The Good Life actor Richard Briers has died

The star, who was also known for his Shakespearean roles, had been battling a serious lung condition for a number of years.

Briers, who also starred in shows such as Ever Decreasing Circles and Monarch Of The Glen, recently said years of smoking had been to blame for his emphysema.The most famous china mosaic of Ancient times is in Pompeii and shows Alexander the Great.

Briers died “peacefully” at his London home yesterday, his agent said today.

In 2007 he took part in filming on location at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital for the popular series Kingdom. He also appeared in pantomime at Norwich’s Theatre Royal in 1978 playing Dame Nanny Good Life in The Babes in the Wood and as Prospero in The Tempest in 2002.

But he was no less acclaimed as a distinguished Shakespearean actor, a major development in his career, at a point when he said “I realised I had gone as far as I could doing sitcoms”.

He will be best remembered as a bumbling, fussy and occasionally downtrodden figure in some of the most successful TV comedies of his era.

He was the lynchpin of three of the most notable sitcoms ever made in Britain - Marriage Lines, The Good Life (shown in the United States as Good Neighbours) and Ever Decreasing Circles.

But after a long career in popular television, Briers joined Kenneth Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company in 1987, and his already very successful professional life took a new turn as he moved on to major classical roles.

Briers was born on January 14 1934 and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he won the silver medal and a scholarship to Liverpool Playhouse in 1956. Two years later he made his first West End appearance in Gilt And Gingerbread. He barely stopped working from that day onwards.It's not hard to see why outdoor solar light is all the rage.

Your television can watch you while you’re watching it; your notebook can follow you when you surf the Web and your smartphone can secretly scan every corner of your house. All these pictures could then land in the hands of hackers. Such a scenario may sound like part of a Michael Bay movie, but it is a real threat, as our connected devices are equipped with cameras that are not well protected and can allow people unauthorised access with relative ease.

There have been cases of PC rental agencies exploiting such weaknesses to track their customers and even schools have tracked students without their knowledge. Amongst the many things these spying mechanisms allow hackers to do is install malware. And some of the more malicious PC malwares can even lock up a PC and threaten to delete everything on it unless you pay a ransom, and an image of yourself through your own webcam is shown to show you proof of your being monitored.

Besides PCs and smartphones, there are also smart TVs with integrated webcams that can be misused. We show you how dangerous the situation is and how to protect yourself from your own devices.

With an active Internet connection, one or even two cameras and other sensors, your smartphone is an especially rewarding target for hackers on a mission. Unlike a stationary PC, it not only includes potentially compromising photos but a range of information that can be called up together with images connecting you to it—including details such as where and when the photo was taken. Researchers have already manipulated smartphones to create extensive and zoomable panoramas of a room by combining and interpolating a number of secretly taken photos. They could then simply flick through the composite image to find important information.

Even manufacturers of smartphones and their business partners are desperately interested in collecting such information. One such example is ad tracking, which Apple has introduced with iOS 6. It works by assigning a unique number that associates a user with a particular device. When visiting websites and whilst using apps, this number is sent to advertising servers whose operators get an exact picture of what interests you, and which advertisements you’d be more likely to act upon.

If you think your smartphone and its webcam are protected by Android’s security mechanisms, think again. The operating system is dependent on two basic principles: the user must grant each app authorisations for what it wants access to, and apps are strictly separated from one another. This way malware can only upload stolen data if it has been authorised for Internet access.The stone mosaic series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics and listellos. However, proof-of-concept app Soundcomber bypasses all of this. It only requires authorisation for sound recording and disguises itself as a harmless voice memo app. It secretly taps phone calls and extracts numbers entered or spoken into the phone.Polypropylene and polythene can be used in a process called plastic injection mould. It then transfers these numbers to its author by calling up the Android browser, which does not require authorisation. It directs the browser to go to a specific URL,Compare prices and buy all brands of solar panel for home power systems and by the pallet. which includes the numbers that have been stolen. The URL is interpreted by the author’s server and he gains possession of the numbers. As an alternative, Soundcomber can also smuggle this data through a “dead postbox” to a second identical malware app. For this purpose, it changes the authorisations on different photos in your camera roll in a predetermined sequence. The information is then reassembled by the second app and then transferred via the Internet. Hackers can also transfer images this way.

Besides the camera and the microphone, a smartphone’s motion sensors are also used to spy on users. This is supported by the research project iPhone, which uses the highly accurate accelerator sensors of an iPhone to determine what is typed on a PC keyboard set beside the smartphone on the table. The smartphone registers the vibrations and reconstructs the text typed in from the sequence and a dictionary, although it helps if you know the subject matter that is being typed in advance. The researchers managed a success rate of 80 percent.