News junkies unite! Postmedia has made the daily newspapers for 10 larger Canadian cities available on the iPad!

• Vancouver Sun
• The Province
• Calgary Herald
• Edmonton Journal
• Montreal Gazette
• Regina Leader-Post
• Saskatoon StarPhoenix
• Ottawa Citizen
• Victoria Times Colonist
• Windsor Star

And for now, they’re free. :) It’s also interesting to note, they’ve jumped right over typical first step of creating an iPhone app. . . . [more]

Last week the New York Times featured Vitaly Borker, an online retailer who deliberately abused his customers so they could complain about him online. Some of Borker’s behaviour was completely outrageous, and included alleged threats of litigation and violence, both physical and sexual, against disgruntled customers.

The complaints by customers actually helped his Google ranking, which in turn helped him secure top search placements and more business, . . . [more]

Much ink has been spilled about the diplomatic cable leak facilitated by WikiLeaks. Almost as interesting as the leaks themselves, however, is the information war that is being waged against WikiLeaks, and the measures the site has had to take just to stay accessible.

Over the course of the last week, the site has suffered from a sustained Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. In such an attack, a group of computers – sometimes numbering in the millions – attempt to saturate a target host with a flood of requests, thereby consuming all of the hosts’ computation resources and . . . [more]

The 2010 CLawBies–or Canadian Law Blog Awards–are now open for nominations.

How to Nominate in 2010:
This year’s nominations deadline is Tuesday, December 28th, and the methods remain the same as in previous years. Publicly nominate a Canadian-authored law blog using ANY of the following:

1. Tweet your endorsement on Twitter.com with the hashtag text: #clawbies2010. We’ll be monitoring!
2. Email your favourite blog, including a couple sample posts or any other notable highlights, to Steve Matthews at steve@stemlegal.com. We’d prefer a public nomination, but this is still acceptable.
3. Write a blog post about three other Canadian law blogs

The National Security Archive, based at George Washington University, has provided a guide explaining How to Decipher a State Department Cable:

“This guide … might come in handy as you peruse the 251,287 Department of State cables recently released by wikileaks (…)”

“At the Archive, we have lots of practice reading declassified government documents. Since we will be using this space to share with you some documents from our trove of government releases, we thought it would be useful to give you some tips on what to look for in these documents. Several of our experienced analysts have created

There are thousands of sites on the Internet that offer free and for-pay clip art, but many force you to deal with loads of pop-ups and advertising. Don’t bother with them! Your first and only stop—and the absolute best online source for free clip art, photos, animations and sounds—should be the Microsoft Office Online Clip Art and Media page. It has thousands of free images and media files, all easily searchable by keyword and topics. Many of the photos are of professional quality.

Don’t forget to visit the Microsoft Office Online Clip Art and Media page the next time you . . . [more]

Today Justice Michael Kelen of the Federal Court handed down a significant decision in DONNA JODHAN v. ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CANADA. Ms Jodhan sought a declaration under section 18.1 of the Federal Courts Act that the standards implemented by the federal government for providing visually impaired Canadians with access to government information and services on the Internet, and the way in which those standards are implemented, denied her equal access to government information and services, and thereby violated her rights under section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. . . . [more]

U.S. attorneys are being invited to adopt volumes of the Federal Reporter in a current Law.gov digitization project from PublicResource.org. The adoption campaign is being called Yes We Scan. PublicResource.org is a non-profit organization that received the Project 10^100 Award from Google and is digitizing the Federal Reporter by “double keying” all text. Double keying involves the entire text being manually typed in twice with discrepancies being checked, and then the full text being reviewed by law students and legal professionals before being certified. The Law.gov project is meant to make U.S. primary legal materials more available.

From . . . [more]

Last week I covered the Vigna v. Levant case and mentioned that comments are a poor way to gauge readership for the purposes of damages, which some readers agreed with.

A recent article in the Alberta Law Review by Matthew Nied discusses this further, Damage Awards in Internet Defamation Cases: Reassessing Assumptions About the Credibility of Online Speech. Nied is a recent UVic graduate, former Law is Cool contributor, and author of the Defamation Law Blog, which is currently on hiatus while he clerks at the B.C.S.C.

Nied proposes that given the hyperbole frequently found online readers . . . [more]

The US Department of Homeland Security is in the process of seizing control of a number of domains that infringe on copyrighted media or “enabling selling counterfeits of trademarked goods.” Here’s the screen capture from the BitTorrent Search Engine Torrent-finder.com, post capture:

TorrentFreak has a running list of other seized domains. And here’s a quote from the Torrent-finder owner:

“My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!” the exasperated owner of Torrent-Finder told TorrentFreak this morning.

“I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed.

Many of you will launch the same group of sites each time you start your browser at the start of a the day (i.e., email, LinkedIn, Facebook, SLAW, New York Times etc.). Firefox has a great feature that will help you do this more easily.

Notice that the bottom of each folder in the Firefox bookmarks list has a “Open All in Tabs” option.

Create a bookmarks folder called “Startup” and add bookmarks to the various sites you want to launch at the start each day. One click on the “Open All in Tabs” link will open all the sites . . . [more]