A Hacker proved that he could activate the camera of a MacBook without warning the user

Once again the Apple MacBook is the source of a privacy problem. A man named Jared Abrahams managed to hack the MacBook camera of a classmate without her being aware. The hacker was able to take naked pictures that he subsequently sent to her. The victim quickly realized that she had been photographed without her knowledge for a considerable time.
To do so, Abrahams has managed to disable the green LED that illuminates normally when the camera is activated. So she couldn't know when it is active. It is normally impossible to take such an action, except for the hacker who has found a solution.  

The FBI found on his computer a special software that can remotely control the camera and the green LED. This practice is indeed already used by the FBI and other similar agencies to spy on some suspicious users. This manipulation is of course not available to everyone.
The vulnerability has been explained by two students from Johns Hopkins University in the United States . According to them, it is necessary to change the OS X kernel to successfully disable the LED of the camera. In fact, the vulnerability is not present on the Mac available since 2008. Nevertheless, it is quite possible that a similar method exists on the latest models to date.
 
Source: The Washington Post

Would you give up your private life for a pair of glasses?

Demonstrations of the latest Glass Google did not fail to glamorize the latest gadget from Google. If the promised opportunities seem interesting, some are already worried about the impact of these devices on our lives, and talk about "the end of privacy."

It is difficult not to address the issue of privacy when wearing glasses connected, equipped with a camera capable of shooting constantly everything seen by the wearer. 
Cory Bernardi, an australian Senator raises the question of how these privacy issues will be managed by Google: "Google Glass has the ability to record video and audio of everything that happens during your day. No need to enter your iPhone and click to capture the moment. (...) This can go if you are a user, but what if you are the unwitting victim of this type of recording?"

For now, Google did not comment on the management of privacy for users of Google Glass or their surroundings. But it seems clear that the issue will eventually face the Mountain View company and that it will respond. 

Last August, the CNIL had again pinned on Google Street View imagery and Wi-Fi data collected by its cars.

A featherweight HD video cam?

It seems that The Raspberry Pi Model A won't be the last hardware release for this year. Blogger Liz, posted yesterday, an article on the  Raspberry Pi website, showing off the new Raspberry Pi video camera, a tiny, single-lens unit that will be released this year.
This post was followed by a thread on the RP forum, unveiling some specs of the new camera :

•  The PCB is 25x20x9mm (approx). Weight currently unknown but very light.
• The module is an OV5647. 
• Fixed focus 5MP sensor capable of 2592x1944 stills, but also 1080p30, 720p60 and 640x480p60/90. 
• Working on the faster frame rates, but stills capture and 1080p30 are already working. 
• There is still some work to do on the camera driver and on image quality.
• The module package is 8.5x8.5x5mm.

The camera will connect directly to the Pi and offer hobbyists the opportunity to build vision-based applications. It’s attached to a nice long ribbon that connects directly to the Raspberry Pi.
The total cost of this module is  $25.

A camera that can shoot around corners

The prototype uses an ultra-short high-intensity burst of laser light to illuminate a scene.
The device constructs a basic image of its surroundings - including objects hidden around the corner - by collecting the tiny amounts of light that bounce around the scene.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology team believe it has uses in search and rescue and robot vision.
"It's like having X-ray vision without the X-rays," said Professor Ramesh Raskar, head of the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab and one of the team behind the system.
"But we're going around the problem rather than going through it."
Professor Shree Nayar of Columbia University, an expert in light scattering and computer vision, was very complimentary about the work and said it was a new and "very interesting research direction".
"What is not entirely clear is what complexities of invisible scenes are computable at this point," he told BBC News.
"They have not yet shown recovery of an entire [real-world] scene, for instance."

                                                 Ramesh Raskar explains how the camera can shoot
                                                 around corners.