Newsletter Archive
Foundation for Information Technology Accessibility (FITA)
Improving the quality of life of disabled persons through ICT29th November 2004
Contents
Software of the Month : The Best BitTorrent Client? / Lookout Returns
Website of the Month : Prevent Your Bank Account From Being Plundered
Question Box (Hints & Tips) : Paralysed man sends e-mail by thoughtArticles :
- W3C highlights Mobile Web Initiative
- Once again, Google makes Microsoft look out of date
- Browser Battles
Software of the Month
The Best BitTorrent Client?
It's amazing how quickly BitTorrent has become one of the major download formats. With good reason, too: it's fast, equitable and efficient. If you haven't yet installed a BitTorrent client on your PC, you should as there are some great free programs available. Popular recommendations include the Open Source program Azureus. It's beautifully implemented, well supported and, being Java based, is available for multiple platforms. Of course the Java code will eat up your CPU cycles so you need a fast PC. Those with older machines should check out BitTornado. It's also cross platform and is fast and highly configurable as well. Both products are adware/spyware free.
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
Lookout Returns
Lookout is an impressive new indexing program for Outlook 2000 and above. It appears it impressed Microsoft, too, because they just bought the company. As a result, the free beta immediately disappeared from the Lookout web site. However, the latest news is that due to public outcry, Microsoft has re-instated the free beta on the MS website. It finds email within Outlook almost instantly.
Go get it while it's free.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=
09b835ee-16e5-4961-91b8-2200ba31ea37&displaylang=enSource: PC Mechanic
Website of the Month
Prevent Your Bank Account From Being Plundered
Some phishing hoaxes are so cleverly put together that they even have arch cynics momentarily thinking,
"Is this real or not?" However, with a small amount of detective work it's pretty easy to uncover the scam.
This short article, "Ten Tips to Topple E-mail Fraud", provides some useful guidelines to help you along
the way.Question Box (Hints & Tips)
Microsoft case study videos
Microsoft is making available a series of video case studies providing a look into the careers of six professionals with various impairments who are using assistive technology products in careers across many industries. All of these video case studies are accompanied by written case studies.
We suggest using these videos to get an idea of the inherent advantages of Assistive technology. When researching solutions to specific impairment issues, we strongly recommend getting expert advice, either through FITA or relevant specialists.
Articles
W3C highlights Mobile Web Initiative
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is considering a new effort called The "W3C Mobile Web Initiative," that will seek to make Web access from mobile devices such as mobile phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants), as simple, easy and convenient as desktop Web access. The W3C made the announcement at a two-day "Mobile Web Initiative" workshop, in Barcelona, Spain, organized to help efforts to improve Web-surfing capabilities of handheld devices.
Participants are highlighting the challenges in accessing the Web over handheld devices and discussing possible solutions, the group said. Over 40 position papers were submitted to the W3C for presentation at the workshop from companies like Vodafone Group, Nokia, and Hewlett-Packard.
Ideas include developing "best practices" documents, providing support infrastructures for mobile developers, organizing training programs for Web content providers and creating validation and conformance testing services for Web-access from mobile devices, the W3C said.The workshop is part of the W3C's ongoing work to refine the mobile Web experience. In January, it recommended a new standard, the technical specification called "Composite Capability/Preference Profiles (CC/PP): Structures and Vocabularies 1.0," as a means for enabling handheld devices to communicate with Web servers and exchange content delivery information.
Tim Berners-Lee founded the W3C in October 1994 as a group to sponsor work to develop common Web protocols. The group, which collaborates closely with CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is hosted by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics in France and by the Keio Research Institute at Keio University in Japan.
Source: IDG News Service
Once again, Google makes Microsoft look out of date
Hardly a month goes by without Google, the world's most popular internet search engine, launching another cool product that annoys its arch-rival, Microsoft. This month's example is “Google desktop search”, a tiny bit of free software that puts a cute little icon on the taskbar of Microsoft's Windows operating system. It calls up the usual Google page that is used to perform web searches, except that users can now also find almost anything they have lost on their computers' hard drives.
Google thereby addresses one of the biggest problems with today's Windows “desktop”; that stuff is increasingly hard to find. The Macintosh system, which Apple pioneered in the 1980s, and Windows, Microsoft's imitation of it, were appropriate when most PC users needed to keep track of just a few dozen files. Today they tend to have thousands, including pictures, songs and e-mails. If you want to find all the files that have something to do with, say, your friend Jane, forget it.With Google's desktop search, however, this becomes easy.
