If you have an office or a retail store, you may also have a security system that to alert you and the police in case of a break-in--or a webcam set up to monitor your business in your absence. But the capabilities of security systems go much further than they did even a few years ago, letting you monitor your business from a smartphone or tablet.

Adobe is working on a fix for a Flash Player vulnerability that can be exploited via clickjacking techniques to turn on people's webcams or microphones without their knowledge.

German researchers have given a new meaning to window shopping. At the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute showed a prototype that lets shoppers learn more about what's in a store display window when the store is closed.

A Taiwanese producer of plastic lenses said on Wednesday its March revenues shot up because of a surge in orders from tablet PC makers, indicating that cameras will be installed on devices due for release later in the year.

OmniVision Technologies has introduced its OV2720, which it claims is the world's smallest high-definition (HD) CMOS image sensor. It's intended for notebooks, netbooks, and webcams. For the uninitiated, OmniVision develops camera technology for phones, laptops, webcams, and video cameras.

The parents of a Pennsylvania high school student have asked a federal judge to bar school district personnel from switching on cameras in school-issued MacBook laptops, calling the security feature "peeping tom technology."

A decade ago, it was a clever novelty: a webcam pointed at an office water cooler. The first one is still online, at www.coolercam.com, broadcasting a fresh picture every 10 seconds.