Braille Live

Quartz Precision
BBC NEWS
Silicon Valley’s secret recipe
By Sue Nelson
BBC Radio 4
Spruce Pine, a modest, charmingly low-key town in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, is at the heart of a global billion-dollar industry. Although this Mitchell County community calls itself the Mineral City, with just 2,000 residents one could dispute the city status. But when it comes to minerals, Spruce Pine has definitely undersold itself.
Read the rest of this entry »

Freedom Scientific Releases New GPS Solution for the Blind
StreetTalk VIP Now Shipping
(St. Petersburg, Florida – July 27, 2009) — Freedom Scientific today announced the immediate availability of StreetTalk™ VIP.

Running on Freedom Scientific’s PAC Mate Omni™ Accessible Pocket PC, StreetTalk VIP offers GPS navigation that takes into account the unique needs of people with visual impairments. The application uses technology from the Sendero Group to determine the best route from point A to point B for either a vehicle or a pedestrian and presents information to the user with synthesized speech and/or refreshable braille.

Jonathan Mosen, Freedom Scientific’s Vice President of Blindness Hardware Product Management, says, “StreetTalk VIP is a powerful tool for exploring your surroundings both virtually and in real time.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Freedom Scientific Announces Secure and Compatible Braille Display Initiative
JAWS® 11 to Offer Improved Security and Interoperability
(St. Petersburg, Florida – August 11, 2009) — Freedom Scientific, one of the leading providers of assistive technology for people who are blind, announced its Secure and Compatible Braille Display Initiative today.

The goal of this new program is to follow Microsoft’s move to signed drivers to improve security and compatibility for customers who use a Braille display with JAWS. Under this program, Freedom Scientific will test Braille displays to ensure compatibility with JAWS and then digitally sign the driver. Starting with the JAWS 11 release later this year, only drivers that have been digitally signed by Freedom Scientific will work with JAWS.
Read the rest of this entry »

Braille Displays Get New Life With Artificial Muscles

Research with tiny artificial muscles may yield a full-page active Braille system that can refresh automatically and come to life right beneath your fingertips.

Yosi-Bar Cohen, a senior researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, was inspired during a business trip to Washington, D.C., where a convention for people with visual impairments was taking place.
Read the rest of this entry »

Wireless Power System Shown Off
BBC NEWS Wireless power system shown off
By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, BBC News, Oxford

A system that can deliver power to devices without the need for wires has been shown off at a hi-tech conference. The technique exploits simple physics and can be used to charge a range of electronic devices over many metres.

Eric Giler, chief executive of US firm Witricity, showed mobile phones and televisions charging wirelessly at the TED Global conference in Oxford. He said the system could replace the miles of expensive power cables and billions of disposable batteries.
Read the rest of this entry »

Skype Could Be Cut Off
From Times Online
July 31, 2009
Skype could be cut off for good over dispute (Paul Rogers/The Times)
Mike Harvey in San Francisco

Skype might have to shut down because of a dispute over the core technology used to make the internet telephone system work. EBay, which paid $2.6 billion (£1.6 billion) for the voice-over-the-internet system in 2005, is facing a court battle with the original founders of the company who retained the rights to the technology at the heart of the system.
Read the rest of this entry »

Students Develop Cane That Uses RFID Tags To Assist Blind
DETROIT

A cane equipped with the technology that retailers use to tag merchandise could help blind people avoid obstacles. An engineering professor and five students at Central Michigan University have created a “Smart Cane” to read electronic navigational tags installed between buildings to aid the blind in reaching their destinations more easily.
Read the rest of this entry »

Survey Finds One in Six Act On Spam Messages
About one in six consumers have at some time acted on a spam message, affirming the economic incentive for spammers to keep churning out millions of obnoxious pitches per day, according to a new survey.

Due to be released Wednesday, the survey was sponsored by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), an industrywide security think tank composed of service providers and network operators dedicated to fighting spam and malicious software.
Read the rest of this entry »

Snooping Through The Power Socket
BBC NEWS Snooping through the power socket

Power sockets can be used to eavesdrop on what people type on a computer. Security researchers found that poor shielding on keyboard cables means useful data is leaked about each character typed.

By analysing the information leaking onto power circuits, the researchers could see what a target was typing. The attack has been demonstrated to work at a distance of up to 15m, but refinement may mean it works over much longer distances.
Read the rest of this entry »

Snooping Through The Power Socket
BBC NEWS Snooping through the power socket

Power sockets can be used to eavesdrop on what people type on a computer. Security researchers found that poor shielding on keyboard cables means useful data is leaked about each character typed.

By analysing the information leaking onto power circuits, the researchers could see what a target was typing. The attack has been demonstrated to work at a distance of up to 15m, but refinement may mean it works over much longer distances.
Read the rest of this entry »