Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.

The New York Times is speculating that the big ISP’s may be getting ready to filter what passes through their server to and from machines in the U.S., at least. Such a prying would place a premium on law firms’ either being their own ISP’s or using encrypted data when moving it via a commercial ISP. . . . [more]

Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.

The New York Times is speculating that the big ISP’s may be getting ready to filter what passes through their server to and from machines in the U.S., at least. Such a prying would place a premium on law firms’ either being their own ISP’s or using encrypted data when moving it via a commercial ISP. . . . [more]

Via Michael Geist:

The CBA is reporting a security breach of their computer system:

An audit of the CBA online web systems has revealed unauthorized third party access to the system during the recent holiday period.

Immediate steps were taken to further enhance the security of the site, and those whose records were potentially affected are being notified of this unauthorized activity.

The CBA takes the privacy of members very seriously and has taken appropriate steps to ensure that this type of incident does not happen again.

Michael quotes them as telling members:

Your records may have been affected

The Law Librarian Blog today drew attention to the relatively new Best Practices for Legal Education Blog, “a site [that] was created with two goals in mind: 1) to create a useful web-based source of information on current reforms in legal education (…) ; and 2) to create a place where those interested in the future of legal education can freely exchange ideas, concerns, and opinions.”

Contributors are from the United States and the UK (or Glasgow anyway – is Scotland still part of the UK? In, out, half in, half out, sovereignly associated with the Brits?). . . . [more]

An interesting article in the NYTimes on the recent health issues of Om Malik. Om, for those of you that don’t follow tech blogs, is a long time industry insider and the publisher of GigaOm.

On Dec. 28th Om had a heart attack, and well wishes aside (I’m a long time subscriber), the combination of the sedentary life style, smoking and scotch (nah, couldn’t be the scotch…), are cited as causes to his health issues. The big kicker for me was the fact that Om is 41! Now that’s a wake-up call if ever there was one. Ouch.

The . . . [more]

Xerox, a company that’s been part of your daily life for seemingly ever, is fed up with our thinking “copy” when we hear their name. (Hell, I still use xerox as a verb.) They do many more things than make copiers and want “a brand identity that reflects the Xerox of today,” as their vice-president of advertising says. So they’ve ditched the capital X and now will use this new logo:

I can’t say I’m impressed by the ball thingy. The 3-D look that’s popular nowadays will soon be out — if it isn’t already — and weren’t we using . . . [more]

Having been trained in the law, we all know better than to just click “I agree” to the next software licence agreement that pops up when you try to install that new widget on your computer. Of course, none of us do actually read the agreement, and the software ends up changing your start page and installing the yahoo toolbar into your browser.

If you have no interest in reading the lengthy contract, but still want to know whether you can expect that widget to also serve you some pop-up ads, the EULAlyzer promises to do the reading for you. . . . [more]

The alpha version is out of Wikia, the search engine from Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame. Note the clean uncluttered Google-look. And note, too, that it quite correctly brings up Slaw first when searching on “slaw.” Apart from that, though, the Wikia team confesses that: “We are aware that the quality of the search results is low…” But they hope to improve them over the next little while.

You can get an account and help out, if you want, in true Wikipedia fashion. Jimmy says:

Right now, the most important thing you can do is help with the “miniarticles”

A link in the Slaw Linkblog points to a Star story that claims Facebook has over a 1,000,000 subscribers in Toronto:

More than a million Torontonians made friends with Facebook in 2007, contributing to the “phenomenal growth” in Canadian users last year.

Toronto was the first city in North America to break 1 million subscribers, a recent study shows.

…The study also found that most Canadians who logged on to Facebook are between the ages of 18 to 34

Can this number of users be remotely right?

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Toronto embraces the entire GTA, . . . [more]

I just received a notice to the profession about an interesting innovation at the Calgary Courthouse of the Court of Queen’s Bench in Alberta. Online adjournments are now available for routine consent applications and applications not yet served:

Calgary Chambers Adjournments

Please be advised that a new online procedure is available in Calgary for consent adjournments and adjournments required where service has not been effected, for all morning Justice and/or Masters Chambers applications. The new procedure is effective January 1, 2008.

Online adjournments are not available for special applications.

The online adjournments are accessed through the Alberta Courts website at

In the same tradition of Dennis Kennedy’s Blawggies, Steve Matthews has just announced his 2007 CLawBies – Canadian Law Blog Awards.

Big winners this year are Rob Hyndman who won the Non-Legal Audience Award and tied for the Best Canadian Law Blog (or Blogger) Award and to Slaw for the Best Legal Technology Blog and runner-up for the Best Canadian Law Blog (or Blogger) Award.

Full disclosure: Steve Matthews is a co-contributor and friend here on Slaw, and he also awarded me runner up for Law Librarian Blog Award, which deservedly went to both Michel-Adrien Sheppard’s Library . . . [more]

…don’t like each other. Safari 3 crashes whenever I’m using LexisNexis/Quicklaw, which is a major pain, since it’s now my browser of choice on the Mac (Firefox being too unstable). Evidently the earlier version of Safari didn’t cause these problems, so I might try to switch back. Quicklaw blames the fact that Safari 3 is in beta and has some bugs to work out yet.

One particularly annoying thing is that when Safari crashes you’re then unable to log out; which means you can’t get access to Lexis /Quicklaw via another browser and have to phone help to get you . . . [more]