Weekend wine fiesta in Pune for Rs 250

With Christmas round the corner, the coming weekend will see wine lovers across Maharashtra getting together in Pune for a one-of-a-kind festival.
Being organised by the Pune Gourmet Club at Koregaon Park, the wine tasting fiesta will be a standalone event.
"Wine tasting festivals are always a part of an agri-fest or some other festival, so we thought it would be a good idea to have an exclusive wine tasting event," says B Shankarnarayanan, an organiser.
More than 40 types of wines from Indian wineries like Chateau Indage, Vindura and ND Wines will be available for tasting.
According to Shankarnarayanan, the fest will give wine lovers an opportunity to taste even the smaller and the rarer brands for a one-time cost of Rs 250.
"In many places, for Rs 150 you get to taste only six wines, so one only tastes the best brands, and the other smaller bands lose out on the opportunity. So this time we thought by fixing the price and not the number of wines, the smaller players too will have a good opportunity," says Shankarnarayanan.
More than 10 wineries from different parts of the country have already registered. Wine expert Marie Juhasoo from Sula Wines will participate and offer her comments on various wines. Chef Parag Kanhere from Nasik will have a live cookery show with Indian wine.
Food stalls with delicious gourmet recipes paired with free exotic wines will be part of the festival. The event has no sponsors - it's purely the voluntary effort of 200-odd members of this club who are fond of good food and some tangy wine.

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Cars flash mails before breaking down

Bangalore:Breakdowns in the middle of a busy street due to engine trouble would become a thing of past as future technologies would enable a car flash ‘health report’ well in advance indicating ‘all was not well with it’.
“Your car could send an e-mail telling you that it’s time to drop in for a health check-up at your nearest service centre,” said Alan Taub, executive director, General Motors Research and Development in Warren Michigan, while tracing the future technology in the automotive industry.
“It could warn you well in advance that it was having an engine problem or that the brake pads were getting worn out or that the battery has not been charged enough,” he said. The component of electrification and electronification of value-added software in vehicles, especially in the high-end segment will go up to 40% by 2015, said Allan. The vehicle would have sophisticated software that could be serviced by just downloading a patch of software.
GM, which has already made available parts of this sophisticated technology in the US, is working on increasing the content of sophisticated software that could be addressed through remote applications, Nady Boules, director, Electrical and Controls Integration Research Lab said.
The technology, which will be made in India in future, would enable the driver to receive a ‘once-in-a-month’ report from the vehicle telling you its health status. The technology would help monitor the critical systems in the car from time to time and send indications if it was going to face some trouble, said Boules.
“The indicators could be available in various ways, you could have a green saying that it is time for a check up, a yellow that could indicate that you need to hurry and red which meant that you swerve immediately to your service centre,” said Boules. GM is working on software at two ends, one that could be made available on the driver’s panel and another that could be availed through remote control, he said.
“Next time you find you have locked your car and left the keys inside, you could call the back office of the company, inform them and they could in turn ‘break in’ the software and unlock the car. Or if you find there is some problem that needs to be immediately attended to, they could through remote application attend to it immediately,” he said.
In the US, currently, a driver whose vehicle has been stolen could intimate the company back office, which, through GPS system, would track the location of the car.
The software, which could be remotely controlled could actually “slow down the car and prevent the thief from running away. It would take out the control of the car from the thief’s hands,” he said with a chuckle.
Such a technology could help immensely in preventing vehicle thefts and free the owner from worries about the car being parked in dim-lit corners of a road. These back-office services could be availed of even during other crises with regard to the car. “The person driving the car could simply call up the back office of the company, inform them of the specific problem, which could be attended to immediately with the help of the advanced software,” he said.
In the US, in case of an accident, the back office is immediately alerted through an automatic system which then calls the driver to understand the gravity of the situation. Help is immediately deployed to the site of the accident. Such accident alerts could be extremely beneficial for India too where the driver in a serious situation could get help immediately, he said. The bursting of the airbags could send out the alert signals to the office.
“Currently, GM is working on components like engine control, steering, safety controls in the process of introducing more electronification of the vehicles,” he said. Once the sophisticated software is in place, it would mean that a car breakdown would have to be struck off from the list of ‘most common excuses’ dished out for showing up late.

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Porn websites pose hidden, extortionate dangers

Online pornography hunters' internet adventures are already fraught with danger from malicious code many porn sites use to commandeer visitors' machines or steal personal data.
Now comes a scheme some researchers say amounts to extortion: One site's threat to disable visitors' computers with relentless pop-up ads if they don't pay for a subscription they were automatically signed up for after a free trial.
The threats, reported this week by researchers at security vendor McAfee Inc's Avert Labs, affect people who visit the Web site and download software to access a free three-day trial membership.
Visitors do get free access for three days, but the download includes code that then generates a stream of pop-up windows, when the user is online and offline, demanding payment of roughly $80 for 90 days' worth of additional access.
The windows stay open up to 10 minutes and appear once a day. They appear on top of any open windows and restore to their original size if shrunk or moved, making them impossible to ignore. They also reappear if the computer is rebooted.
The site actually warns visitors they will be billed as full members - and lose full use of their computers if they don't - unless they cancel the subscription within the trial period. But the warning appears in the full terms and conditions statement, which downloaders aren't required to read.
Once the fees are paid, the software can be removed with a special file.
"What it appears they are doing is, in my humble opinion, a form of extortion based on the (usually correct) assumption that a person's computer will be key to many other activities in their daily life,'' McAfee researcher Seth Purdy wrote on the Avert Labs blog.

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