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]

♬ Every time I turn around
Something’s just not right
Just might be paranoid…♬

Lyrics and Music by Nicholas Jerry Jonas, Joseph Adam Jonas, Paul Kevin Jonas II, Cathy Dennis, John Fields, recorded by the Jonas Brothers.

An article on yesterday’s online New York Times entitled: “Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System” by John Markoff sheds some further light on the cyber attacks on Google that appear to have originated from China.

The exact nature of the intrusion and theft is a closely-guarded secret, but Markoff states:

[A] person with direct knowledge of the

Major announcement out of Paris this morning with Figaro and the Wall Street Journal reporting on an Open Letter (une lettre collective) to Google from La Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés. Alex Türk, the Président of CNIL addresses his letter directly to Monsieur Eric Schmidt, Président du conseil d’administration et chef de la direction, Google Inc.

The Italian authorities, the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali signed on as well as the Irish Data Commissioner and other privacy and data protection authorities.

Türk’s letter starts: “We are concerned to see that too often, the . . . [more]

This week in biotech, the value was all in the network. Here’s the run-down, from serious to Colbert:

I took a look at the reasons why biotech companies aren’t using social media very much, even though they should. Biotech companies seem to fall in the “late majority” of social media adopters, so those who are online now are the “early adopters” among biotechs, and without many online peers, the value is low. Critical mass is building, though.

Another kind of network — this one of expat Canadians — was spawned recently. C100 is “a select group of Canadians . . . [more]

A corporate press release last week boasted that the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice is using IBM “predictive analytics” to determine which juvenile offenders in custody are likely to re-offend. An offender’s rehabilitation program may depend upon the results of this analysis, which is a form of data mining to discover from data sets correlations that would otherwise be hidden. The software is a product created by SPSS, a company recently acquired by IBM.

Evidently, the U.K. Ministry of Justice is already using SPSS’s predictive analytics for the same purpose in connection with the population of adult offenders in . . . [more]

To continue our ebook reader discussions, I’ll throw in some recent comments. For the past few months, I have been very interested in purchasing an ebook reader…certainly not urgent but I’ve investigated the Kindle, B&N Nook and now the ipad. Each reader seems to have its pluses and minuses. Although I was not ready to pick one yet, I recently received an ipad as a birthday present. I was delighted though not convinced I would have bought one myself. I have to admit I love my ipad. I’m reading a book on it, however I now do most of my . . . [more]

As Simon detailed recently the issue of online comments and the identities of those who make them is a going concern and the concern in question arose here in Nova Scotia this week.

A recent story about issues within the firefighting department in a local weekly publication The Coast, elicited various comments in the online version of the paper. People who were targeted by those comments took exception to the comments and went to Nova Scotia Supreme Court to request an order for the Coast and Google to reveal the names and IP addresses of the commenters, neither the . . . [more]

Colleague and fellow blogger Patrick DiDomenico has started a blog called iPad4Legal that is further whetting my appetite for an iPad. He describes his new blog in these terms:

iPad4Legal is a blog about iPads as they pertain to lawyers, law firms, and the legal profession. We may occasionally stray and discuss iPhones or other Apple products since the technologies often overlap.

Another colleague described iPad as good for content consumers (which I am) but perhaps less so for content creators (which would be perhaps disappointing but something I suspect Apple would improve upon). The obvious interest will be in . . . [more]

The issue of archiving Tweets has come up before. But now Google has an even better suggestion through a Twitter archive.

Google suggest using the tool to identify how the news broke, or see what people were saying about a specific popular issue. Anyone watching the Guergis/Jaffer affair last week would probably want to check out #bustyhookers (I’m not just being gratuitous, there’s a really interesting story behind it for those who weren’t following).

I can see it being used for public relations metric purposes, but also discovery for future online defamation cases. Some have expressed concerns about the . . . [more]

Just announced (by Tweet naturally) is that every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total in the last four years numbering in the billions.

The announcement is timed to coincide with the Twitter developers conference in California.

One wonders just how future researchers will grapple with all of this content. . . . [more]