Jakub Anderwald

One annoying thing in listening to audio / video streams on computer is that almost every stream, application or site has its own loudness. For some music files you might need to turn the volume up, but then your favorite video channel will just scream out loud.

It’s because with the volume setting you set the maximum possible volume for audio output. And not every source uses the full scale – sometimes there are poorly encoded MP3s, sometimes commercials want to be louder than everything else, and sometimes a ballad will be simply played quietly.

For a regular user it means he/she has to turn the volume up and down constantly. Luckily, in Vista, there’s a feature that will put and end to it: Loudness equalization. It will make all sounds sound with a similar volume. It will always run in teh background monitoring everything you play and adjusting itself. Just turn it on, set your desired volume level and Vista will take care of the rest. And since it’s on the OS level, all sources are equal.

How to do it? Go to Control Panel | Sound | Playback | Properties | Enhancements and turn on Loudness Equalization. That’s it.

You can read it on Wired, and you’ll be able to read on more news protals going ahead. A short recap is:

Hackers attacked Epilepsy Foundation forums with a script that created hundreds of posts with blinking animation and javascript code to do more flashing. This, in turn, caused headaches and seizures for a lot of readers. The forums were closed for removing the images and securing.

I think there are two important point to note here:

First, it was the first physical attack done via a computer. It really did hurt someone without any special means, just a computer display. It travelled through Internet.

Rembeber the exploding computers in “Live free or die hard”? It all lookes childish – come on, how can a computer explode? And all those movies about viruses spreading into people’s minds through computer / TV networks. Well… here we go – one way was already found.

Second, epilepsy arguments were often used in web standards discussions, as to why we should not use blinking text and sharp colors in animations. I hope this lesson will be learned and we won’t hear “oh come on, how can a <blink> tag hurt someone?” anymore.