It will be no surprise to anyone that one of the reactions to the NSA/Snowden revelations would be attempts to evade spying. Many organizations have looked at their systems to determine where the vulnerable weak points are. For example, even if certain internet communications are encrypted, there may be points along the chain where it becomes unencrypted and vulnerable.

This article talks about efforts by Microsoft and others to encrypt more than they have before. Those interested in this topic can learn more by following Bruce Schneier and the EFF.

The EFF, for example, recently published a chart that . . . [more]

This week I’m attending my first Dreamforce conference, the annual Salesforce.com “user conference.”

I put user conference in quotes because, although that’s where Dreamforce started, over the years it has evolved into something much, much larger. There are nearly 100,000 attendees and over 1,000 sessions covering topics ranging from starting up a new company to collaboration to meditation. Keynote speakers include Marissa Meyer from Yahoo and Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook. Green Day and Blondie are playing a concert for attendees. The breadth and depth of the topics is simply mind-boggling.

The vibe and energy at the conference is amazing. . . . [more]

Judge Denny Chin of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York today dismissed the copyright violation lawsuit that US author groups had launched against Google.

The search giant has been digitizing tens of millions of books to create a massive online library / bookstore but the project was opposed in a lawsuit by US publishers and author organizations that started in 2005. The publishers’ group split off and settled earlier.

The judge wrote that the ambitious project respects authors’ rights and is a case of “fair use” (equivalent to fair dealing in Canadian copyright . . . [more]

“I know lawyers who are very innovative and lawyers with very traditional practices. The latter seem to make much more money,” says Noel Semple, a self-described “lapsed lawyer and aspiring professor.”

And there, in a nutshell, appear two of the biggest impediments to innovation in the legal field: the idea that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t need fixing, combined with the real possibility that the innovation will fail – or at the very least, that the innovator will be scrambling for money until the idea catches on.

Innovations in the legal sector – and the impediments thereto – were . . . [more]

The October 2013 issue of Connected is available online. The bulletin covers news about the impact of new social media on courts.

Most issues cover news from the United States, but there is occasional coverage of other jurisdictions.

In this issue:

• Courts and QR Codes
• Justices from 12 midwest states consider implications of evolving technology on the courts
• Australia’s Supreme Court of Victoria launches new social media initiative
• Ohio explores haunted courthouses across the state

The bulletin is published by the Virginia-based National Center for State Courts (NCSC) and the Conference of Court Public Information Officers. . . . [more]

My last post discussed the viability of assessing a cloud provider’s financials as part of your due diligence process, and I concluded that requesting full access to a cloud provider’s financials is simply not a reasonable request to make of a privately held company.

How can you entrust your data to a company that you don’t know the financial health of, you ask? You plan for the worst. Expect the company will fail without warning, and plan accordingly.

To be prepared for this eventuality, look for the following in your prospective cloud provider:

Data Backup in Open, Non-proprietary Formats . . . [more]

Stepping outside legal subject matter for a moment, did you know that top reviewers on Amazon are publicly listed? Amazon values this group’s contributions enough to maintain a Hall of Fame, and cultivates further engagement through its Vine program, where members are given a box of free samples (once or twice a month) in exchange for delivering a couple online reviews.

NPR has an interesting post about the amount of free samples that simply show up “out of the blue” for Amazon’s top reviewers. This despite the fact that “Vine reviews have fewer stars, on average” within . . . [more]

One to watch — but not spy on, perhaps: the Dark Mail Alliance is aiming to develop the software to enable email that has end-to-end encryption in order to frustrate government efforts to read your post. At the moment the alliance with the name that only Darth Vader could love comprises Silent Circle and Lavabit, though the invitation to join them is extended to any others who share their mission to develop and:

 . . . to open source the protocol and architecture and help others implement this new technology to address privacy concerns against surveillance and back door threats

Law enforcement has contacted us seeking assistance in investigating bad cheque frauds by someone purporting to be Joe Mathewson. He is using the email address Joe111mathewson@gmail.com and the phone number 647-760-4059. The following UPS account numbers have been used on frauds: A82A95 F9236V and F88481.

If any of the above information has come up in a matter you have handled or been approached for, please contact Tim immediately at fraudinfo@lawpro.ca or 416-596-4623 so we can gather further information for the police.

Cross posted at AvoidaClaim . . . [more]

The British daily The Guardian reports that the Supreme Court in the Australian state of Victoria wants to make the justice system more understandable for citizens by making its website more interactive and hiring a retired judge to blog about cases:

“[Victorian Chief Justice Marilyn] Warren said the court’s new interactive website would become a hub for the court’s communication with the public, who would be able to comment on the website, watch video on demand, debate in online forums, and download judgments and summaries.”

“She said employing a retired judge to blog the courts represented a ‘historic shift

In a recent post the prolific and insightful Lee Rosen suggested that a cloud provider’s market dominance shouldn’t be your sole criteria when assessing the company’s prospective longevity. Instead, Rosen suggests a lawyer should adopt the Regan-era mantra of “trust, but verify,” and assess — essentially, audit — a cloud computing provider’s financials to prove out the company’s financial health. Rosen uses his diligence on his practice’s cloud provider, Salesforce.com, as providing a high degree of financial visibility that helped him gain a level of comfort with placing his practice’s data in the company’s hands.

Rosen closes his post with . . . [more]

North American courts are not really sure what to do about web scraping, where someone uses automation to take information in bulk from a web site and puts it on his/her/its own site in competition with the original site. Sometimes (but not often) doing this is held to be trespass to chattels. More often it has been held to violate the terms of use of the victim site, even if those terms are ‘webwrap’, i.e. never explicitly consented to. (In fact, it is freakishly rare for webwrap conditions to be upheld except against scrapers).

The federal court in Illinois recently . . . [more]