The Secret to a Healthy Heart May Lie in the Genes of Elite Athletes

(Bloomberg) -- Elite athletes’ spit may hold the key to better health.

The world’s finest endurance performers are giving saliva samples for DNA analysis to Stanford University researchers, who hope to find new drugs, perfect training methods, and improve exercise and heart health for the merely normal.

At Euan Ashley’s lab in Palo Alto, the director of Stanford’s Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease has gathered DNA from 200 world-class runners, skiers and other athletes after hooking them up to a brutal exercise test to separate the best. He plans to eventually sequence DNA from more than a thousand of the world’s fittest people.

“As a cardiologist, I deal with a lot of heart failure,” said Ashley in an interview at Stanford. “I’m interested in the limits of human performance and if the extremely fit groups can help us with the other end.”

Daniel Hansson and Kristin Larsson, a fit, blond Swedish couple, arrived at Stanford’s medical center ready for a workout. They were hooked up to a mask and a treadmill that forced them to run harder and harder while tracking oxygen consumption. The couple competes in adventure and endurance races that can last as long as 7 days with little rest. In 2012, they were the top international competitors in a 40-mile race on the lower slopes of Mount Everest.

Top athletes may have genes that help their hearts pump stronger, their lungs take in more oxygen, or that give them stronger muscles or blood that’s more efficient at transferring oxygen, Ashley said. On the opposite spectrum are people whose hearts are failing, or whose ability to transport oxygen in the blood has weakened by disease. Studying the elite may reveal a pathway for future treatments.

Above Average

“If the results from this study can help average people increase their health, and learn how to do the right training, if I can help contribute to the health of everyone, I’m happy to do it,” Hansson said in an interview at Stanford.

It’s a strategy that already has at least one real-world success. A rare gene mutation is the basis of a new generation of cholesterol treatments under development by Sanofi, Amgen Inc. and other drugmakers.

The drugs are named after a gene called PCSK9. In normal people, PCSK9 creates a protein that disrupts the ability of liver cells to remove bad cholesterol from the blood. In one aerobics instructor, however, researchers found the she’d inherited a mutation to PCSK9 from both parents, allowing huge amounts of cholesterol to be swept away.

With no PCSK9 protein in her bloodstream, the aerobic instructor’s bad cholesterol levels were between 13 milligrams and 24 milligrams per deciliter. Below 100 is considered good for adults. Drugs based on the mutation are projected by analysts to sell billions of dollars a year.

Elites Only

The cutoff point for athletes to participate in Ashley’s study is high. The researchers are using a fitness measurement called maximal oxygen consumption, or VO2-max, which measures the body’s rate of oxygen consumption based on body weight.

An average healthy, untrained man has a VO2-max of 30 milliliters per kilogram per minute, and a woman’s is normally 25 ml/kg/min. To be in the study, male athletes have to have a VO2-max of more than 75, and women of 63.

In the VO2 test, Larsson, 32, just made the cutoff. Hansson, 37, while quick enough to run the fastest-ever time by a non-Nepalese in the Everest race, barely missed it. Instead, he’ll be studied in a separate group of athletes with lower scores, which the researchers said will need to be included to hit their target of more than 1,000 total people.

Ashley says the cutoff needs to be so high because it is often in outliers that new genetic pathways are discovered.

Rare Mutations

The researchers also believe the DNA testing may help them discover groups of endurance athletes whose fitness profiles correlate with certain genes. The profiles may help identify what sort of training or exercise may best improve heart health.

“The hypothesis is that the athletes have reached the super-high level with different genetic profiles, but also that they have trained differently to get to the top,” said Carl Mikael Mattsson, a visiting assistant professor at Stanford who is helping to run the study. “Some respond well to a lot of training but others respond better to shorter and harder training.”

Ashley says it’s unlikely that any one gene or even series of genes can predict the next Olympic winner. Any test that claims to predict a gold medal is “a lot of junk science.”

