Your Site isn’t Accessible? You May Get Sued

Now this is an interesting piece about a recent case filed against Target.com for lack of accessibility in their website.

It seems as if Target is being sued for having it’s site inaccessible to the blind…

A federal district court judge ruled yesterday that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind. The ruling was issued in a case brought by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corp. (Northern District of California Case No. C 06-01802 MHP) The suit charges that Target’s website (http://www.target.com) is inaccessible to the blind, and therefore violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the California Disabled Persons Act. Target asked the court to dismiss the action by arguing that no law requires Target to make its website accessible. The Court denied Target’s motion to dismiss and held that the federal and state civil rights laws do apply to a website such as target.com.

So far I can understand that this applies to sites which have an actual presence / storefront, and doesn’t apply to Internet only merchants, however, if you have a company blog that represents a business with a storefront you may want to take precautions

[via Threadwatch]

Own any domain exploit, no defense exists

A recent post regarding an exposed exploit in all browsers suggests that one can own any domain using International Domain Name (IDN) to spoof current domains.
For example:
The domain: http://www.pаypal.com/ should be interperted by all browsers into http://www.paypal.com/ but present the page www.xn--pypal-4ve.com and therefore one can ’steal’ any domain name / ssl.

At the moment there is no idea how to fix this, nor do the developers.

For more information: Description and Live Example

Note: I tried all the above suggested ideas / links on ‘Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0′ and could not make this work. Could you?