All Government Departments will give "full email access" to citizens by next June, according to the Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Taoiseach, Dermot McCarthy. In the intervening eight months or so, various Web sites and online directories of department officials will also come onstream, he told a trade union conference on Friday.
VIRTUAL ELECTIONS:Costa Rica's government is launching the first test of a national election online. Helped by students from Villanova University Law School, it wants to eliminate paper ballots by the next election in 2002. The project will use PCs in schools around the country linked to the Net. Security experts at AT&T in New Jersey will design the system.
POLLS APART:France is reviewing its ban on the publication of opinion polls in the last week before general elections. The ban was circumvented in last summer's elections when foreign news services conducted polls days before voting and posted them on the Web. The ban was first imposed 20 years ago.
SIGN-LANGUAGE CDROM:The National Association for the Deaf will launch two CD-Roms for learning Irish sign language (ISL) next Thursday. One is an English-ISL dictionary of over 3,000 word signs and the other has over 1,300 frequently used phrases. Meanwhile Britain has unveiled a nationwide initiative to bring the benefits of computer technologies to people with disabilities. The Computability Centre and the Foundation for Communication for the Disabled are to merge at the end of the year - the new organisation will be called AbilityNet.
STATE COOKIES:Remember cookies (Computimes, September 8th)? The Putnam Pit newspaper in Tennessee took a case to obtain the cookie files on local council workers' PCs. It sought the files using its state's "open-record" laws and was told to pay $328 for them. Then after finding out what cookies were, the city reconsidered and decided the files were not a matter of public record after all.
ROBOT EARS:Scientists at Yale Univeristy have found a new use for echo-location, the sonar system that bats and dolphins employ to find their prey. They have developed a robot that relies on sound waves rather than camera vision to explore its surroundings. The robot's sonar scanner is so sensitive that it can tell whether a tossed coin has come up heads or tails, from the pattern of reflected sound waves.
SANDBOX SOFTWARE:eSafe's Protect monitors data requests to and from your system. If it detects errant behavior (e.g. a recently downloaded Java applet trying to access personal info on your hard drive), it halts the operation, explains the problem and waits for your response. Protect cordons off new downloads into a protected directory or sandbox, from which it denies requests for unusual access to your PC's drives.
LOTUS BUG:Lotus admits there's a bug in its Notes 4.x viewer when displaying Excel spreadsheets. It happens when you define a custom number format in Excel. The Notes viewer eliminates decimal points from custom formatted numbers, thus multiplying the value of each decimal number by 100. Affected versions include Excel 5, Excel 6, Excel 95, and Excel 97. Lotus is still working on a fix. Meanwhile Microsoft says the final Mac version of Internet Explorer 4.0 - due next month - won't give users the option of a Web "front end" to their operating system.
In a survey of 108 large and small software companies in IrelandBO]: 53% of indigenous Irish software companies said they believed turnover and employment would than double by the year 2000; 68% said the main barrier to achieving growth would be the
inability to attract and retain key personnel. According to a MORI poll financed by Motorolas2]: About one in 10 people in Britain uses the Net regularly; 41% claim they are not regular users of technologies such as PCs, mobile phones, and pagers, compared with 43% last year.
Seven out of 10 people knew little or nothing about digital TV and a third hadn't even heard of it; Of those who had, the main attraction was better picture quality and more channels, rather than interactive services.
Sources: 1 Strategies for Sustainable Growth - the Software Industry in Ireland, report by Prospectus in association with Forbairt; 2 MORI.
VIRTUAL VOTES:Online polls are all the rage at the moment. Club Internet's latest (at www.clubi.ie) were about the Dublin taxi strike and the English au pair found guilty of murder - only 16 per cent felt the verdict was right. And in Local Ireland's presidential poll (at local.ie/election) Mary McAleese had a late rally - with 40 per cent of the first preference votes she beat Mary Banotti (with 32 per cent), followed by Adi Roche (11 per cent) and Dana (9 per cent).
www.tinet.ie/muse Telecom Eireann's new music site Muse has an impressive line-up of contributors including Radio Ireland's John Kelly, the two Donals (Dinneen and Scannell), Mic Moroney and editor Jim Carroll. Ash are its interview booth's first visitors.
www.e-Christmas.com This major European-wide initiative, for online Christmas shopping, goes live this morning. Irish participants include Aer Lingus, Bewleys and Waterford Crystal.
www.quixell.com Europe's first interactive auction Web site for brand-name computer products, with the (trademarked) slogan: "Bid from your bedroom, shipped to your door". www.europe.ibm.com/euro IBM has just launched a dedicated Web site about how compnaies handle the move to the EU currency.
php.indiana.edu/ shyde/guyhome.html
www.bcpl.lib.md.us/ cbladey/guy/html/main.html Remember, remember the fifth of November. Two sites about Guy Fawkes.
www.witchesweb.com/home.html
www.witchvox.com Witches of the nice variety - the ones who don't believe in Satan, but who will explain black cats, the phases of the moon, witch-related news, the Witches Forum, networking opportunities, and even a few spells.
www.supportunicef.org/
Unicef's spooky site has Halloween fun (from online colouring books to sending festive online `trick or treats` to your friends) combined with learning more about Unicef's programmes. www.usacitylink.com/boo/ Cast your spell and find all the haunted houses.
lippard/civil.html
A good free speech link
http://www.multimedia.ie
"We have attracted 50 per cent of all electronics companies investing in Europe this year. But make no mistake, these compa- nies are not investing in Ireland because they like us. It is because of the high standard of education." - Tanaiste Mary Harney on last week's Silicon Valley trade mission. "New technologies in themselves will not guarantee increased productivity, economic growth or improvement in living standards. These will require deep additudinal and organisational change." - Peter Cassells, general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, at Friday's ICTU conference on the information society.
"Today, the right command sent over a network to a power generating station's control computer could be just as effective as a backpack full of explosives." - report of the US Presidential Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection.
November 3rd: The monthly flux discussion group in Dublin's Arthouse at 7 p.m. - guest speaker William Collins has been involved with technology and the visual arts, from theatre lighting, set design, and lecturing on the history of art in the 1970s to computer-aided design in the 1980s and online authoring. See www.arthouse.ie/ ocean for his present work. Free, all welcome. November 12th: Briefing for journalists and the public on the future of computing, organised by the Irish Science Journalists Association at the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin, 2 p.m. - info: email brian.trench@dcu.ie November 12th and 13th: "Making Enterprise Computing A Reality With Microsoft NT V5.0 and Exchange V5.5" - two seminars in Dublin, with speakers from Digital's European Messaging Expertise Centre. - info: mganter@tinet.ie or tel 01-2987007 November 20th (Berkeley Court Hotel, Dublin) and 21st (Jurys, Cork): Two free morning seminars on intranets organised by 3Com Ireland, Sun Microsystems and Netscape. - info: tel 01-803 5452 or email ClairePurcell@3Com.com
Computimes is edited by Michael Cunningham. Email only (no faxes please) to computimes@irish-times.ie (private correspondence should be marked NOT FOR PUBLICATION)