Hansson and Larsson say they’d be interested in any findings that can help them train better, but they don’t care to know about their 8-month-old son’s DNA, no matter his athletic potential. “We don’t want to know before he is 18, then it is his choice,” said Hansson.

Aamir Khan outstrips Shah Rukh Khan as his films perform better abroad

Aamir Khan has now replaced Shahrukh Khan in the top five international Bollywood grossers list as his three hits PK, Dhoom 3 and 3 Idiots climbed to the top three slots, bringing SRK’s Happy New Year and Chennai Express to number four and five, reportedDaily News and Analysis (DNA).

Even though Shahrukh Khan’s films dominate local as well as international markets, it is now Aamir’s time to prove that his films can do equally well.

Not only that, Aamir’s PK became the first Hindi film to collect about INR340 crore at the domestic box-office. Although Talaash wasn’t appreciated by the Indian audience, the film was able to draw crowds aboard. His previous films Dhoom 3 and 3 Idiots are also known for their sky-rocketing business.

Film trade analysts and critics also weighed in their comments on Aamir and Shahrukh’s films:

Taran Adarsh: HNY didn't get the kind of numbers an SRK film gets

"There's a tough fight between Shah Rukh and Aamir in the overseas territory. Besides star-power, it's also about the film and its content. As of now, yes Aamir is having a dream run. But SRK is also a huge pull.

Aamir's Dhoom 3 was already an established brand. PK had him coming back with Rajkumar Hirani after a massively successful 3 Idiots.

Besides this, the film's content found high acceptance overseas. Though Happy New Year did very well, it didn't match the kind of numbers one has of an SRK film. It did lesser than Chennai Express. Aamir's Dhoom 3 and now PK have done put him in a great position."

Komal Nahta: The figures speak for themselves

"Out of the top five grossers overseas, three are Aamir's movies. The figures speak for themselves and Aamir's ranking in the overseas market. I think like the audience in India, even the audience abroad has started looking at Aamir's movies to be like an ISI mark. They associate his movies with quality and novelty. They know that if it's an Aamir Khanmovie it must be something good. That's why his movies are doing so well."

Following are the figures reported by DNA:

3 Idiots: $27,000,000 (Approx INR1,676,295,000)

Dhoom 3: $27,969,454 (Approx INR1,736,483,550)

PK: $26,307,214 (Approx INR1,633,020,300)

Chennai Express: $18,155,736 (Approx INR1,127,017,310)

Happy New Year: $13,500,420 (Approx INR838,173,575)

'Zid' review: Engrossing – warts and all

You have to hand it to Bee Gul, what Jackson Heights took 20 plus episodes to get round to, she delivered in one.

But then again, the writer has done it before. In her previous drama Pehchan she was able to show in full the emotional journey of her character in just one episode, along with questioning a woman’s traditional place in society.

Here in Zid, her script manages to highlight immigrant issues with working class lads struggling with course work and low paying jobs, a quick green-card marriage alongside choices women make and the control others exert over their lives. All this while managing to illuminate backstories for all the characters to help us get to know them better, warts and all.

There is a freshness in Zid that gives its women characters the space to explore the choices they make – good or bad or muddling in the middle. While the women seem strong, and hold their own, the men on the other hand, seem merely as conduits to get these women where they are today – which in itself seems a subversive twist.

The plot progresses fast and though the story centres around Saman (Maya Ali) and her adjustment to her new life in the US, it expands to include other characters that come into her orbit as well.

Having been kept in the dark about Omar’s (Ahsan Khan) first marriage, Saman finds it hard to accept her duplicitous marriage.

Read more: Review: 'Zid' is a mixed bag

Unable to live a lie, stubbornly unwilling to hear Omar’s side of the story, and searching for her own identity, Saman moves out of her home and away from Omar.

