Dropbox is still the most popular cloud-based file sharing and storage system, so its success and failures will inevitably signal how quickly the legal community warms up to the cloud.

Dropbox has recently come under scrutiny for a number of security failures. In response to breaches discovered earlier this summer, they have just introduced a new two-step verification on their accounts.

The two-step verification will be optional for users, and allows them to impose a new security code on top of passwords. The code is sent directly to a cell phone, and can be used whenever the account . . . [more]

A nice little infographic, challenging us to take account of our online personae.

Has your cellphone number leaked out by accident? Are your eHarmony details jangling cacophonously with your LinkedIn resume? Do your Dad’s Facebook updates invite snark from your hipster webdev team?

Some may be surprised to learn that they can control some of this info. Others may be surprised to learn how little of it can be controlled. For instance, deep web data is now being exploited by US political fundraisers, in ways similar to established marketing practices. This data, scooped from banking transactions and the . . . [more]

You might have read about LawMeets: It was profiled this week in an ABA Journal news item as the subject of a $500,000 US National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant to its developer, entrepreneur and corporate and securities law Professor Karl Okamoto of Drexel University.

Professor Okamoto is also Director of the Business and Entrepreneurship Law Program at Drexel and founder of ApprenNet, which operates the LawMeets venture. The new LawMeets is an online experiential learning initiative, the virtual evolution of Prof. Okamoto’s live National Transactional LawMeet program, which – live or online – might . . . [more]

Last week news broke of the epic hacking of Gizmodo’s Mat Honan. By exploiting security flaws in both Amazon’s and Apple’s account verification and reset procedures, a hacker was able to obtain access to a wide variety of Honan’s accounts, including his iCloud account. Once they’d gained control of Honan’s iCloud account, the hackers were able to remotely wipe his iPhone, iPad, and his Macbook, destroying his personal data, including irreplaceable pictures of his one-year-old daughter:

In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my

One of the many highlights for me at last month’s American Association of Law Libraries 2012 Conference was the opportunity to meet Priya Rai of the National Law University in Delhi and to observe her presentation, Access to Legal Information in the Digital Age: A Comparative Study of Electronic Commercial Databases and Public Domain Resources in Law.

Ms Rai is an accomplished law librarian and legal research instructor trained in law. One of her accomplishments is participation in the Information Institute of India Project. She attended and presented at AALL 2012 as the recipient of the FCIL Schaffer Grant . . . [more]

Earlier this week, Tech Vibes reported that as worldwide Twitter subscribership crossed the half-billion mark, Canadian accounts were shown to account for 2% of that total, placing Canada at 8^th spot among all countries in total Twitter subscriber numbers. Canadians, of course, were also among the early adopters of Facebook and routinely top the rankings of ComScore and similar reports for such things as time spent online, so our collective Twitter presence is not actually all that surprising.

The surprise comes courtesy of some recently completed but not-yet-released research conducted by CanLII. Over a 6 week period in . . . [more]

Online users who want a certain amount of anonymity will want to stay off Quora. Their new Views feature is set to track which users have looked at your posts. Some good coverage on the subject via Gigaom.

This type of insider knowledge has always been a bit of a balancing act. On one side, this information is incredibly valuable to the websites that collect it. Heck, it’s a core element of Linkedin’s paid account service — seeing who’s viewed your profile over the last X number of days. As a user, my interests are divided. It both . . . [more]

The July 2012 issue of Connected is available online.

The bulletin covers news about the impact of new social media such as Twitter and Facebook on court proceedings, the ethical implications of judges and court staff using new media, and court policy issues relating to these technologies.

It is published by the Virginia-based National Center for State Courts and the Conference of Court Public Information Officers.

Most of the stories are about the United States, but there is occasionally material about non-US matters. One of this month’s items is about a mistrial declared in a New Brunswick murder case because . . . [more]

Every two years for the past few years I’ve written something before the Olympic games about the IOC’s social media and web rules, which are overly controlling, out of touch, and behind the times. This year is no exception. Even though we are just a few days in, there have been several stories vying for the most outlandish social media excess medal. For example:

Carmi Levy wrote an article just before the games began entitled The IOC’s social media anti-lesson for business that starts off with:

As the final hours tick down until the 2012 Olympic games get started in . . . [more]

Legal complexity is nothing new. The scope of its unhappy consequences, however, seems to be getting ever wider thanks to the internet. Now texts land right in the living rooms — or the pants pockets — of half the planet at a keystroke. And, as a colleague once complained, computers and the internet “grease the skids of prolixity” where lawyers are concerned: ten words can become a hundred or a thousand at no marginal cost.

The terms of service “agreements” governing almost all the software and services you use are famously long and impenetrable. Just to read privacy policies alone . . . [more]

We hear a lot of talk about access to justice from the judiciary and the politicians who are charged to execute this lofty ideal. But it took an initiative between the National Virtual Law Library Group and the Federation of Law Societies of Canada to found CanLII over a decade ago.

The Free Access to Law Movement could hardly envisioned the rise of mobile technology in the 2002 Declaration on Free Access to Law. When a solo private practitioner uses their own resources to advances the goals of unrestricted legal access and provides it to the public for free . . . [more]

AustLII, the Australasian Legal Information Institute, has launched the Australasian Colonial Legal History Library, a free online collection of databases containing legal information from the colonial period of Australia and New Zealand.

A recent article explaining the project, Digitising and searching Australasian colonial legal history, has been published on the Social Science Research Network:

“The paper explains the construction, content and features of the first version of the Library, which as of July 2012 contains 12 databases including one case law database from each of the seven colonies (including New Zealand), some of which are ‘recovered’ cases