Back in November John Gregory wrote about Dealing with Digital Assets After Death and a New York Times article quoting Montreal marketing consultant Adele McAlear. Adele happens to be a friend, so I took the opportunity to speak with her in detail about the topic on behalf of Slaw readers. Our full interview (held in December) is below. Since that time, she has launched her new website DeathandDigitalLegacy.com to better track this wide-ranging subject. Adele will also be speaking on “Death and Digital Legacy in Social Media” at the upcoming PodCamp Toronto 2010 (of which I am . . . [more]

ROOTS

The Legality of an American Slavery

Introduction

February 1 is known as National Freedom Day in the U.S. It’s also the start of Black History Month, the annual celebration and triumph of the descendants of African-Americans. This year, President Obama has also indicated that National Freedom Day will also be the first ever National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. For this reason, Blawg Review #249 will follow the theme of African slavery in America, using the model of Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family.

Haley’s novel traces his family roots back six generations to . . . [more]

This fillip revisits something I blogged about two years ago (Flogging). Microsoft researchers are working with computer scientist Gordon Bell to develop a system that will record, annotate, and make available to recall, nearly every aspect of his daily life. A number of videos describing the project and showing aspects of it have emerged since I first blogged about it. And Bell and co-author Jim Gemmell published a book last year about this long-term experiment, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (Roughcut). (Amazon lets you peek inside the book at a few of the . . . [more]

I realize we are not likely supposed to promote products here on SLAW but I really, really like both IrfanView and the Microsoft Snipping Tool as revolutionizing the ability to visually explain things in an HTML email (and I realize I am likely behind the curve on this one).

I am a visual learner and like to see things in a picture. Since there is often insufficient time for in-person training, it helps to be able to visually explain to someone in an email where to click on a program or what words to input into the database. Both of . . . [more]

“You hold the whole web in your hands”.

“What this device does is extraordinary. It is the best browsing experience you have ever had”

It has a 9.7-inch multi-touch display and a battery life of 10 hours. For those who care, here is the liveblog feed. . . . [more]

.♫ Copycat, copycat, copycat
copy copy copy everyone else….♫

Lyrics by Dolores O’Riordan and music by Noel Hogan and Dolores O’Riordan, recorded by The Cranberries.

Anyone who places content on the web should be concerned with detecting the unauthorized copying of their content. Certainly anyone with a blog would not want others taking their original content without their permission. This actually happened to my own blog just recently: www.thoughtfullaw.com. In my case it was simply someone who was unaware of the rules around copyright.

But there was a case in Victoria British Columbia where a law firm . . . [more]

This past week, the Government of British Columbia announced that Information and Privacy Commissioner David Loukidelis would be leaving that post to take on the role of Deputy Attorney General of the province. The transition will be effective February 1, 2010 though his resignation as Commissioner [PDF] was effective immediately.

David was appointed Commissioner in 1999 and he has overseen a dramatic transformation in privacy laws affecting British Columbians. The Personal Information Protection Act came into being during his tenure and his report on the effect of the USA Patriot Act on the privacy of Canadians is known around the . . . [more]

A recent entry in the ongoing conversation about air travel security is this German TV show that demonstrates an utterly ineffectual body scanner. Some of the comments here and here provide useful links and partial translations of the proceedings (though some others tend to get ranty and off-colour).

One in particular caught my eye at the first link, posted by paul on January 22, 2010 9:03 AM:

It seems we’re back to the classic sensitivity/specificity tradeoff. If an operator passes every scan that look potentially dangerous to the body-search people, you find stuff, but you don’t have the capacity to

“. . . along came a spider and sat down beside her. . .” Which might give anyone pause, not only arachnophobes. These arthropods, which have two legs up on insects, don’t fuss me much — I was taught as a child never to harm a spider — something about bad luck — and so those that do cosy up to me usually get taken outside with some care. Even so, I can’t imagine doing what seventy people in Madagascar did not too long ago.

The intrepid Madagascarians (?) collected golden orb spiders (click to see – arachnophobe warning) . . . [more]

I hope that all members of Slaw are as pleased as I am to note that the British Columbia Supreme Court has recently applied the law of distress damage feasant in upholding (at least partly) the claims of the University of British Columbia to be able to charge those who illegally park on the campus. See Barbour v. University of British Columbia (2009), 310 D.L.R. (4th) 130. The battles between students and the parking police and towing company in my time at UBC were legendary. The cry was “Buck Fusters!”; the towing company being called “Busters”!

There was story that . . . [more]

This may seem like a Friday Fillip, but it’s such an interesting idea that I thought Slaw readers might be interested.

Today, Radio 4 officially launched a major new series ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’, written and presented by the Director of the British Museum, Neil Macgregor. In brief segments over the next year, the history of mankind will be discussed by reference to a variety of objects. . . . [more]

Curmudgeon time.

An article with the headline captions:

Driven to Distraction
Forget Gum. Walking and Using Phone Is Risky.

appears in today’s online and print New York Times.

The note at the bottom of the online article is: ” A version of this article appeared in print on January 17, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.”

The point of the piece is that walking while distracted by reading or using the keyboard or touchscreen may be distracting.

As Homer (Simpson, that is: the other is currently unavailable for comment, at least to me) might say: “D’oh”!

Would . . . [more]