Finding refuge with Omar’s uncle's place, Uncle Qasim (Imran Peerzada), she develops a friendship with his daughter Rukhi (Rabab Hashim) where she learns more about both their lives and loves. She gets caught up in their revelations too –Qasim Uncle’s uneasy truth that marriage to his American wife Julian was a sham, merely a way for him to stay in the US, and the fact of Rukhi’s secret boyfriend.

Conversations between Rukhi and Saman about their differing views on marriage truly strike a chord. Rukhi’s views stem from actually falling in love, and making her own decisions versus Saman’s who feels tricked into an arranged marriage.

Rukhi’s ideas reflect her liberal upbringing in the West, where marriage is a mutual bond based on love and respect and more importantly of ones’ own choosing.

For Saman, marriage was the be all and end all, and quite literally forced on her. Her work, her achievements in fact, her entire sense of self, pale in comparison to the title of being in a marriage, arranged by others and suffused with expectations from a patriarchal society back East.

How often have we heard these same unending arguments and being on different sides of the fence?

That’s the magic of Bee Gul’s pen – the ability to show us different points of view and understand each character even if we may not agree with them.

Though Rukhi wants to get married to her American (read white) boyfriend, her father, who she believes to be progressive and accepting, reacts with shock and horror despite the inherent hypocrisy of the situation. He lays out a complete plan to take her to Pakistan, (complete with shades of Khuda Ke Liye – heck, even her suitor is called Dav(e)id!) which mercifully Rukhi foils.

Rukhi is actually a level-headed character who handles her situation with maturity and lets her actions speak louder than words. Rabab Hashim looks and sounds like that modern girl her character is and carries Rukhi with a quiet inner strength.

However, this situation could have been dealt with a little more nuance, after all it’s not like these questions haven’t arisen before. Neither are parents ignorant of this possibility of their children marrying outside the religious fold and nor are kids naïve about their parents' expectations.

We wonder: Did Uncle Qasim miss the memo on desi parenting? You know, the one where parents start brainwashing their kids from age five, sorry, age three, that they can never ever marry (insert all non-Muslim communities here). Or that his daughter escaped puberty and/or her rebellious questioning phase and that Daddy dearest didn’t notice?

Anyhow props to Rukhi for taking her own decisions.

After a series of slights and silent accusations Saman bumbles her way to her friends Zainab’s place. The mysterious Zainab (Nausheen Shah) turns out to be a goth-inspired (but verging on a confused preppy chic-style) kleptomaniac, into substance abuse of all kinds with shady dealers constantly threatening her. Her grandstanding is limited to her shouting them down, but not really getting them off her back.

Raving and ranting against the unfairness of a dog-eat-dog world, where people run only after money, commiserating on Saman’s situation by advising her to drag her already married husband to court and mete out punishment, ‘Z’ as she is called, isn’t your average good desi girl. Nausheen Shah manages to play her with spunk if, occasionally, a little loud.

I suspect Zainab will wear the mantle of ‘bad’ girl with the heart of gold that Bee Gul is fond of – Kuku of Pehchan reincarnated as Zainab in Zid.

There is also a twist that most discerning viewers are probably on to, but it is a smart move to lay bare each character and their motivations before revealing their intersecting lives.

Zainab also finds Saman work as a caregiver. This brings her into Shazia’s (Angeline Malik) home where Saman looks after Shazia’s unhinged Harry Potter loving mother-in-law (Ismat Zaidi in a short lived performance). While Saman develops a relationship with the family, somewhere she hurts and misses her own while nursing her betrayal.

These situations serve as a mirror to show Saman and by extension the audience, many different kinds of marriages and relationships and the ways in which loved ones both deceive and shield one another.

Maya Ali holds her own ably as the stubborn Saman determined to live life on her own terms.

So who is the good, bad and muddling middle?

The beauty of Zid is that no one is starkly black and white, and the audience is left to make their own decisions about these characters. The drama is standing on the strength of its script and there are enough nuances for the actors to explore in their characters. Though technically sound, it does however lack visual story telling.

