This is an important topic, highlighted by the Gonzales v. Google case we mentioned last week.

A couple of very helpful practical guides to what you should be doing to avoid privacy breaches:

Firstly, in today’s Wired a piece by Ryan Singel on How to Foil Search Engine Snoops, which has drawn comments from our friends at Search Engine Watch in the form of a great page on Protecting Your Search Privacy: A Flowchart To Tracks You Leave Behind

Among the topics addressed are
* Why Mozilla Firefox is a smarter choice
* Removing local search histories
* Care . . . [more]

Rob Hyndman wrote yesterday about the illegality of posting election results tonight to any Canadian blogs. And in case you think no one is going to notice if you do slip in the odd comment, CBC’s Tod Maffin is specifically looking for such postings.

So, beware!

(Thanks, Rob.) . . . [more]

In addition to the West Perspectives publication, Slaw readers should also consider monitoring or getting RSS feeds on some of the more interesting blogs on legal writing:

Nancy Soonpaa, at Texas Tech.

Not to mention Scribes – the American Society of Writers on Legal Subjects.

Wayne Schiess at the University of Texas.

Raymond Ward, who’s an appellate lawyer with Adams and Reese LLP in New Orleans.

Many of these blogs touch on subjects of concern to Slaw, and each wrestle with the issue of how to communicate legal ideas more effectively. . . . [more]

One of the Google alerts I run, well, alerted me to the fact that something called Sedna RSS is catching our RSS feed and in effect reposting Slaw. We’re only one of seemingly more than a hundred blogs warmed over by this French site? organization? person? — I can’t seem to penetrate to any explanatory page.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. We run over a Creative Commons license that lets our content be used for non-commercial purposes and in derivative works, so as it stands now there’s probably no copyright beef. (I think I’ll change the . . . [more]

A palimpsest -- one of my favourite words -- is, according to Wikipedia, “a manuscript page, scroll, or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again,” dating from a time when wax tablets and parchments were bases for writing. Stuff from the past, right?

1. RSS4Lib
2. Techcrunch
3. FeedXs
4. Feedburner
5. RSSxl
6. Tristana
7. FeedTier
8. Seth Lloyd
9. Lloyd, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos
10. Cool Tools
11. Nova Scotia Statutes
12. Nova Scotia Public Highways Act
13. Nova Scotia Beaches Act
14. Nova Scotia Baby Chick Protection Act
15. Wikipedia: hogshead
16. Nova Scotia Merchandise Inspection Act
17. Nova Scotia Treasure Trove Act
18. Oak Island
19. Karen’s Schneider’s Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian’s Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust
20. Google News search re US Dept. Justice and Google records
21. BBC News: Google defies US over search data
22. Google’s letter to US Dept. Justice re request for search data [pdf]
23. New

. . . [more]

Either by email or in-person, I’ve been asked a few times recently how one creates an RSS feed from a static website. A pretty good question, where the answer could involve anything from installing a single CGI script, to adding a blog or CMS to the website, to a custom programming solution.

But just a couple of days ago, I came across a new solution posted at both RSS4Lib & Techcrunch called FeedXs that will allow for the manual posting of items to an RSS Feed with no online publishing required whatsoever.

This isn’t a perfect solution, simply because one . . . [more]

When your friends (are they really friends?) suggest that you’re spending more time with IT and computers than you should be, you’ll soon be able to answer them back that everything is really a computer, or part of one, so there’s no alternative.

Coming in March is a book by Seth Lloyd, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, called Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos (Knopf, ISBN 1400040922 / also available now as an e-book). As the title suggests, Lloyd shows how the universe is in fact a computer. Here’s an excerpt (via . . . [more]

Simon C’s post from earlier this week reminded me of one of my favourite oddities from Nova Scotia Statutes and inspired me to take a closer look to see what else I could find:

– My favourite (which hasn’t been much of a problem this year), is section 34 (1) of the Public Highways Act, which requires all able bodied males between the ages of 16-60 ” to work with their shovels on the highways during the winter whenever the highways become impassable from snow.”

– Another favourite is from section 6(2) of the Beaches Act. It seems . . . [more]

Librarians are often shocked at how uncritical, even gullible, lay researchers can be in approaching websites that the search engines throw up. It’s therefore wonderful to have the folk-wisdom of caution in a single place. See Karen’s Schneider’s Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian’s Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust . . . [more]

The blogosphere is abuzz with discussion about the dispute between DoJ and Google about surrendering a week’s worth of search recordsHere is a copy of the Motion to Produce – hell just a few terabytes of data surely – as part of Alberto Gonzales’ effort to be more aggressive in the War Against PornA nice turn of phrase from Xinhua.
The BBC has a great explanation of what is at stakeAlso the AP Story at MSNBC and John Battell sets the context nicely., and just how critical the issues are.
What is surprising – and frankly distressing – . . . [more]

Canadian law firm librarians have an increasing challenge finding historical stock trading prices. This is the story thus far:

For many years we enjoyed the proprietary system from The Globe and Mail called “InfoGlobe” which primarily delivered news content but also had an archaic, difficult system that allowed for pulling up historical stock prices. Once we had become “dragon masters” after many hours of training and practice, we could quickly pull up any range of dates, any configuration of data (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) for any public company, existing, predecessor or deceased.

At the time we grumbled at the difficulty . . . [more]