[CVALE] The Evil Empire and Xandros...Who is next?

[Pandora]

Gaijin wrote:
> Recently, I applied for a G-Mail account with
> Google, and half-way through the application form, the text was asking what
> my screen reading software was saying or doing.  How did they know I was
> running a screen reader?

This struck me as a warning flag. Things may not be as conspiratory as 
you think. HTML pages, such as application forms, have style sheets 
associated with them, and some pages have several sheets, each of which 
produces a different type of page. You can specify a style sheet for a 
PDA, for a default computer screen, for a printer, and most notably for 
a screen reader.  Thus your computer can request the best information 
for reading the screen by using the style sheet marked media="reader". 
Google can detect that you downloaded that particular style sheet, but 
they don't have access to your computer or behind your firewall. It's 
most likely your screen reading web browser trying to be too helpful.

Hmm...then again, gmail's signup form doesn't have any external style 
sheets that I can see, certainly not one that is marked media="reader". 
Maybe they did find some sneaky trick of guessing that you're using a 
screen reader. I wouldn't worry about it overly though. They probably 
can't detect anything important.