The Linked Data Platform (LPD) is a thing now. It was recently given “Candidate Recommendation” status by the W3C. That means that it has moved up from a “Working Draft” (mentioned in an earlier post) and the developers are satisfied that the standard does what is meant to do.

And what it is meant to do is this:

Provide a set of best practices and a simple approach for a read-write Linked Data architecture, based on HTTP access to web resources that describe their state using the RDF data model.

The LPD is described in . . . [more]

Back in March, Tim Berners-Lee — who invented the world wide web, no less — issued a call to citizens in different countries to pressure their governments to produce a bill of rights to ensure net neutrality and protect the rights of web users worldwide.

It’s a far cry from the heady days, not so long ago, of cyber-libertarians rallying around A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. But then again, we live in different times. The growing evidence of abuses committed by intelligence services (south of the border obviously, but here at home as well) are . . . [more]

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said that 80-90% of his computer time is spent on an iPad.

This comment lead tech journalist Mike Elgan to wonder: “Could 80 percent of the corporate workforce do 100 percent of their work on a tablet?”

His article sets out arguments for and against, but basically concludes that tablets would be sufficient for many.

For me personally, for what I need it for, while you would have to pry my tablet out of my hands, it is not adequate to replace my PC. For too many things it is just not quite good . . . [more]

The World’s Columbian Exposition was an influential social and cultural event (“The Devil in the White City” from Erik Larson brilliantly communicates the vibrancy of the preparation of the Exposition). On October 9, 1893, the day designated as Chicago Day, the fair set a world record for outdoor event attendance, drawing 716,881 people to the fair. Electricity occupied a very special place in the White City. An entire building was devoted to electrical exhibits. Electricity powered everything: fountains, a moveable sidewalk, elevators, automatic door openers, and even electric cigar lighters. GE, Westinghouse, Thomas Edison, Brush, Western Electric were showcasing various . . . [more]

It’s not hard to light up a debate over the digital legal information revolution and its impact on law. There’s plenty of kindling. What’s hard is to pick an issue and keep the blaze contained. And the sources of fuel keep adding up.

Dutch financial giant ING might have struck a new spark with a report last month on social media and how it impacts news reportage. The full title of the ING report is “An International Study into the Impact of Social Media on the Activities of PR Professionals & Journalists, News & News Dissemination.” It has . . . [more]

The Cyberjustice Laboratory of the Université de Montréal has been developing a courtroom management software application for one year now. Initially, the project, called ISA – a french acronym for « Interface de salle d’audience » (courtroom interface) – had the sole purpose of developing a streamlined interface facilitating the management of the Laboratory’s state-of-the-art technological courtroom software infrastructure.

However, due to the great potential of this software and to the enthusiasm of its first users, a web-based version of ISA was quickly designed. Our main objective behind its development is to extract the management functions from the courtroom’s physical . . . [more]

There’s a wonderful new book available that provides a useful overview of linked data principles and concepts that will help you understand and apply the knowledge you’ve been gathering over the past couple of years.

Seth van Hooland (Associate Professor in the Information and Communication Science Department at the Université Libre de Bruxelles) and Ruben Verborgh (Postdoctoral Researcher in Semantic Hypermedia at Ghent University) have written “Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums: How to Clean, Link and Publish your Metadata.”

This entertaining little video sums up the content nicely.

And here’s the publisher’s blurb:

“This highly practical

At a hacker conference in New York earlier this month, security expert Jonathan Zdziarski presented a paper which should raise some eyebrows for lawyers.

Zdziarski noted the considerable developments Apple has made to ensure its iOS devices are secure, to the point where the iPhone 5 and iOS 7 is more secure from everyone. Everyone, that is, except for Apple itself.

Although third party documents on Apple devices are encrypted, the library and caches folders are typically not. What this means is that an unlocked device allows access to data which would normally be encrypted. There is currently no way . . . [more]

From Saturday’s Guardian – here is the complete transcript.

The NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has urged lawyers, journalists, doctors, accountants, priests and others with a duty to protect confidentiality to upgrade security in the wake of the spy surveillance revelations.

Snowden said professionals were failing in their obligations to their clients, sources, patients and parishioners in what he described as a new and challenging world.

No matter how careful you are from that point on, no matter how sophisticated your source, journalists have to be sure that they make no mistakes at all in the very beginning to the

Today I’m daydreaming of Italy …

“The district of Ravenna lies in the north east of Italy, some 80 km (50 miles) from Bologna, the regional capital of Emilia Romagna. Ravenna is the second largest commune as per land area in Italy.”

If you need a good excuse to travel to Italy this may be the perfect opportunity.

The Summer School LEX programme is taking place in Ravena the first week of September. This is “an intensive 6-day, 8-hour-a-day program, that requires participants’ total dedication and intellectual commitment.”

• September 1-2: Basic Module (an introduction to XML web technologies

Here’s another post under the “social media law” umbrella—this time about what intelligible advice, if any, lawyers can bank on when it comes to directing their own clients to “clean up” social media accounts. It’s not the first time this has been canvassed here on Slaw, as John Gregory’s post from earlier this year attests, but since I recently prepared materials for a webinar on social media as evidence, and in the course of that started a trial run of X1 Social Discovery (which is what the Department of Justice, RCMP, and at least two major Canadian law firms are . . . [more]

It has always been a challenge in suing someone for defamation that the lawsuit may draw more attention to the defamation than it had previously obtained. A fortiori in cyberspace… This seems to have happened (again) recently in France, where a restaurant’s suit against a critic whose negative review featured high in Google’s search results about the restaurant has now replaced the review in the rankings… “In typical Internet style, Google searches for the restaurant now prominently feature articles about it suing [the author].“

The exercise of a right to be forgotten in Europe under the CJEU’s ruling on the . . . [more]