I know there are a bunch of us Firefox fans here at Slaw, so I thought I’d pass along the fact that our favourite browser went over 20% market share point this past month.

Given that Firefox is not the default install for any of the major operating systems, and that users must adopt because of personal choice, hitting the 20% mark can’t be considered lightly.

Most less-savvy computer users will tend to keep the default program installed, IE for Microsoft, or Safari for Mac. And for those of us in the legal industry, with our obsession of all things . . . [more]

Nothing legal here, but even so, perhaps on this historic day I can have some off-topic license to give you this snippet of a story that I find heartwarming:

Khoi Vinh, who is the Design Director for NYTimes.com, runs a blog, Subtraction. As he reports there, he noticed today while at work that a line was forming outside the New York Times building, people queueing to get a copy of that day’s paper announcing Obama’s victory, and he proceeded to take some (beautiful) photos of the lineup. He says:

I ran down to a lower floor where I

Further to Simon’s introduction of Dan Pinnington as a contributor to SLAW, I see from this month’s Law Practice magazine that Dan has a great article on Blackberry tips. There is an HTML version available here.

I thought I knew most of the tips but Dan has mentioned a few I did not know; his article is one of the more extensive on this topic. . . . [more]

♬ Do I know you
Do I know you…♬

Words and music by: Delon Dotson, recorded by:Realtime.

The New Client ID and Verification Rules are coming into effect across the country. In some cases, they are already in effect. These new Rules place new professional obligations to lawyers to ‘know the clients’ for whom they are acting.

Surveying the implementation of the model rule as put forth by the Federation of Law Societies [PDF] sets forth the following: (all dates taken from the respective Law Society’s web sites):

Newfoundland – Rules came into effect Oct 31, 2008: http://www.lsuc.on.ca/link.cfm?lid=12052

PEI: . . . [more]

I dropped by the Lords of the Blog site, just to see what was happening with the posting peers and found this nifty question, which Lord Norton took from the Times:

When was the last US presidential election won by the Republicans in which Nixon or a Bush was not on the ticket? . . . [more]

I had occasion today to hunt up online a decision of the European Court of Justice and to link to it. The ECJ provides links that may be the longest URL I’ve ever seen. I illustrate with a typical example:

http://curia.europa.eu/jurisp/cgi-bin/form.pl?lang=en&newform=newform&Submit=Submit
&alljur=alljur&
amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;
amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;jurcdj=jurcdj&jurtpi=
jurtpi&jurtfp=jurtfp&alldocrec=alldocrec&docj
=docj&docor=docor&docop=docop&docav=docav
&docsom=docsom&docinf=docinf&
amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;
amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;a
mp;alldocnorec=alldocnorec&docnoj=docnoj&
docnoor=docnoor&typeord=ALLTYP&allcommjo
=allcommjo&affint=affint&affclose=affclose&numaff
=C54%2F05+&ddatefs=&mdatefs=&ydatefs=
&ddatefe=&
amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;
amp;amp;mdatefe=&ydatefe=&nomusuel=&domaine
=&mots=&resmax=100

Obviously what’s happening here is that the program is providing for all possible perms and combs for the production of a record, thus the endlessly repeated “amp;” which the html code for an ampersand (gone wrong, as it happens, because it’s oddly self-referring, . . . [more]

Idée, a Toronto-based IT company, is anything but fixe: it’s all about shifting shapes — and colours. They have developed really good image identification and visual search software, used by industry for a bunch of things, including searching the net for pirated copies of copyright images. But there’s fun to be had as well, so we’ll introduce a few of the niftier aspects of their products as featured in their open-to-the-public idée labs.

First up is Multicolr Search. The online demo extracts the colours from 10 million Flickr photos to let you assemble a matrix of . . . [more]

The American election season has almost come to an end, leaving in its wake a large volume of creative expression by the campaigns and by citizens. Viral videos have been created and circulated by candidates and their supporters since the primaries, but a recent video provides an interesting lesson in intellectual property management.

Many would remember the series of “wassup” advertisements put out by Budweiser starting in 1999 (YouTube – Wassup). You may have completely forgotten about it until this week, when a video supporting Barak Obama circulated over the internet (YouTube – Wassup 2008). It . . . [more]

In view of our election just past, and the one next week of our neighbours to the south, I thought it opportune to raise the topic of election laws, and more specifically, absentee voting.

Several weeks ago, I received in the mail an absentee ballot from the Board of Elections in Lorain County, Ohio. I dutifully filled it out, put it in an envelope, and mailed it in: voilà, my franchise duly exercised. No one asked how long I’d been in Canada (sixteen years), or if I intended to return to the U. S. (unlikely, at this point). As a . . . [more]

The text of Ontario’s Bill 118, Countering Distracted Driving and Promoting Green Transportation Act, 2008 is now available online. There’s also a PDF version.

Display screens visible to the driver are prohibited, except for dedicated GPS devices and a few others. The “money” provision reads as follows:

No person shall drive a motor vehicle on a highway while holding or using a hand-held wireless communication device or other prescribed device that is capable of receiving or transmitting telephone communications, electronic data, mail or text messages.

With the proviso:

a person may drive a motor vehicle on a highway while

Here’s an unexpected article from ReadWriteWeb: Ray Ozzie Announces Windows Azure – “Windows in the Cloud”. I say unexpected not because I thought that Microsoft would never get into cloud computing, but rather because it seems early for them to be moving into the space. Doesn’t Microsoft usually wait for all the problems to be solved by smaller, more nimble firms? Once everything works, then Microsoft moves in (and messes it up, some would add. But those people are just bitter about Vista).

I’m under the impression that it’s still very early days for cloud computing. I know a . . . [more]

Vos papiers, s’il vous plait!

Ihre Ausweispapiere bitte!

Let’s see some ID!

That’s the way it is now — and pretty much has been, increasingly, since WWI, before which one might have roamed fairly free of official fetters. Now it’s all photo ID and holograms, watermarks and RFIDs. The only upside to all of this I can see, apart from whatever increased security we might gain, not a fit subject for a fillip, is a fascination with the intricacies of proof of authenticity. When ID is required, counterfeiters will offer their services, and so begins another round of cops . . . [more]