Zid explores the choices we all make and hopefully can reconcile ourselves to. Let’s hope the story continues to move on at a steady pace and we are treated to more food for thought.

Mobile Apps Remain Vulnerable For Months

Developers are failing to respond quickly to reports of security flaws, Trojans are infecting corporate devices at an alarming rate, and even mundane data about your device's power consumption could threaten your privacy.

As if we needed more to worry about when it comes to cyber-security, three recent reports highlight the frailty of mobile devices and mobile apps. Each of the reports -- from McAfee Labs, Lacoon Mobile Security in partnership with Check Point, and Stanford University, working with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd -- focuses on key deficiencies in mobile security.

According to the McAfee Labs Threat Report for February 2015, mobile developers have failed to patch critical secure sockets layer (SSL) vulnerabilities months after the vulnerabilities were disclosed.

Last month, McAfee Labs tested 25 of the most popular Android apps on CERT's list of vulnerable mobile apps and found that 18 of them remain unpatched despite public disclosure and vendor notification. Out of more than 1 million Android apps tested by CERT using automated scans, at least 23,000 have failed dynamic SSL validation testing.

[ Suffering from insomnia? Don't read Why Kasperky's Bank Robbery Report Should Scare Us All. ]

McAfee simulated a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack and managed to successfully intercept information such as login credentials during supposedly secure sessions. The Superfish adware that Lenovo installed on some of its laptops from September through December 2014 has been criticized because it enables attacks of this sort.

"Mobile app developers must take greater responsibility for ensuring that their applications follow the secure programing practices and vulnerability responses developed over the past decade," said Vincent Weafer, SVP of McAfee Labs, in a statement.

Developers also need to be aware that vulnerabilities may be introduced through third-party analytics libraries. Among 10 analytics libraries found to be vulnerable by CERT, only 4 have been fixed.

McAfee Labs is not alone in its view that mobile devices are insufficiently secure. Last week, Lacoon Mobile Security and Check Point Software Technologies issued a report noting that one out of every 1,000 mobile devices on enterprise networks has been compromised by a mobile remote access Trojan (mRAT). The report suggested that for organizations with at least 2,000 devices, there's about a 50% chance that the internal corporate network itself has been infected with some form of malware.

Lacoon and Check Point said fewer organizations than expected appear to be infected by mRATs, but added that higher than average rates of mRAT infection in certain regions, such as the US, indicate that specific individuals and companies are being targeted. Coming in the wake of the massive Anthem breach, that should prompt some concern.

To further underscore the frailty of mobile security, researchers at Stanford University and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. have found that developers can bypass restrictions on location data by tracking mobile power usage over a period of a few minutes.

The researchers in a paper note that there are 179 Android apps in the Google Play store with the permissions necessary to access to voltage and current data. Most, if not all, of these apps presumably use the data for legitimate purposes, such as assessing battery life. But were the developers of these apps determined to track where people go, they could employ the techniques described in the paper to infer the user's location history using power consumption data.

Such research raises the possibility that other seemingly innocuous data could be used to compromise privacy and security. It also amplifies related findings about how privacy often can be pierced by correlating a few salient bits of data.

Mobile security, in short, is a moving target, one that's increasingly hard to keep up with.

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Health IT In 2015: What's In The Cards?

Healthcare CIOs need to build on existing groundwork to improve compliance and efficiency in what should be a demanding year.

Healthcare IT professionals are in for another busy year in 2015, as medical organizations look for ways to build on the groundwork they've already laid with their investments in electronic health records (EHRs), early big data and analytics trials, and experiments in patient engagement and population health.

They'll also need to address federal mandates including Meaningful Use Stage 2, the push-pull of ICD-10 deadlines, and the government's demand for healthcare systems interoperability. No matter who resides at the White House after the 2016 election, throughout 2015 healthcare organizations should act as though the Affordable Care Act -- aka Obamacare -- will survive, in some form or another, several executives predicted.

