Technology
News
By Dave Wilby
and Sean
McManus
Government websites fail the disabled
 A new report commissioned by the UK EU presidency says that
only three per cent of public service websites meet the most basic of
accessibility guidelines. Following such guidelines makes it easier for people who
require assistive devices to use websites. That includes blind people using
Braille readers, or screenreaders that read webpages aloud, and deaf people who
require subtitles for audio content.
Most websites failed to provide suitable text alternatives
for images on the sites. A lack of alternative text is a top complaint among
people using screenreaders.
The
report proposes that all public sector websites are made to conform with
accessibility standards by 2010. While it’s good to see some commitment, five
years is a long time for people with disabilities to go without online
access to the public services their taxes pay for.
The presidency could start by fixing its own website, on
which a picture of birds flocking around the word ‘home’ has the alternative
text ‘crown’, and an image that reads ‘UK Presidency of the EU 2005’ has the
alternative text ‘FCO’.
The report was based on a survey of 436 public sector
websites across the EU.
No Vista Beta on the horizon
The hugely anticipated second beta of
Windows Vista
won’t arrive by the end of the year after all, Microsoft has finally admitted.
There is now no official time frame for the release of Beta
2 of the shiny new OS, although fans and critics alike expect it to arrive early next year. However, Microsoft did reveal it still plans to
launch the full-blown desktop version of Vista in the second half of 2006, with
its server
guise, still codenamed ‘Longhorn’, trailing behind sometime in 2007.
Probably.
IM fans urged to keep eye out for worms
Dozens of new worms are in the wild and spreading over our
Instant Messaging (IM) systems, according to
security experts.
Researchers at Akonix Systems, a company specialising in
business IM security, claims the number of worms targeting IM services reached
62 in November, up 226 percent from October and hitting a new record.
Among the worms detected, four were entirely new threats, 20
were able to attack to more than one public network and eight had been designed
to spread across all four major IM networks: AOL, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo!
Google tests click-to-call
Google is testing a new way of connecting with advertisers:
click-to-call. It
enables potential customers to respond to a text advert by entering their phone
number, and Google will then connect them to the advertiser by phone.
There was much talk of click-to-call at the AdTech
conference in September. It’s seen as a way to offer text advertising to
companies that don’t have websites, and a way to shorten the conversion cycle
for certain promotions.
Typically these services publish a freephone number
alongside the advert and enable the caller to place the call. In this case,
Google is banking on customers trusting it more than advertisers: Google makes
the call to the customer and advertiser and promises not to track who customers
call or what their numbers are. In return, Google conceals the customer’s
details from advertisers.
Things that go BOINC in the night
Seti@home,
the distributed computing project for searching for extraterrestrial signals,
is joining BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. That
means that users of the popular screensaver will now be able to participate in
a wider range of projects using the one program.
Seti@home uses a computer’s idle time to chug through radio
telescope data, looking for signs of intelligent signals. Users of the new
program will be able to donate their computer’s idle time to a wider range of
research tasks and decide how much time their computer should spend on each
type of task.
While Seti@home has captured the public’s imagination (more than 3 million people were taking part in 2001), one researcher claims it poses a
security threat. Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the US Fermi
National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, has reportedly
expressed concern that aliens could hack into our PCs by sending out bad data.
We can see where this is going. Before long, we’ll be
getting emails that start: "Hello, I’m the daughter of Tharg, ruler of the
planet Neptunosa. He was killed in a Snarg uprising, leaving behind
$50,000,000,000,000,000 in a Venusian bank account..."
Ricky Gervais launches free podcast
Ricky Gervais, best known for co-writing and starring in The
Office, is to create a 12-part radio series exclusively for distribution
online.
Gervais will make a series of 30-minute programmes which will
be available
to download from The Guardian’s website. He will be joined in the studio by
his Office co-writer Stephen Merchant.
"I want to do a radio show where I can say I want, when
I want, for as long as I want and that's free for anybody who can be bothered
to listen, anywhere in the world," Gervais said. "We didn't want it
to just be the best bits of a radio programme you'd missed so this is a show
that is straight-to-podcast.”
Gervais was a DJ on London indie station XFM before
getting his TV break. The programs will be uploaded to The Guardian website on
Mondays, starting 5th December 2005.
Space jobs threatened by government budget cuts
The BBC
reports that the UK government might be about to cut its contribution to a
major new European Space Agency project from
£24 million to £6 million. If it does, the UK’s space industry, which employs
15,000 skilled people, stands to lose out when the project’s contracts are
awarded, putting jobs at risk.
The GMES (Global Monitoring
for Environment and Security) project will cost an estimated total of £1.6
billion. It will pull together all earth related data so that global warming
and natural disasters can be monitored. It will also enable the EU to enforce
fishing quotas.
An initial subscription of £24 million would enable the UK to take a leading role in the project. The government says it has not yet made a final
decision on how much money it will commit, and it has until Monday to make up
its mind.
Also in the last week, Hu Shixiang, deputy commander of China’s manned space flight programme, has said he expects China to be able to put a man on the moon
by 2020. This too is subject to receiving the necessary funding from the
Chinese government.
Sony to put parental controls in PS3
Sony, currently famous for putting invasive software on
music CDs, but also known in some circles for its gaming consoles, has
announced plans to put parental controls into its next console generation.
Microsoft’s Xbox 360
which was recently launched in the US already features such controls, designed
to enable parents to block inappropriate content.
Consoles are big business and young adult gamers are a key audience,
which the marketing behind the original Playstation helped to create. Games are
increasingly cinematic and use the familiar blockbuster themes of love and
violence to tell their stories. Those stories play out in a world that’s
increasingly life-like as the graphics performance of consoles improves. By
introducing parental controls, console makers hope they can abdicate
responsibility for games designed for adults falling into the hands of
impressionable children.
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