Wired has an article today about how exactly Egyptian officials managed to shut down the internet there, in an effort to suppress speech. This happened yesterday, and while news is not hard to find (Al Jazeera seems to have the most complete coverage), I gather the shut-down has hampered protesters considerably.

As a result, the “Obama’s Internet Kill-Switch” issue has taken on new profile. Here are some leads into the Lieberman-Collins Bill.

And in related news, corporate control of internet traffic in the US faces an encouraging initiative from Senators Maria Cantwell and Al Franken: A . . . [more]

Just A Click Away, a Canada-wide initiative on public legal education and information (PLEI) being coordinated by Courthouse Libraries BC, is organizing a two-day intensive conference in Vancouver, British Columbia on February 23 & 24, 2011.

The conference is about how to use Internet and social media technologies to better educate the general public about the law and provide resources for individuals to solve legal problems.

As a run up to the conference, Just A Click Away has been running a webinar series that features different approaches being used to provide online PLEI.

So far, 2 webinars have been . . . [more]

People have expressed concern about behavioural advertising, in which advertisers watch what one does online in order to send out ads that are likely to appeal to the person watched. A number of big online services are now developing a ‘do not track’ command to allow their users to prevent their information from being collected for that purpose.

A more interesting, and more intrusive, usage of behavioural information collected online is by insurance companies that may decide whether someone is a good risk to insure based on that information. Fans of XXX’s double-cheese-and-bacon deep-dish pizzas may find themselves having a . . . [more]

From an announcement on the Facebook blog yesterday, Facebook has taken a big step to make your Facebook browsing experience far safer. I suspect this at least in part because someone was able to hack into Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook fan page.

If you’ve ever done your shopping or banking online, you may have noticed a small “lock” icon appear at the lower right of your browser or that the URL starts with a HTTPS. The HTTPS indicates that your browser is using a secure connection to communicate with the website you are on. This ensures that . . . [more]

Legal project management. Three words that are appearing together in sequence more and more often. I got a tip from a colleague recently about Onit. What is Onit?

Onit is a light-weight project management and business collaboration tool for legal and business professionals.

I signed up for an Onit account to gather information about what legal project management would look like on a day to day basis using a software tool. I learned a little more than I bargained for. The Onit website offers some good arguments for implementing an LPM structure over the provision of legal services under . . . [more]

I read with great interest a recent article by Chris Anderson in Wired Features how video on YouTube is having the unexpected effect of allowing people to learn–and innovate–at an accelerated rate. He gives the example of people learning from one another how to dance, developing skills previously unheard of. Take for example the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers:

According to Anderson, many of these dancers were self-taught through Internet video, bringing together tricks and moves previously unknown in dance. Part of this is accelerated learning and innovation, he says, comes from people sharing what they know, so that others who . . . [more]

While Q&A sites have been around for as long as the web, the last year has seen a tremendous surge of innovation in this space. Quora is one of the hottest startups in the valley right now, and has experts in various fields answering questions on everything from “Why is Dropbox more popular than tools with similar functionality?” to “Why is honey dangerous for babies?”.

LawPivot brings the Quora concept to legal advice, allowing companies to confidentially ask legal questions of lawyers that have registered with the site. LawPivot employs a recommendation algorithm that will match . . . [more]

New details about the Stuxnet worm that spread through tens of thousands of computer systems in mid-2010 provide an in-depth look behind the most successful cyber weapon we’ve seen to date.

Widely believed to be designed by the US and Isreali governments, the main targets of the Stuxnet worm were industrial controllers made by Siemens. While used in thousands of factories for legitimate manufacturing processes, the Siemens controllers targeted by Stuxnet were also used to enrich uranium at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. To ensure Stuxnet did not cause any collateral damage, the worm’s programmers were careful to ensure only the . . . [more]

Writers from Canadian Lawyer and Law Times magazines have co-launched the Legal Feeds Blog. And with close to 40 posts in their first four weeks, it’s great to see such strong early volume and blogging enthusiasm! [and yes Gail, I was hoping a Clawbies mention would inspire everyone to keep up the early pace!]

One attribute that really stands out for me, and it’s really more about editorial approach than anything, is the mixed delivery styles for their blog content. Whether it’s an early preview to the day’s story, a roundup of newspaper headlines, or a short opinion . . . [more]

Those who get Slaw’s entries by RSS or email may not regularly read comments to our posts and so might have missed a rather important, laconic comment to my entry yesterday on the New York Times’s deep linking feature. Lexum’s Ivan Mokanov wrote in to say that CanLII now has anchors at the paragraph level in judgments. They’d just not got around to announcing it. And they’re planning to build further functionality around it.

The illustration Ivan gave makes the point clearly and simply. This link
http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2010/2010scc63/2010scc63.html#par14
will take you to directly to paragraph 14 of the judgment in question . . . [more]

From time to time I bug the good folks at Lexum about introducing paragraph level anchors into the court decisions they publish: it would be very handy indeed to be able to make a hyperlink that went right to a paragraph within a judgment. And, of course, this feature, like many others, is on the crowded Lexum/CanLII agenda, and will have to wait its turn.

But in the meanwhile, the New York Times has just released a new version of its paragraph level linking tool, Emphasis. There’s a good article, “Emphasis Update and Source,” by Michael Donohoe, that . . . [more]

The anti-spam bill – Bill C-28 – was recently passed, and is expected to be in force sometime later this year.

If you think it won’t affect you because you don’t send mass emails trying to sell random products, and don’t infest other people’s computers with spyware, you would be wrong.

It applies to the sending of commercial electronic messages that many of us would not consider to be spam. An email to just one person that you consider a potential customer or client who you met at an event may fall into the prohibitions. And it applies to . . . [more]