"Despite no shortage of bombastic political theater, there’s going to be no way to put this genie back in the bottle. It would be political suicide to take away coverage from the tens of millions of newly insured," Dr. Peter Alperin, an internist at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, as well as VP and general manager of Connectivity Solutions at Doximity, told InformationWeek. "Physicians and health systems will need to find ways to deal with the new landscape of patients."

Many of these methods will rely on technologies that trim costs and inefficiencies, introduce best practices, and learn from other industries, such as manufacturing and finance, healthcare professionals predicted.

"Everyone is talking about the infrastructure or the 'how' -- analytics, mobile, etc. -- but the real focus needs to be on 'what and why' all this stuff is about results. It's the next logical step in the 'businessization' of healthcare," Jordan Dolin, co-founder of Emmi Solutions, told InformationWeek. "A big prediction for healthcare 2015 is that we'll see innovations around personalization, patient-centric, convenient mobile and population health. Analytics is not the hard part, it's knowing what to do with the data and we'll see more progress in that area."

Of course, healthcare organizations will continue investing in cloud, security, mobile (including wearables), and messaging. They will lobby for laws such as the MEDTECH Act, which concerns regulation of patient records and decision-support software, and argue the pros and cons of once againdelaying ICD-10. Telehealth will gain even more traction as lawmakers, payers, and providers knock down some of the remaining boundaries.  

They'll have to: People are living longer, healthier lives at a time when healthcare costs are growing at the same as -- or faster than -- the cost of living, said John Tempesco, senior director of marketing at AtHoc and former CIO for the Naval Medical Department Northeast Region.

"Technology companies are responding to both of these trends by creating direct-to-patient technology to help them remain independent and healthy," Tempesco told Information Week. "The benefits of this technology trend will not be realized until the data collected by these innovations can be incorporated in a meaningful way into the electronic health record to advance both preventive and predictive health interactions. The trick will be, with so much data, how can we cut through the noise to provide meaningful results to providers in order to meet the triple aim of cost reduction, improved quality, and patient satisfaction?"

CIOs and their teams should keep some other big-picture changes in mind as they consider new IT initiatives and discuss departments' plans. Organizations with a culture of open communication and a foundation of transparency and cooperation are best equipped to leverage the right technologies at the right time to help peers meet these, and other, challenges in the year ahead.

Online Learning Benefits Which Translates To A Real-Time Job

Online learning has a number of benefits which are directly translatable to the skills needed for excelling in the work scenario. These are the real skills which are required by the employers and online learning helps in developing them. Here are those top five work skills which can develop through online education that translates to a workplace.

Engagement with the peers

In online classrooms the students are engaged with the others on a daily basis. The conversations are not limited to a day or a week but it continues and the students and the faculty bounce off ideas as they occur. Similarly when the student goes to a real time work space these qualities continue and helps in collaborating with the peers and the seniors and subordinates. Engaging in meetings, discussions and seminars are the benefits of online learning which translates to a real time job.

Ability to perform a cross cultural collaboration

In online learning you develop the chance to interact with the people all around the world and this helps in development of skills to communicate and collaborate with the people of the other countries which are very useful in the real time work scenario.

Using technology for virtual collaboration

In online learning the student gets the chance to interact with the others in virtual classrooms and online meetings and this skill is very important and needed when you work in a big multinational company.

Critical Thinking

Online degrees develop an ability of critical thinking in you which is very much needed in real time work scenarios to find out the solution of business problems when acting as leaders and managers.

Self motivation

Students of online learning are self motivated and this virtue is very much required by the employers who want their employees to be always self motivated.

Apple to spend 1.7 billion euros on new European data centres

REUTERS - Apple Inc said it would spend 1.7 billion euros ($1.9 billion) to build two data centres in Europe that would be entirely powered by renewable energy and create hundreds of jobs.