What makes it so embarrassing for Microsoft is that the world's biggest software company's answer to this problem was supposed to be contained in a new file-storage and search system in the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. Alas, in August Microsoft announced that Longhorn would not be available until 2006, and that its new storage method, called WinFS, had been dropped.It gets worse for Microsoft. For months, Google has also been letting people test its new web-based e-mail service, Gmail. This offers new and more intuitive ways of viewing trails of e-mails. More importantly, it offers huge amounts of free storage, so that users can store their digital stuff on Google's server computers rather than on their own (Windows-run) PCs.
Google, in other words, is attacking from every side. And there is more in the pipeline. “Google Print” is software that will help people search inside books (similar to a technology now provided by Amazon). “Google SMS” will help people to search the web from their mobile phones (Microsoft hates this too). Even a Google web browser is apparently in the works To be sure, nobody is yet counting Microsoft out. The firm has a record of coming late to new technologies, but then playing so rough (and wielding its operating-system monopoly so shamelessly) that it still manages to be the last one standing. In an effort to catch up with Google, Microsoft plans to launch a new search engine for both the web and the desktop, separate from Longhorn, by the end of this year. But what little of it is visible so far looks remarkably like, ahem, Google.
Source: searchenginesnews
Browser Battles
After 19 months of development, two name changes and more than 8 million downloads of its preview release, the Firefox browser is finally turning 1.0. Firefox, is a web browser based on the Mozilla Foundation's open-source development work.Our browser is moving into the mainstream," said Mitchell Baker, president of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, based in Mountain View, Calif. "Being an alternative browser in today's market is a challenge, but people have begun to realize that the browser matters, that the browser you get with your computer can be a beginning point and not an endpoint."
While Web analysts have largely ignored the browser market since declaring IE the winner of the browser war, scattered Web site measurement statistics have suggested gains for Firefox and other minority browsers against the IE juggernaut
IE continues to command more than 90 percent of the market, with Opera Software's namesake browser, Apple Computer's Safari software and other Mozilla-based browsers making up the difference. Firefox has set its sights on gaining 10 percent of the market by the end of 2005. In addition to making apparent market inroads and shattering its own download goals, Firefox has succeeded in blazing an open-source fundraising trail that backers call unprecedented. To place full-page ads in The New York Times, the Mozilla Foundation raised more than $250,000 in donations in the first 10 days of a fundraising campaign.Mozilla owes part of its Firefox success to widespread security concerns about IE. While all the browsers have faced security bugs, IE's security reputation has suffered chronic damage amid a steady torrent of security bugs and spyware schemes targeting IE users.The Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT), the computer threats division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, earlier this year issued an advisory urging Americans to consider ditching IE in favor of its competitors. Independent groups have launched their own campaigns urging Web surfers to consider IE alternatives. Microsoft in August updated IE with significant security measures, but that update is available only to the approximately half of all Windows users running Windows XP. With the early successes of Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation has capitalized not only on the 19 months of work since the Firefox project launched (under the legally contested name Phoenix), but on the six years of Mozilla's tumultuous history.Mozilla was the product of a bold--some said desperate--strategy by Netscape Communications to rescue its Netscape browser from oblivion at the hands of Microsoft's relentless marketing practices. Many of those practices were found to have violated federal law in the government's antitrust case against Microsoft.
In 1998, Netscape decided to do what grassroots programmers had long done but no major corporation had--release its software into open-source development. That meant anyone could freely see, use and contribute to the underlying code according to the terms of an open-source license. Mozilla's initial results were long in coming and short on quality. Netscape's first products based on Mozilla's code were savaged as undercooked, and Mozilla's later releases, while more stable, were bypassed for being overweight.While Mozilla struggled to turn out its browser, AOL acquired Netscape and merged with Time Warner.
The merged company wound up laying off hundreds of its paid browser developers, settling its differences with Microsoft, and spinning off Mozilla as an independent foundation.Unlike prior Mozilla releases, Firefox has won plaudits and some awards for being fast and lightweight while providing features, like tabbed browsing, that many Web surfers find indispensable once they've tried them. The browser's small size earned it an investment by Nokia for development of "Minimo," a tiny browser for use with Web-ready cell phones. Now Microsoft is paying close attention to Firefox's progress."We're seeing the natural ebb and flow of a competitive marketplace," said Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows, professing indifference in response to a question about Firefox's apparent market inroads. "Curious early adopters are trying it out, and frankly we're happy they're trying it out on Windows. We believe that IE is the best browser out there, but we're happy to have (Firefox users) on the Windows platform."
Source: ZDNet News
Disclaimer
The reader is responsible for the use of information contained herein and its safe and lawful use. This includes work policies and restrictions applicable to the computer environment specific to the user. Descriptions of products or services are for information purposes only. FITA makes no claim, representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the information presented here, the performance of products and services, or any results that may be obtainable by their use. FITA also does not necessarily endorse the specific content or positions contained in the articles shown or referred to.
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Copyright © 2002 Foundation for IT Accessibility
Last modified: Monday, July 31, 2006
