Further to the post earlier today about passwords at LinkedIn being hacked, LinkedIn has issued the following update:

Our security team continues to investigate this morning’s reports of stolen passwords. At this time, we’re still unable to confirm that any security breach has occurred. You can stay informed of our progress by following us on Twitter @LinkedIn and @LinkedInNews.

While our investigation continues, we thought it would be a good idea to remind our members that one of the best ways to protect your privacy and security online is to craft a strong password, to change it frequently (at . . . [more]

A post on the TheNextWeb site indicates that a Norweigan IT webite, Dagens IT, reported the breach. That site indicates that 6.5 million encrypted LinkedIn passwords have been posted to a Russian hacker site.
LinkedIn has responded that they are looking into the breach.
To be safe, LinkedIn users should change their passwords immediately.
For more passwords tips, see this article from Law Practice Magazine: Don’t Be Passé With Passwords: Best Practices for Staying Safe.

[Updated 3:30 pm Eastern]

Not a lot of info from LinkedIn on this so far today. Two earlier tweets indicating they are investigating . . . [more]

Others have talked about their contributions to lawTechCamp 2012 held in Toronto in May. I am sharing the slide decks from the presentation I did with fellow consultant Stephanie Barnes and the six minute demo I did the same day.

The first talk here is an introduction to Law Firm Knowledge Management. Included are some images developed by Stephanie, and some we have developed together, as well as content from other sources. . . . [more]

Abe Voelker recently authored a thought-provoking blog post on how version control systems used by software developers could potentially be used to rework the process of drafting legislation:

Imagine a public system like GitHub but instead of source code being tracked, legal documents such as bills/laws are tracked (and just like GitHub, versioned in git). Imagine if, before any bill is introduced to Congress, its contents were posted on this publicly available medium with adequate time before a vote?

What if any proposed amendments to legislation were posted publicly as pull requests?

What if anyone could write amendments to existing

The Supreme Court of Canada has refused leave to appeal the decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal in Tucows.com v Lojas Renner 2011 ONCA 548

That decision had held that Tucows.com could bring an action for a declaration of its rights to a domain name in an Ontario court, on the ground that the dispute involved “real or personal property located in Ontario”. In this case, Tucows.com was the registrar and the owner of the domain name Renner. com. The other party was a Brazilian company that owned the trade mark ‘Renner’ (though not apparently in Canada.)

The Court . . . [more]

Ever wonder how Google responds to copyright violations? Or, how many URL removal requests it receives from copyright holders? Take a look at Google’s Transparency Report.

The numbers are pretty interesting; and the site is probably worth a bookmark for anyone involved in IP law. You can see, for example, that BPI made 5X more copyright enforcement requests than the RIAA last month. You can also identify which domains are being taken offline, or which file sharing services are receiving the most attention.

An interesting window inside Google…

. . . [more]

The New York state legislature is reviewing two proposed laws that would seemingly make it mandatory for operators of blogs, websites, etc., to take down anonymous comments upon request “unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name and home address are accurate”.

Also included is an obligation for any website “where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages” must develop infrastructure and contact mechanisms for a.) allowing takedown requests to be submitted and b.) for contacting anonymous posters and seeking their . . . [more]

Twitter is growing. There is no news in that statement. What is new is that they are now sending users a weekly email about what they are doing. They’ve also made a number of updates to their Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

Privacy changes include:

• A tailored suggestions feature, which is based on recent visits to websites that integrate Twitter buttons or widgets, an experiment they are beginning to roll out to some users in a number of countries.
• They now support the Do Not Track (DNT) browser setting, which stops the collection of information used for tailored

For those using Google’s Custom Search Engine service, a recent post from Google announcing new features will be of interest. By utilizing these instructions, and making a small change to your on-page web code, you can now enable both date and relevancy sorting for your collections.

If you’re using any kind of structured data or rich markup — extra classification on “site search” functionality, for example — you can also engage filtering by attribute to restrict the search results even further.

It’s great to see that Google hasn’t been forgotten their CSE web service. It’s easy to use and . . . [more]

We have discussed on Slaw the mandatory disclosure of information from Facebook pages in civil litigation, and the disclosure of FB passwords to prospective employers. I do not believe that we have discussed the disclosure of information from FB in the course of a criminal investigation.

A German court has recently ordered disclosure of the content of private messages and pictures from a suspect’s FB pages. A write-up of the case appears in International Law Office.

Is this just another search warrant for a computer? Would courts where you are have any difficulty with an application for such a warrant? . . . [more]

On Friday online legal services provider LegalZoom filed for a $120m Initial Public Offering. For those unfamiliar with LegalZoom (likely only our Canadian readers, shielded from the ubiquitous LegalZoom advertising in the US), Richard Granat has authored an excellent series of posts on his eLawyering Redux blog.

As with Facebook’s S-1 filing from a few months ago, LegalZoom’s S-1 filing offers up a wealth of information on the company’s progress to date:

• LegalZoom has served approximately two million customers over the last 10 years;
• In 2011 consumers placed 490,000 orders on the site;
• 2011 revenues were $156m, up

Here’s a smart little website that finds free eBooks for your Kindle on the Amazon site. It searches the best sellers and updates them regularly. Plus, the creator of the site includes a nice article on how to find and use free Amazon eBooks, even if you do not own a Kindle. via LifeHacker . . . [more]