The company said the centres, in Ireland and Denmark, will power Apple's online services, including the iTunes Store, App Store, iMessage, Maps and Siri for customers across Europe.

The investment is set to be evenly divided between the two countries, with the Irish government confirming that 850 million euros would be spent in Ireland. The two data centres are expected to begin operations in 2017.

"This significant new investment represents Apple's biggest project in Europe to date," Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement.

"We’re thrilled to be expanding our operations, creating hundreds of local jobs and introducing some of our most advanced green building designs yet," he added.

The data centre in Ireland will be located in Athenry, close to Galway on the west coast while in Denmark, it will be in Viborg, western Denmark.

In a sign of how important Apple's investment in Denmark was, the country's trade and development minister issued a statement mirroring that of the iPhone maker's, adding the two data centres would be among the largest in the world.

Ireland's government also reacted to the announcement, saying 300 jobs would be added in the county of Galway during the multiple phases of the project, a boost as it seeks to cut the unemployment rate below 10 percent this year.

"As the Government works to secure recovery and see it spread to every part of the country, today's announcement is another extremely positive step in the right direction,” Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny said in a statement.

($1 = 0.8808 euros)

(Reporting by Supriya Kurane in Bengaluru, Sabina Zawadzki in Copenhagen and Padraic Halpin in Dublin; Editing by Ted Kerr and Keith Weir)

http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/02/23/apple-europe-idINKBN0LR0P120150223

Third of Americans say Hollywood has problem with minorities

LOS ANGELES: In a year when a lack of diversity among Academy Awards nominees prompted the Twitter hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, one-third of Americans believe Hollywood does not pay proper attention to minorities and women, according to the annual Reuters/Ipsos Oscars poll.

Thirty-four percent of the nearly 2,000 people polled online said they believed Hollywood has a general problem with minorities and 32 percent said the film industry's capital shies away from making Oscar-calibre movies that appeal to minorities.

Nearly two-thirds of black respondents, or 62 percent, said Hollywood had a problem with minorities, compared to 48 percent from all minority groups.

How women are treated fared only slightly better overall, with 32 percent of respondents saying Hollywood has a problem with women and 29 percent believing it fell short in making Oscar-calibre movies for the female audience.

But women were only slightly more negative than men when asked about women's standing in the film industry. Twenty-eight percent of men and 30 percent of women thought Hollywood underdelivered on Oscar-quality movies for women.

The findings come a month after nominations revealed no actors of colour in the four acting races and no women in the best director and screenwriter categories for Sunday's Academy Awards - in what was deemed by experts "the whitest Oscars" in years.

The most controversial exclusions centred around Selma, the Martin Luther King Jr. biopic that secured best picture and best song nominations but failed to earn nods for its female African American director Ava DuVernay and lead actor David Oyelowo.

Gregory Sampson, a 51-year-old African American respondent from Maryland, said he thought Hollywood had a lot of work to do to be more inclusive of minorities and women and blamed it on a "good old boy network."

"You have your big stars like Denzel Washington or Samuel L. Jackson, who appeal to everyone, but a lot of those guys don't get the recognition they should get," Sampson said.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has some 6,100 members, who are selected for the quality of their work and recommendations by existing members. A 2012 investigation by the Los Angeles Times showed membership was 94 percent white and 77 percent male with a median age of 62.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll surveyed 1,988 Americans online from Feb 13-18 and has a credibility interval of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

Eco-friendly bike-cars

The "ELF" is Robb Cotter's dream come true.

"I've always wanted to create a small, efficient vehicle that incorporates solar power," said Cotter, an auto technician and design expert.

He's done that, and a lot more, with his 160-pound hybrid electric-pedal, three-wheeled bike called ELF.

"The ELF can help reduce the carbon footprint in cities," he said. "It's environmentally-friendly, safer than an ordinary bike and you can carry cargo in it."

