September 2005 |
Football Clubs to test wireless audio description |
| We were interested to hear that a number of football
clubs are to test wireless audio descriptions of football matches. |
| Traditionally, the quality of audio description
services is patchy, if provided at all. In many grounds, only
a limited number of headsets are available, especially for away
fans, and sometimes in restricted locations, where fans cannot
sit with friends and family. Wireless technology can help to
resolve many of these issues. |
| net-progress are delighted to hear this
news, as we have taken a close interest in what football clubs
are doing to improve the lot of visually impaired supporters
since we audited the Premiership club websites last November.
At that time, only a handful provided accessible websites. If
you haven’t read the report yet, you can download the
Premiership
Survey from our website here. |
| We’ll be doing a follow up audit later in
the year, and it will be interesting to see whether the accessibility
standards of these websites have also moved forward. |
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War of the worlds – website
security |
| Forget the Summer blockbuster earlier in the year
starring Tom Cruise. The real pyrotechnics have been taking
place between two astronomers this month. |
| In July, Jose-Luis Ortiz and his team at the
Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia announced that they had
discovered a giant object orbiting beyond Neptune. Mike Brown,
an astronomer at Caltech, emailed his congratulations to Ortiz,
and at the same time, told the Minor Planet Center (MPC) that
he had also been tracking the object. Soon after, Brian Marsden
of the MPC told Brown that telescope logs including his observations
were publicly available on the internet. |
| Brown then checked his server records,
and by performing reverse DNS lookup (incidentally demonstrating
what a valuable process this is), discovered that his logs had
been accessed via two computers at the Institute of Astrophysics
of Andalusia. Ortiz readily admits that this is the case. However,
he claims that he did nothing wrong, as he found the logs on
a publicly available website via a Google search. However, as
the use of the Caltech logs were not recognised, it is not clear
whether the log file data was used to validate the Spanish findings,
or whether it caused them to re-examine images taken more than
two years previously. |
| Putting to one side the elements
of the debate particular to the astronomy community, lets concentrate
on the accessing of the log files. Well, within the letter of
the law, you would have to say that Ortiz is right in saying
that the log files were in the public domain, and therefore
“fair game”. In fact, we found that the log files
are still available to the public. However, we would have to
say that for us, it isn’t right ethically. |
| Don’t think that finding information
not really intended for everyone is uncommon. Not that long
ago, we found that we had been nominated for an award when we
found the entry form via Google. It wasn’t particularly
sensitive, but we knew that it wasn’t supposed to be available
to the general public. If your website can be indexed by Google,
it will index it. Normally, of course, this is a good thing,
but its worth sitting back for a moment and thinking about what
you have on your website and whether you want Google to index
everything it finds. |
| One thing you can do is to go to Google and type
in, “site:www.mydomain.com”, inserting your own
domain name, of course. This will list all the pages that Google
has indexed from your website. |
| Assuming that you want to keep information from
Google, what can you do? Well, firstly, you can password-protect
directories and pages. This is probably the best solution, as
it is difficult to argue that information is in the public domain
if someone has to hack a password to get it. You can also use
a robots.txt file to tell the search engine spiders (the technology
used to index a website) what it can list and what is off limits.
Similarly, a meta tag can be placed in the head of individual
pages to the same effect. |
| This won’t completely fireproof you however.
On some websites, your browser will list the contents of a directory
if there is no index page. |
| If you are worried about the security of
your website, or need advice about what you can do to protect
your sensitive data, please contact
us and we’ll take a look at it for
you. |
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Calculating website Return On Investment – what
is your website doing for your business? |
| As well as the above piece, this month we’ve
also penned an article on calculating website return on investment.
Don’t worry, dear reader, we won’t post it in full
here. This update is quite long enough already! What follows
is an introductory paragraph, and if it is of interest, you
can read the rest of it on our website. |
| Extract: |
| Having a website for your business is one thing,
but is it working hard for the business, or just squatting in
cyberspace? The answer, surprisingly, is that many companies
do not know. You could be seriously underestimating its value
to the business. Or you might be failing to make the best use
of your website, or worse still, actually damaging your company’s
business and brand. It might look slick, but without measuring
website performance, you’ll never know what is going on
under the bonnet. Carrying out proper web analytics is vital
to determining the true value of your website to your business. |
| Read
the full article, “Calculating website Return On Investment
– what is your website doing for your business?”
here. |
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Win a copy of the Get home Safely
board game |
| Because we’re such thoroughly
good eggs here at net-progress, as well as running net-guide,
we also support a number of other charities. One such charity
is Kidsafe, who have produced a snakes and ladders style board
game called “Get Home Safely”. The game is designed
to be fun, and to teach children to play and stay safe. But
our largesse doesn’t stop with supporting Kidsafe. Oh
no, we’re prepared to give away our complimentary copy
of the game. The first person to email us with their snail mail
address and the name and age of their child or children (as
we would like it to go to a good home where it will be appreciated)
will be the lucky recipient of the game. One last thing –
it has small, easy-to-swallow counters, so its probably not
ideal for the icklest of kids. |
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| That’s all for this month’s net-update.
If there’s a specific issue you’d like to see covered
next month, please let us know. |
| Ends |
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