Computer viruses and electronic mail

Today the Internet is a valuable source of information as well as a powerful communication medium, with undoubted social and economic benefits, however it also poses some security risks. Virsuses may hide in email attachments or in appartently innocent applications directly downloadable from the Internet. In this work we give a brief overview of virus types and main defense techniques. Then we present statistical data of virus attacks revealed by an anti-virus SW activated on our e-mail server, and discuss results in terms of virus types and temporal distribution

Healthy Aging through Pervasive Predictive Analytics for Prevention and Rehabilitation of Chronic Conditions

The current aging of the population is linked to many societalchallenges, especially in healthcare. Co-morbid chronic conditionsare prevalent in older age and drastically affect people?swellbeing, but they are difficult to study due to the many healthdeterminants involved. For this reason, we propose amultidisciplinary ICT-based approach for the prevention andrehabilitation of chronic conditions using unobtrusive andpervasive sensors, interactive activities, and predictive analytics.This framework allows fine monitoring of older people?s healthand improved personalized care for healthy aging. To illustrate theadvantages of this pervasive and data-driven approach we setforth a conceptual model, in which we use cardiovascular disease,Alzheimer?s disease, depression and falls as examples of commonco-morbid conditions in older people

Providing Web Accessibility for the Visually Impaired

Web accessibility means ensuring that online content, services or applications can be accessed and used by everyone, including those with special needs. Usability, on the other hand, is a multidimensional concept that depends on the application, the user context and on the goal itself, and its aim is to provide a fully satisfactory user experience. Although closely related, accessibility and usability are frequently addressed as two separate issues. Nevertheless, it is very important to apply them synergistically from the earliest phases of design in order to guarantee satisfactory interaction for users with disabilities

Distance Learning: New Opportunities for the Blind

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Structured Audio Podcasts via Web Text-to-Speech System

Audio podcasting is increasingly present in the educational field and is especially appreciated as an ubiquitous/pervasive tool (?anywhere, anytime, at any pace?) for acquiring or expanding knowledge. We designed and implemented a Web-based Text To Speech (TTS) system for automatic generation of a set of structured audio podcasts from a single text document. The system receives a document in input (doc, rtf, or txt), and in output provides a set of audio files that reflect the document?s internal structure (one mp3 file for each document section), ready to be downloaded on portable mp3 players. Structured audio files are useful for everyone but are especially appreciated by blind users, who must explore content audially. Fully accessible for the blind, our system offers WAI-ARIA-based Web interfaces for easy navigation and interaction via screen reader and voice synthesizer, and produces a set of accessible audio files for Rockbox mp3 players (mp3 and talk files), allowing blind users to also listen to naturally spoken file names (instead of their spelled-out strings). In this demo, we will show how the system works when a user interacts via screen reader and voice synthesizer, showing the interaction with both our Web-based system and with an mp3 player

Evaluation of an Internet Document Delivery Service

An Internet-based Document Delivery Service (DDS) has been developed within the framework of the CNR ( the Italian Research National Council) Project BiblioMIME, in order to take advantage of new Internet technologies and promote cooperation among CNR and Italian university libraries. Adopting such technologies changes the traditional organisation of DDS and may drastically reduce costs and delivery times. An information system managing DDS requests and monitoring the temporal evolution of the service has been implemented, running on the local-area network of a test-site library. It aims to track number and types of documents requested and received, user distribution, delivery times and types (surface mail, fax, Internet), to automate repetitive manual procedures and to deal with the various accounting methods used by other libraries. Transmission of documents is carried out by means of an e-mail/Web gateway system supporting document exchange via Internet, which assists receiving libraries in retrieving requested documents. This paper describes the architecture and main design features of the e-mail/Web gateway server (the BiblioMime server). This approach permits librarians to continue using e-mail service to send large documents, while resolving problems that users may encounter when downloading large size files with e-mail agents. The library operator sends the document as an attachment to the destination address; on fly the e-mail server extracts and saves the attachments in a web-server disk file and substitutes them with a new message part that includes an URL pointing to the saved document. The receiver can download these large objects by means of a user-friendly browser. We further discuss the data gathered during the triennium 1998-2000; this consists of about 5,000 DDS transactions per annum with 300 other Italian scientific and bio-medical libraries and commercial document suppliers. Use of the instruments described above allowed us to evaluate the performance of service “before” and “after” the use of Internet Document Delivery and to extract some critical data regarding DDS. Those include: a) libraries with which we have greater numbers of exchanges and their turnaround times; b) extraordinary reduction in costs and delivery times; c) the most frequently requested serial titles (allowing cost-effective decisions on new subscriptions); d) impact on DDS of library participation in consortia which allow user access to greater numbers of online serials

Usability and accessibility of eBay by screen reader

The evolution of Information and Communication Technology and the rapid growth of the Internet have fuelled a great diffusion of eCommerce websites. Usually these sites have complex layouts crowded with active elements, and thus are difficult to navigate via screen reader. Interactive environments should be properly designed and delivered to everyone, including the blind, who usually use screen readers to interact with their computers. In this paper we investigate the interaction of blind users with eBay, a popular eCommerce website, and discuss how using the W3C Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) suite could improve the user experience when navigating via screen reader. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

Conceptual framework: How to engineer online trust for disabled users

The Internet has penetrated our lives, becoming an indispensable tool for social, business and personal growth. Thanks to the Web, users can easily carry out many tasks that were previously difficult. Differently-abled persons need to have the same opportunities as everyone else, so accessibility and usability must be included in the design of all Web resources, applications and services. To be extensively applicable, accessibility and usability guidelines should be delivered as simple design features. In previous studies some conceptual frameworks have been introduced with this aim. However, the specific applicative environment such as trustworthy e-commerce services, may offer ad hoc challenges. In this paper, we propose some guidelines to extend the design of usability conceptual frameworks in order to promote trust in e-commerce websites for people with visual disabilities. © 2009 IEEE

A comparison between public-domain search engines

The enormous amount of information available today on the Internet requires the use of search tools such as search engines, meta-search engines and directories for rapid retrieval of useful and appropriate information. Indexing a website\u27s content by search engine allows its information to be located quickly and improves the site\u27s usability. In the case of a large number of pages distributed over different systems (e.g. an organization with several autonomous branches/departments) a local search engine rapidly provides a comprehensive overview of all information and services offered. Local indexing generally has fewer requirements than global indexing (i.e. resources, performance, code optimization), thus public-domain SW can be used effectively. In this paper, we compare four open-source search engines available in the Unix environment in order to evaluate their features and effectiveness, and to understand any problems that may arise in an operative environment. Specifically, the comparison includes: - The SW features (installation, configuration options, scalability); - User interfaces; - The overall performance when indexing a sample page set; - Effectiveness of searches; - State of development and maintenance; - Documentation and support

Integrated Network Service Manager: un sistema per la gestione integrata di servizi di rete

Cost reduction, simplified management, security and quality of service are fundamental targets when designing network services. Large organizations, which require great flexibility, often implement distributed services leading to the high cost of managing multiple servers. Transferring services from a distributed to a centralized model can reduce costs considerably. However, this choice could limit the freedom of peripheral administrators to manage their own services. We believe that the best solution is to strike a balance between the centralized and the distributed model: i.e., a hybrid management system, partly centralized, partly distributed. The idea is to centralize system configuration, maintenance and monitoring while distributing administrative tasks, typical of peripheral organization units, via web-based interfaces. We call this approach \u27Centralized Management with Delegated Administration\u27. In this report we describe INSM (Integrated Network Services Manager), a system for managing e-mail and DNS services, based on the CMDA model