Cotter's startup Organic Transit launched the ELF in 2012. The bike, priced between $5,500 and $10,000, is made in Durham, N.C., and features an egg-shaped shell that shields the rider from bad weather.

It can top 20 mph using just electric power (the battery charger plugs in to any wall outlet) and 30 mph with pedaling.

Organic Transit has sold over 450 ELFs, mostly to "individuals who are using it as a commuting vehicle and for exercise," Cotter said. "One person said he even rode it from Ontario to Key West."

His next goal is to grow the market beyond just personal use. "We've had interest from businesses, universities and city agencies such as police departments," he said.

The startup is working on a more heavy-duty successor to ELF, which could potentially carry up to three passengers.

"My intent is that with every person that uses our vehicle, it'll help improve their health and drive down their transportation expenses," said Cotter.

Concerns Emerge About Samsung Smart TVs 'Bugging' Owners

Owners of Samsung smart TVs need to watch what they say if they've activated the voice recognition feature on these devices.

The feature may transmit some voice commands, together with information about the device, to a third-party service that converts speech to text,Samsung's global privacy policy warns.

Further, Samsung may collect, and the device may capture, voice commands and associated texts to evaluate and improve the feature.

The information has sparked considerable comment in the media since it was first published in The Daily Beast.

If voice recognition is going to be on all the time, "that seems like really poor design, and certainly represents a privacy risk," commented Justin Brookman, director of the consumer privacy project at the Center for Democracy & Technology.

"Google has a decent approach to this," Brookman said, "The phone listens for you to say "OK, Google" and then anything after that goes to Google for processing."

Available Alternatives

Users can turn off, or not enable, voice recognition, but that will prevent them from using interactive voice recognition commands, Samsung said. And, while this will prevent the company from collecting spoken words, it may still collect associated texts and other usage data for analysis.

A Samsung spokesperson told The Daily Beast that users could disconnect the TV from the home WiFi network, although that raises the question of why anyone should purchase a smart TV set and then use it as an ordinary dumb TV.

"Consumers who are really concerned about privacy don't have to buy Samsung Smart TVs," remarked Mike Jude, a manager at the Stratecast service of Frost & Sullivan. "There are a lot of smart TVs out there."

Samsung did not respond to our request to comment for this story.

The Threat of Smart TVs

Concerns about smart TVs recording voice commands or transmitting them to third parties may not be overblown.

Smart TVs can be hacked into and used to spy on their owners, security experts at Italian firm ReVuln warned back in 2012, when they posted a video demonstrating how to hack a Samsung Smart TV by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability.

"Users need to have more power over the devices that they're buying and bringing into their houses," Parker Higgins, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told TechNewsWorld.

It would "go a long way [if] users...[could] really look at the security of these devices and...replace the software if they want to," Higgins suggested.

Security "is a real concern, no matter how this product is deployed," the CDT's Brookman said. Concerns over security will impede the adoption of the Internet of Things because, "for a lot of products, the value proposition just isn't worth the potential threat."

Back in 2013, LG smart TV owner DoctorBeet reported that his device logged what he was watching and sent the data back to the company's servers without encrypting it, whether or not he had this option enabled.

The news caused a furor, and LG eventually explained that the TV did not collect or retain personal data, and that it would issue a firmware update to resolve the problem.

Still, security and privacy issues "should be an engineering concern at the companies that are building these [devices]," suggested the EFF's Higgins.

The Bigger Picture

"The larger issue is that there's an inverse correlation between embedded intelligence and privacy," Jude posited.

Much of the intelligent functionality in a voice-activated feature, like Apple's Siri, "is deep voice and context analysis that literally takes what we called supercomputing 20 years ago" and that's processed in the cloud, Jude said.

In that case, "you will have to accept [the intelligence] will be provided as a utility from the cloud and, whenever something's in the cloud, there's the potential of its being hacked," Jude pointed out. Sure, intelligent devices are useful, but "be careful what you ask for."