In case you needed another reason to get paranoid about your growing loss of privacy, Facebook has now successfully developed facial recognition software that performs to the same standard as the human brain. [Cited FB research paper.]

The project is called “DeepFace”, and its recognition rate of 97.25 is closely comparable to human accuracy at 97.53%. Even with variances in lighting; and even when the angle of the shot is different. If you’d like to get into the detail, the link above gives a nice condensed summary.

What could this mean in the future? It’s hard to predict, of . . . [more]

The ABA Journal has a story about a law firm falling victim to a cyber attack that locked up the firm’s computer files for ransom. Here’s the text of the article:

The good news: No law firm or client data was taken.

The bad news: Attorney Paul Goodson and his staff can’t access his Charlotte, N.C., law firm’s files after they were locked up by a computer virus, WSOC reports.

Like other businesses in the city, the firm was targeted via email. Once an attachment was opened, the Crypto Locker virus took over. Thousands of documents stored on his computer

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Linked Data Platform Working Group is working on “a specification [that] describes the use of HTTP for accessing, updating, creating and deleting resources from servers that expose their resources as Linked Data. It provides clarifications and extensions of the rules of Linked Data.” Last week they released Linked Data Platform Use Cases and Requirements. This new Working Group Note builds on the working draft they released in October 2013 and aims to “motivate a simple read-write Linked Data architecture” through a collection of stories and use cases.

We all love stories right? Unfortunately . . . [more]

This week is the 25th anniversary of the creation of the Internet a.k.a. the World Wide Web. Yesterday Google shared a message from the Internet’s Web’s inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In March 1989 he shared a proposal for “a ‘web’ of notes with links between them” or a non-linear system using “hypertext” which I remember (as someone who used the precursors of the Internet) as a hot topic at the time.

Berners-Lee takes the opportunity to ask some important questions in urging us to keep the Internet open and free:

So today is a day to celebrate. But it’s also

The February 2014 issue of Connected is available online.

The bulletin covers news about the impact of new social media on courts.

Most of the items are about the United States, but there is coverage of other jurisdictions from time to time. The bulletin is published by the Virginia-based National Center for State Courts (NCSC) and the Conference of Court Public Information Officers.

In this issue:

• NCSC’s Social Media and the Courts Network gets an update (a new site that provides information on how courts are currently using social media)
• Courts using social media to warn public of scams
• Harvard’s

The question relates to the discoverability of social media information and whether having something on a ‘private’ page makes any difference. Case law has dealt with this too. My own summary is that any document relevant to civil litigation has to be disclosed by a party, wherever it is and however private it is. However, the opposing party will not be given free access to fish among private documents on mere speculation that there is something relevant there.

Once lawyers know this (and presumably most litigation lawyers now do), can they advise their clients to move stuff to private sections . . . [more]

In my seemingly never-ending quest to grasp the underlying technical components that feed into the various linked data efforts out there, I happened on an interesting talk given at last year’s SymfonyLive* conference. This presentation, by Markus Lanthaler, was called “Building Next-Generation Web APIs with JSON-LD and Hydra.”

If you’re interested in JSON coding at all I would recommend the first half of this presentation for Lanthaler’s nice overview of the differences between JSON and JSON-LD (JSON for Linking Data).

However, what really struck me in this presentation were a couple of slides he . . . [more]

Check out Google’s new Map Gallery.

Sourced from various governments, nonprofits, and businesses, this newly launched service works as a jumping off point to locate historical and resource-based map collections. Once a map of interest is identified, the user can click in and see that map as an overlay, layered together with Google maps. See the examples below to get a better idea:

• 1814 published map of the Lewis and Clark expedition
• Ecological and cultural features and areas of northern Vancouver Island and the Central Coast (Living Oceans Society)
• 1995 Heart of the Rockies Map
• Bylaw Infractions – City

A recent piece in University Affairs profiles Toronto lawyer Arshia Tabrizi and his academic community engagement start-up, Vidoyen. The name, the article explains, blends “video” and “doyen.” But I’m not sure how many Deans, if any, are on the roster: The site does, though, boast “academics, scholars, experts and thought leaders.”

The site features two-minute video mini-expositions falling in a range of categories. In a quick look through the categories, I don’t see any law professors or practitioners, other than Mr. Tabrizi himself. The slate of advisors includes Former Mayor David Miller and David Cohn, the Director of News . . . [more]

Like many in the legal profession, I spend a significant proportion of my days working at the craft of writing.

Sometimes, I write on risk management topics for Canadian Lawyers Insurance Association. Weekly, I sit down to write a post for publication here on Slaw. From time to time, I also write reports, meeting minutes and more.

Because I work mostly alone, I often have found myself lamenting the absence of another set of eyes to review what I have written. No matter how many times I review my drafts, it seems I always miss something that any good . . . [more]

The most recent Snowden revelation, as reported by the New York Times, has revealed that even law firms have become ensnared in the NSA’s ever-growing communications dragnet.

The top secret document, leaked by Edward Snowden, reveals that a US-based firm was targeted by the NSA over the period of time it represented Indonesia in trade talks with the US government. Controversial FISC court rulings grant the NSA permission to monitor the communications of Americans, even communications within the scope of attorney-client privilege, provided those communications are deemed to have intelligence value and are with foreigners.

Given these revelations, US-based . . . [more]

The old adage is that there are three things that matter in real estate; that being location, location and location. But a recent item here in Nova Scotia caught my attention for turning that axiom around a bit. That being the story of a man who is appealing his property tax assessment due to the availability of high speed internet access or more specifically the lack thereof. The linked story contains most of the details but I’ll try to impart the readers digest version (or perhaps we should change that axiom to “the blog version”) here. In short, his house . . . [more]