Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, switched from an internal email system to Google Mail. The Faculty Association objected on the grounds that this breached terms in the collective agreement giving faculty the right to privacy in their personal and professional communications. ((Article 16.01.03 of the Collective Agreement provides: The Board agrees that members have the right to privacy in their personal and professional communications and files, whether on paper or in electronic form. )) The argument was that because Google and the relevant servers are based in the United States, authorities from that country would have legitimate and other . . . [more]

An evaluation of the Law Commission of Ontario will begin this fall. (Since it has been full operating – working on projects – only since February 2008, this may seem premature or early. Early it is, premature it is not because it is tied to the funding renewal/renewal of mandate process that will begin in spring or thereabouts next year.) There are many questions about evaluation (who should do it? who should be part of the process? and so on), but I am bringing one to this group: whether anyone has had experience with evaluating an organization’s use of technology. . . . [more]

We’ve talked half a dozen times on Slaw about the United States Border Services’ practice of instituting suspicionless searches of travellers’ laptops, recommending basically that lawyers take nothing but a clean machine across the border.

Now the American Civil Liberties Union has made a formal request under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act for records setting out or touching upon policies establishing and governing this practice, as well as data as to the number of searches, the characteristics of persons whose devices were searched, and so forth. The official request adumbrates the ACLU argument that these searches may infringe the . . . [more]

I’ve been attending classes this week at the University of Victoria’s DHSI. From the website:

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute provides an environment ideal to discuss, to learn about, and to advance skills in new computing technologies influencing the work of those in the Arts, Humanities and Library communities.

Perhaps the only institute of its kind, attendees come from all over the world (in my class there are people from Europe, the US, and Thailand as well as Canadians from all parts). We have grad students, professors and librarians.

To get an idea of the content, have a look . . . [more]

I’m borrowing (or plagiarizing) this piece from my partner Mark Edward Davis

On Tuesday, June 9, 2009, Facebook, an extremely popular social networking website based in the United States, announced that beginning Saturday, June 13th at 12:01 a.m. EDT, users of the Facebook website will be allowed to create personalized URLs for their Facebook pages in the format (facebook.com/yourname). Currently, a Facebook user’s webpages are identified by an id number. While this change allows users to personalize their URL, it also creates the potential for Facebook users to misappropriate a trade-mark as their username (facebook.com/trade-mark). To prevent the unauthorized . . . [more]

In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is calling for an end to print textbooks in schools. Thanks to Josette McEachern for posting about this Quill & Quire article on the Edmonton Law Libraries Association blog. There are various spins to this attempt at budget efficiency activism.

A couple of items from the various articles caught my eye:

On average, California schools have just one computer for every four children — a situation that prompted Education Week to give the state a D-minus this year for its use of education technology compared with other states.

From Associated Press

‘A world of

Simon Fodden posted here last Fall about Obiter2, the wonderful Quebec-legal-research-focused website by lawyer Marco Rivard.

A colleague in Montreal pointed out to me yesterday that his site has since added a Custom Google search engine that targets Quebec/French civil law doctrine and legal information (Moteur de recherche Google ciblant la doctrine et l’information juridique).

For example, a search on “valeurs mobilieres” produced French language results here from a number of law firms and other organizations. . . . [more]

Rasterbator is a free tool that turns any image into a huge poster. While you can have fun with pictures of family, friends or your pets, or monsters in your living room window for Halloween, for work purposes you could also use this app create a sign or to blow-up a chart or graph.

Rasterbator gives you two ways to blow-up images: You can upload an image to the Rasterbator site or you can download a Rasterbator app to your computer.

Rasterbator gives you a blown-up image that you can print on multiple sheets of paper. Assemble these sheets in . . . [more]

Are you sick of us talking about Twitter yet? It seems the possibilities are only just starting to be explored. Lawyers Weekly reporter Luigi Benetton recently interviewed a few of us (including Michael Geist and Darryl Cruz of McCarthy Tétrault LLP in Toronto) for his article “Twitter in the courtroom: a fad, or here to stay?” (June 12, 2009 edition).

Some of the points discussed:

• this area is evolving quickly
• reporters “tweeting” from a trial is akin to reporters taking notes on behalf of the public
• messages on Twitter (or “tweets”) may not adequately characterize the full shape

From the Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) blog.

Adobe expects to deliver security updates for Adobe Reader and Acrobat versions 7.x, 8.x, and 9.x for Windows and Macintosh on Tuesday, June 9. This is the first quarterly security update for Adobe Reader. Adobe considers this a critical update and recommends users be prepared to apply the update for their product installations. Details of where to download updates will be posted to Adobe’s Security Bulletins and Advisories support page on June 9. . . . [more]

We’ve talked a little about litigation around domain names of famous people. But what about accounts on social media platforms?

Tony LaRusa, manager for the St. Louis Cardinals, is suing Twitter at the Superior Court of the State of California for a now inactive account that bore his name and likeness in LaRusa v. Twitter, Inc.

Although close scrutiny of the account does indicate it was not really LaRusa’s (citing parody), they did make off-the-cuff remarks like,

Lost 2 out of 3, but we made it out of Chicago without one drunk driving incident or dead pitcher.

LaRusa had apparently . . . [more]

The semantic web is coming, the semantic web is coming!

Simon Chester alerted us a while ago to Google Lab’s new project: Stub Posting on Google Squared. It has now launched: http://www.google.com/squared. Simon C asked in his post what Slaw readers might make of this, and I’d like to repeat his question now that you can take it out for a spin and kick its tires. I can see how the basic organization into fundamental facets that shift depending on the nature of your search terms would be useful to school students; but I’m not sure whether it . . . [more]