: These bio-customized kicks will start at $1,800 when they hit the market later this year.

But it does raise the question: While I can conveniently forget that the leather in my shoes was once the skin of a cow, is there something different in knowing that the cow had been bred and slaughtered just for me? Is this a farm-to-table situation, where it’s more ethical to name the pig that you’ll eventually eat? Or am I creating the most majestic animal I could imagine just to thieve its gorgeous skin? Truthfully, I’m not sure if Rayfish’s addictive mix and match UI makes me feel like a hip consumer or an all-consuming monster.

Online store will go live after the Grow Your Own Sneaker contest period has ended. Pricing of a pair of genuine Rayfish sneakers currently ranges from $14,800 to $16,200, depending on your shoe size and the complexity of the desired pattern.

Once regular production begins in late 2012, Rayfish sneakers will cost approximately $1,800. This price includes bio-customization of a pair of stingrays, growing your shoes to maturity, and shipping them to any address on the planet.

The news from cybersecurity researchers this Memorial Day sounded like a plot device from a science fiction movie. A hyper-secret surveillance program laid dormant on computers around the world for years, secretly turning on microphones, taking screenshots, copying files, recording keystrokes, fiddling with Bluetooth, and sending all the information off to unknown parties. Following an investigation request by the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union, the discovery of Flame--the world's most sophisticated known weapon of cyberwar--was made public. Many of the infected computers belonged to deliberately targeted home users; the exquisitely crafted software escaped evasion by the world's best antivirus software suites for years.

According to Alexander Gostev of Kaspersky Labs, one of the first experts to investigate Flame, the product “[sniffs] the network traffic, taking screenshots, recording audio conversations, intercepting the keyboard, and so on. All this data is available to the operators through the link to Flame’s command-and-control servers. Later, the operators can choose to upload further modules, which expand Flame’s functionality. There are about 20 modules in total and the purpose of most of them is still being investigated.” Other portions of Flame activate Bluetooth functionality and siphon name/phone number/address info from Bluetooth-enabled phones near infected computers. Flame was written using Lua, a programming language best known for its use in Angry Birds.

Due to Flame's information-gathering goals, complex construction, multiple redundancies to hide from virus and malware detectors, and the fact that it's not being used for financial gain, most experts are classifying the product as a cyberwar weapon. What makes Flame especially interesting (and creepy) is the fact that many infected computers are home PCs with Internet connections whose Skype conversations and documents folders were methodically spied on.

We still don't know (or aren't being told) both how Flame was released into the wild and what the primary infection methods are. An anonymous statement from Symantec claims most discovered cases are in the West Bank, Hungary, Iran, and Lebanon with smaller numbers of infected computers in Austria, Russia, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates. The list of countries targeted seems to infer Israeli complicity in the cyberattack.

One Israeli official already made a wink-and-nod statement that could infer local involvement in Flame. In an interview with Israeli Army Radio, Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon said that “Those who view Iran as a significant threat are likely employing various means, including this one, to attack it. […] Israel has been blessed with elite technology, and these tools that we pride ourselves in open up all sorts of options for us.” However, Ya'alon's statement might also be a boastful piece of misinformation.

Researchers at the CrySyS Lab at Budapest University, who wrote one of the first technical reports on Flame (which they called sKyWIper), identified over a dozen unique words or strings of text used by the product's unknown programmers. These words were all English or Spanish, such as Boost, Flame, Flask, Euphoria, BUENO_FLAME_DLL_KEY, Headache, Beetlejuice, Microbe, and Weasel.

The CrySyS team, who did not leave their names on their technical report (and noted that they "carried out an investigation in collaboration with several parties involved in incident response ... Some of these parties involved may want to remain anonymous; therefore, references in the document are deliberately incorrect to avoid identification of the source of some information, data, sample, code, prototype, etc."), said the earliest date of infection appeared to be in Europe in December 2007, in the United Arab Emirates in April 2008, and in Iran in March 2010.

The Iranian Students' News Agency (via the New York Times) claimed in April that a related program called Wiper was used in mass attacks on the Iranian Oil Ministry. According to a Kaspersky statement, "The Flame cyberespionage worm came to the attention of our experts at Kaspersky Lab after the UN’s International Telecommunication Union came to us for help in finding an unknown piece of malware which was deleting sensitive information across the Middle East. While searching for that code--nicknamed Wiper--we discovered [Flame]."

Although Kaspersky did not release details on specific infected computers, Gostev claims that victims include private “specific” individuals, educational institutions, and state-related organizations. Symantec's statement, meanwhile, cryptically says that many victims ”appear to be targeted for individual personal activities rather than the company they are employed by.” McAfee's Peter Szor and Guilherme Venere also discovered several Flame infections in the U.S.

Cyberwarfare--and corporate espionage--are two-way streets. Flame is an admirably complex piece of technology. Even if Israel or the United States isn't behind the project, it's still the pinnacle of covert cyberwarfare in 2012. However, today's high-tech novelty is tomorrow's routine weapon. As Flame is examined in detail and reverse-engineered, the product's unique aspects will be replicated and improved by other interested parties. This will mean a significant headache for computer security firms.

Programs, worms, and malware aren't created in vacuums. It's a very safe assumption that there are other products similar to Flame lurking on computers right now, surreptitiously spying on users' every move or deleting strategic files... and evading detection by the anti-virus programs personal and enterprise users rely on to keep themselves secure. Apart from the United States and Israel, China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Brazil, and a host of other foreign countries have their own cyberwarfare programs. Emerging cyberwarfare threats are a part of everyday life--from Flame to fears that China is placing backdoors in computer chips sold to the U.S. military. Then, of course, there are all the cyberweapons discovered on a regular basis that we don't hear about because governments and corporations wish to keep mum.

Flame is like something out of a science fiction movie, or a plot device from the latest Mission Impossible. High strangeness is a matter-of-fact assumption when dealing with cyberwarfare and technology these days. Today's spying on academics and Iranian oil facilities might just be tomorrow's creepy corporate information-gathering tool.

Julian Assange

Julian Assange, founder of the anti- secrecy website WikiLeaks, lost a U.K. Supreme Court appeal to block his extradition to Sweden to face rape claims after challenging a technicality of his detainment 18 months ago.

Radical provisions of the new Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (PCSOA) are both empowering and threatening to teenagers accustomed to mixing freely with others. The cause for concern goes beyond PCSOA criminalizing teenage sex by increasing the age of consent from 16 to 18. Teenagers would do well to know how this 'child-friendly' law could affect their lives, for better or for worse, and how different it is from the corresponding IPC provisions dealing with adults.