'The Flying Car' is on its way!

Fed up with traffic jams? Here's some good news -- 'The Flying Car' is on its way.

An American company, Terrafugia Transition, based near Boston, is to soon start manufacturing "the flying cars", called the Transition Roadable Light Sport Aircraft, which can be transformed from a car to a plane in just 30 seconds.

The Transition can fly at 115 mph and reach 65 mph on the road; on the ground, with its wings tucked up and in, it can fill up with petrol at a normal filling station and fits in an average size garage, the 'Sunday Express' reported.

'The Flying Car' is set to go into production this year and is expected to cost between 125,000 pounds and 160,000 pounds, say its developers.

Richard Gersh, of Terrafugia, the US company which makes the vehicle and hopes to sell 200 a year, said: "This is an aeroplane first and foremost. The idea is you can drive it to and from a regulation airport. Fully fuelled, you can fly it for a range of 400 to 450 miles.

"We have 100 orders so far. There are still some minor changes that need to be made because it has to meet both road and aviation standards. However, we expect to be delivering at the end of this year."

New, cheaper gadgets for the visually impaired

Even as technology has made it possible for the blind to use the internet, to click photos using special cameras and to undertake activities that are effortless for the sighted, innovators are now seeking to aid them further with new and cheaper gadgets.

Currently, the visually impaired are able to read and browse through various web pages on the internet one line at a time. Paul D Souza, a Karnataka-based engineer has created a multiline refreshable display that gives a visually impaired person instant access to the computer revolution.

"My device is like a monitor for the blind where they can read by feeling the Braille dots on its surface. The dots created by raising or lowering small pins simulate the bumps of an embossed page and the text changes as the online page refreshes itself," Souza told.

He says such devices are currently being used in countries in the West but at costs that are very prohibitive in India.

"Technology has not changed for the last 30 years. People continue to use the single-line display device which costs as much as USD 3,000. I have tried to create a five line ? 20 characters per line ? display at a cost of USD 500. It's also the first device in 14 years to meet NLS Braille specifications," he says.

Facebook bug that allows personal data access, phishing repaired

A Facebook security threat that would allow anyone to access your personal data has been repaired by the company.

The vulnerability was discovered by Rui Wang and Zhou Li. It enabled malicious websites to impersonate legitimate websites, and then obtain the same data access permissions on Facebook that those legitimate websites had received.

The bug occurred when a user informed Facebook of his or her willingness to share information with popular websites like ESPN.com or YouTube.

When such a request is made, Facebook passes a secret random string called an authentication token back to the requestor for identification. Whoever holds that authentication token can convince Facebook that they are, say, ESPN.com, thereby gaining unlimited access.

"Researchers at Indiana University reported a vulnerability in our Platform code to us, and we worked quickly with them to resolve it. It was fixed shortly after it was reported. We're not aware of any cases in which it was used maliciously," the statement said.

"We thank the researchers at Indiana University for bringing this to our attention, and for demonstrating the value of responsible disclosure."

250000 Facebook photos 'land on' dating site

Hacking and art mixed in a freshly-launched dating website that lets visitors seek mates by sifting through profile pictures mined from Facebook.

Lovely-faces.com boasted Facebook pictures of about 250,000 people searchable in categories that included nationality, gender, funny, smug, and "climber."

The creators of the online "dating agency" were identified at the website as artists Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovic.

'Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook's constraints and boring social rules," the website authors said in an online statement datelined in Berlin.

The artists explained that a million "stolen" Facebook profile pictures were analyzed using facial recognition software that filtered images by expressions.

"Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves intoxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering expressions," the artists said.