IBM has made a tool for Web browsers that will help the blind and visually impaired access streaming multimedia on the Web.

The tool, which works with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, is designed to handle any file that is embedded in a Web site, including Adobe Flash or Windows Media files.

The tool, which IBM plans to make open source, will be showcased at next week’s 2007 Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference.

IT added $2 trillion to the U.S. economy in the past decade, according to a report released Mar. 13 by the Washington, D.C.-based Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a technology-promoting public policy think tank.

The report, Digital Prosperity: Understanding the Economic Benefits of the Information Technology Revolution, found that the economic transformation resulting from IT was occurring at adoption rates exceeding even the most optimistic forecasts of the late 1990s.

Federal authorities have charged three men with hacking into online brokerage accounts and using the proceeds to manipulate the stock of Google, Sun Microsystems and 12 other companies.

Indian nationals Jaisankar Marimuthu, Chockalingam Ramanathan and Thirugnanam Ramanathan were arrested and indicted on multiple counts, marking the first time an arrest and federal charges were made in an online brokerage account intrusion case.

The men allegedly took positions in 14 stocks and then hacked into online U.S. brokerage accounts between July and November 2006. Using the victims’ own account funds, the defendants allegedly pumped up the market for those shares and then dumped them, accumulating profits of more than $121,500. The brokerages subsequently suffered damages of more than $875,000 for the compromised accounts.

The Learning Continuum Company has released the plugin version of the Using Sametime 7.5 Connect course. The course installs as part of the Sametime 7.5 client.

Students take the course using Sametime and can also participate in course discussions to get help. This version is in addition to a Domino-based version of this course that allows users to take the course using either a Notes client or a Web browser.

Seagate announced the first manufacturer to sell laptop PCs with its new built-in encryption technology.

The hard drives, to be available in laptops made by ASI Computer Technologies, will include a chip that makes it impossible for anyone to read data off the disk, or even boot up a PC, without some form of authentication.

Former Hewlett-Packard board Chairwoman Patricia Dunn and three others accused in the company’s boardroom spying scandal will plead guilty to misdemeanor charges Wednesday, the state attorney general’s office said.

Under a deal with prosecutors, Dunn, former HP ethics chief Kevin Hunsaker, and private investigators Ronald DeLia and Matthew Depante each will plead guilty to a single count of fraudulent wire communications.

The public beta of Notes 8 is now available at http://www.ibm.com/lotus/getnd8now. Get ready for a long download (1.6gb for the whole package) and also for some sleepless nights while you play with it.

In this hands-on article, Contributing Editor Nancy Hand details the challenges she had getting McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.5i to work in a Notes environment.

Read this DominoPower article.

IBM announced new software and services to help organizations ensure quality of their service oriented architecture. An SOA is a business strategy that enables a company to more closely align and reuse existing technology to achieve business goals.

The new IBM SOA quality management portfolio–which includes Rational, Tivoli, and WebSphere software as well as new technology services–will help improve the overall quality of technology in an SOA before it is deployed.

A shortage of qualified chief information officers looms in the next few years. Growing demand for CIOs is not being offset by an increasing supply of talented, well-prepared executives, according to a just-released report, "Grooming the 2010 CIO," written for the Society for Information Management Advance Practices Council.

The report looks at ways that companies can start addressing the coming CIO shortage today by grooming future leaders from within.