Not that Firefox wasn’t the most customizable browser already, but the upcoming edition will allow you to add and remove elements from all installed toolbars – paring your experience down to a single row, if desired.

As someone who currently uses three rows of toolbars, plus the area taken up by in-browser tabs, screen real estate is always an issue. Moving to larger monitors & screen resolutions does help, but it remains a constant balance between adding functionality -vs- viewable area. Knowing that I’m overly reliant on my ‘bookmarks toolbar’ – which I jam as many essential links into as . . . [more]

Connie Crosby and I will be co-presenting with two American law library colleagues (Jane Edwards and Marlene Coir) in a few weeks at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries in Windsor, this year a joint conference with the Michigan Association of Law Libraries.

Our topic is “Legal Research Free and Fast!” and we will be making available a jointly-authored paper that provides an overview and analysis of “free” versus “fee” online research tools.

My personal challenge for the presentation – and I assume perhaps a challenge shared by my co-panelists – is what free Internet-based, law-related . . . [more]

The Canadian Privacy Commissioner is in the midst of consultations on the privacy impacts of online tracking, profiling and targeting. The first public event is a panel discussion taking place today correction – Thursday the 29th in Toronto from 8:30 til 4:15. This event is being webcast. Viewers are invited to pose questions to the panelists.

To follow the consultations on twitter the hashtag is #priv2010. The Privacy Commisioner’s office’s twitter handle is @privacyprivee. . . . [more]

When I was first appointed to the High Court of Justice of Ontario in March, 1988, the era of having a dedicated court reporter assigned to a judge and traveling with that judge throughout Ontario was coming to an end. In 1988, most court reporters created a court record of the viva voce evidence by way of shorthand. If the presiding judge required a portion of the evidence transcribed, the court reporter would create a transcript after court hours from his/her shorthand notes. This system started to disappear in the late 1980’s as a result of the expense involved in . . . [more]

This week in biotech, everyone was trying to find a way through.

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is trying to find a way through to new treatments, and has created a whole funding program to do so. This week they pumped $3.2 million into a clinical program at Avila Therapeutics; and three other companies last year were able to start clinical trials with LLS funding. These biotech-foundation collaborations are win-win arrangements that you can expect to see more of.

Canadian Flax growers are trying to find a way through to use Roundup-resistant varieties without alienating the European Union (their . . . [more]

Henry George Bohn said in the 1855 Handbook of Proverbs,

An idle brain is the Devil’s shop.

It’s probably just as applicable today, especially with those recently unemployed in the legal profession.

Henry Russell (supposedly a fake name) is a 37-year-old Los Angeles attorney who has just released a new book, Craigslist Casual Encounters: The Hilarious and Disturbing World of Seeking Sex Online. A year after losing his job he decided it was a good idea to start posting fake advertisements on CraigsList, starting with dryer lint and quickly escalating to ads seeking sex.

Often impersonating . . . [more]

In a story from Reuters, A Professor Ishikawa has created a scanner that can process hundreds of pages a minute. Using off-the shelf equipment, it takes 500 photos a second and calculates the curves of the pages, with the net effect that a book can be scanned as someone flips through it. Video here. As the story says,

While the technology has the potential to take paper books into the digital age, it remains to be how publishers will react to people scanning their books while just flipping through them.

On that note, it is worth mentioning that India . . . [more]

Interesting coincidence? Not sure who is the real threat to privacy.

Yesterday, privacy regulators from 10 countries (Canada, Israel, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Ireland, New Zealand and the U.K.) attacked search giant Google for allegedly lax privacy practices.

And yesterday, Google started publishing stats on requests from law enforcement agencies from around the world to hand over private user data:

“Again, the vast majority of these requests are valid and the information needed is for legitimate criminal investigations. However, data about these activities historically has not been broadly available. We believe that greater transparency will lead

I am reasonably sure the number of Farmville updates appearing on Facebook News feeds is approaching the number of spam emails sent each day. We need to stop this madness! I say this with all due respect to my friends who are clearly Farmville addicts.

There is an easy way to prevent Farmville updates appearing on your Wall. Simply put your mouse over the item, and click the Hide Farmville button. This will block Farmville updates from appearing on your wall.

Note that this works for updates from any other annoying Facebook apps like Mafia Wars or Birthday Gifts. It . . . [more]

Kathy English discusses this past weekend in The Star some of the issues of online commenting which have been raised here recently,

Would you be willing to express your opinions under your real names?

Can news organizations find a way to compel online commenters to speak out under their true identities? Should the media ever unmask anonymous commenters? Can the courts force them to do so? Should they?

Most importantly, is the end of online anonymity near?

These are important questions now under consideration in news organizations and courts throughout North America. This week, a Nova Scotia judge ordered both

There is a lawsuit and a criminal investigation underway resulting from a school outside of Philadelphia that secretly took pictures of students with webcams on laptops supplied by the school.

The idea was to use the webcams only in cases where a laptop was reported stolen. It is alleged however that school officials turned on the webcams simply to spy on the students for their own curiosity.

More details and commentary can be found on Techdirt, Boing Boing, and this AP story.

It’s hard to sort out reality from posturing, but it doesn’t look good for the . . . [more]

The Ontario e-Laws legislative website has a new look and feel to bring it in line with Ontario government website standards.

The retro avocado green-colored banner is interesting if somewhat garish. That aside, the site appears to retain the same functionality, albeit with frequently-accessed links in slightly different locations.

Presumably one thing driving this is the government’s obligations under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005, S.O. 2005, c. 11, to make their website more accessible to persons with disabilities (as explained here by the government).

Expect to see much more discussion in the near future in law . . . [more]