Can you / should you / do you rely on the product of search engines as evidence in civil or criminal matters? Do you base legal advice on what you find on search engines, or on the use made of them?

A recent article in Canadian Lawyer canvasses some of the possibilities.

The Ontario Superior Court held that one could not establish facts by showing how often certain terms were used in Google searches. That was for the purpose of the certification of a class action.

However, showing previous use or actual use of trade marks can be done . . . [more]

No matter where you live in Vancouver, odds are pretty good there’s a dog nearby with the name Charlie.

How do I know this random tidbit? It’s thanks to CartoDB, a (mostly) free cloud-based mapping tool. While browsing their online gallery, I came across a user-generated map of popular dog names in Vancouver, created using open source data.

The product concept is pretty simple: CartoDB will take geo-location data, along with other connected contextual data, from an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file; and then turn those pieces into an professional-looking, interactive map.

We recently used CartoDB for . . . [more]

The Law Society of BC recently issued a warning to its members to be vigilant about their firm’s cyber security after a BC firm’s files were held captive by a hacker who encrypted them and tried to extort payment in return for restoring access. There have been similar cases in Ontario in the last year.

…the firm found that its computer system was hacked and paralyzed by a computer virus known as the Cryptowall Virus when the staff showed up for work on Monday, December 29, 2014. Notices appeared on some of the firm’s computer monitors stating “Your files were

When I first learned about “LII-in-a-Box,” a new legal information service developed by the African Legal Information Institute, I thought it might provide a stand-alone information system that could operate independent of the internet. I thought it might be something that would alleviate poor and intermittent internet connections that make access to online information difficult in under-served communities and countries. Honestly though, what really came to mind was the LibraryBox Project that Jason Griffey has been championing for a number of years now. . . . [more]

The Annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is under way in Las Vegas. Its a mecca for those into the latest and greatest and biggest and fastest and most innovative consumer tech.

For example, the latest in TV’s are 4K (4 times the resolution of HD) that are impossibly thin with tiny bezels. While the high end models are unaffordable, the improvements eventually become mainstream.

Trends include wearables (fitness still dominates) and the smart home (aka internet of things). Everything seems to be connected somehow – even teakettles. (Some might say that an internet connected teakettle belongs to the internet . . . [more]

In late 2014, during a meeting of my firm’s technology advisory group, I recall skeptically saying something like: “What hacker is actually going to target a law firm. We don’t store client credit card data, there are multiple layers of security on our servers, on our files and for employee personal information, I mean really, we are not Target or Home Depot.” Other members of our group did not agree with me.

Boy, was I mistaken. On December 31, 2014 the Law Society of BC issued a Fraud Alert titled BC law firm’s computer system hacked by extortionist.

Notices

Here’s an interesting site on open source digital forensics. The site is maintained by a group of volunteers and was created by Brian Carrier who wrote the “foundational book for file system analysis” in 2005, “File System Forensic Analysis.”

There are some potential legal benefits for using open source software in digital investigations. Brian Carrier looks at these benefits in his paper, “Open Source Digital Forensics Tools: The Legal Argument.”

It’s noted however that open source tools are not necessarily better than “closed source” tools because both may suffer from “serious bugs and faults and . . . [more]

In case we missed you on New Year’s Eve, the 9th annual Canadian Law Blog Awards (aka the ‘Clawbies’) were announced.

This year’s Fodden Award winner for the top overall Canadian blawg went to Double Aspect, the Canadian constitutional law blog of Leonid Sirota, a J.S.D. candidate at NYU School of Law. As usual, we chose winners and finalists for 3 practitioners, 3 practice blogs, 3 ‘new’ law blogs, and a series of topical and group awards.

You can visit Clawbies.ca to see the full list of this year’s winners & finalists.

Once again, there were many . . . [more]

I’m tired.

Tired of ABS fear-mongering.

Tired of disingenuous and protectionist arguments made by those who know very little about ABS – yet are fiercely opposed to it.

And tired of the misinformation being floated by ABS opponents.

Now I know what it was like in the McCarthy-era.

Lawyers (particularly trial lawyers) are trained to argue a position based on logic and evidence – not hyperbole and emotion.

OTLA’s recent pronouncements in the Law Times on December 29, 2014, are particularly troubling:

“We have studied ABS from the time it was first raised by the law society in the . . . [more]

In with the new, out with the old. Last week I beamed about the promise of new gifts from Google in the form of the pending End-To-End extension which will put pretty good privacy in reach of ordinary Gmail (and probably other email) users. As Tiny Tim may have said, “Encryption to us all; God bless us, every one!”

This week I draw your attention away from the shiny and new, and direct it to the digital dumpster—where all shiny toys eventually end up. Fresh to the heap: the Yahoo Directory. This marks not the passing of some fleeting fad, . . . [more]

Back in June this year, people perked up to the news that Google was developing an email encryption extension to Google Chrome. The alpha version of the “End-To-End” extension was posted publicly for the coding community to test and kick around, and David Whelan dropped the news here on Slaw in the course of a more general post about the importance of encryption and the risks lawyers take when they don’t properly safeguard client data.

Unlike data on your hard disk, data sent by email has always been prohibitively complicated to encrypt. The tools necessary to encrypt email from . . . [more]

I saw a very interesting TEDx chat by Jeremy Howard where he talked about the current state of machine learning and what computers are capable of today. Howard is the founder and CEO of Enlitic a medical company that “uses recent advances in machine learning to make medical diagnostics faster, more accurate, and more accessible.” His talk was called “The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn” and was delivered last month at TEDx Brussels. . . . [more]