Your eyes are absorbing this webpage. They're passing over this, this, then this word, right now. That's how reading works, online: you take this for granted. But what if you couldn't?

We grant our gaze to electronic screens for most of the day, and in return, they give us anything we want. We stare; they glow. We rarely speak, and neither do they.

And this makes sense! The internet is a boundless collection of text, images and video, channeled to flat pieces of glass and plastic, beamed through lens, retina, and nerve, all the way into our brains. It can show us anything, and for most web users, that's exactly what it does.

But for millions of others—those who are unable to see—the web is a wildly different place. Characters become sounds. Layouts are meaningless. Images are, at best, words, and at worst, blank spaces. And yet the blind browse the same internet as everyone else, every day. They use the same gadgets the sighted do, and happily. But how?

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The Black Hat security conference attracts the creme de la creme of the security industry. This year the organizers even offered a paid live stream for those unable to make the trip to Vegas. Called Black Hat Uplink, the service carried a $395 price tag. But as security expert Michael Coates found out, the price could be waived entirely, thanks to “a combination of logic flaws and misconfigured systems which provided access to a testing login page that could be used with user credentials that were not fully "registered" (e.g. no payment received). “

Coates, who oversees web security at Mozilla, wrote on his blog that he was unable to attend this year's event and so decided to closely monitor it online. “In this process I noticed the new "Black Hat Uplink" service that would allow remote individuals access to streaming Black Hat talks from two select tracks,” he wrote.

“I identified a series of flaws that would enable the creation of an account with only providing an email address (e.g. no name, address, phone etc) and I was never asked to enter any credit card data. Odd I thought, perhaps you enter the credit card info upon your first login.” Upon completing the registration, he was faced with a slight problem: he didn't have a registration email do direct him to the login page.

“A few select Google searches and I ended up on a relatively vanilla looking login page. I have a username and a key, let's give it a shot. To my surprise the login was accepted and I was now sitting in front of the live Black Hat video stream.”

He wasted little time in contacting the event's organizers, holding off the public disclosure until they had fixed the flaw. He also revealed that Black Hat used a third-party solution for the video feed. Can't see them using the same vendor for the next event, though.

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Google Voice.  Situation: It's a pretty awesome competitor to good ol' Skype, especially when you use its crazy powers to forward calls from your magical number to physical locations all over the world.  I, for one, use Google voice to get into my own apartment.  Ringing me up on the ol' call box in front of my condo complex calls my Google Voice number (local calls only!), which in turn buzzes up my cell phone which, in turn, lets me go home.

That's just one interesting use of an otherwise awesome service.  There are many more.  Problem: There are not nearly as many apps--Web-based or downloadable--that allow you to interact with Google Voice in unique, cool ways.  I've scrounged together five for your enjoyment but, honestly, we're scraping the barrel this week in terms of available software.

So, that said, go register a Google Voice number.  And while you're doing that, start skimming this article for awesome new ways to use the service!

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It can be difficult to think about how the rest of the world works when one's caught up in the latest and greatest software tools on a weekly (or just frequent) basis.  And I'm not just tooting my own horn on this one.  You, as a Maximum PC reader, are likely infused with more knowledge about the best the software world has to offer by virtue of your thirst for knowledge for all things extreme and PC-related.

In short, you know your chops.

I thus found myself a little taken aback earlier this week.  I met somebody new during the course of my normal nine-to-five and, during our introductory discussion around the ol' office cube, I noticed that she was using Yahoo Messenger.   No harm there, right?  As I casually brought up the Greatest IM Client Ever, Pidgin, I also managed to sneak mention of good ol' Firefox and Chrome into the discussion.  In fact, I think I even made it a joke: Hey, Yahoo isn't as bad as Internet Explorer, right?

Oops.

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