Digital Globe, a commercial satellite image company, has started a crowdsourcing campaign to help find the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. You can go to their Tomnod site, look at satellite imagery of where the plane might be, and tag anything that may look like wreckage or life rafts.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that satellite imagery, especially high resolution near real time imagery, was exclusively for government spy agencies.

Now anyone can obtain up to date satellite imagery with remarkable resolution. (The best resolution is still reserved for government use.) If a recent image is not available . . . [more]

Because a cybercrime attack can cause irreparable harm, law firms should be prepared to take action immediately. Being able to do this requires an Incident Response Plan (IRP).

An effective IRP can put a firm in a position to effectively and efficiently manage a breach by protecting sensitive data, systems, and networks, and to quickly investigate the extent and source of the breach so that operations can be maintained or promptly restored. Many firms design IRPs so that they address inadvertent breaches as well – for example, a lost USB key, or a misdirected email. An IRP can help avoid . . . [more]

The February 2014 issue of Connected is available online.

The bulletin covers news about the impact of new social media on courts.

Most of the items are about the United States, but there is coverage of other jurisdictions from time to time. The bulletin is published by the Virginia-based National Center for State Courts (NCSC) and the Conference of Court Public Information Officers.

In this issue:

• NCSC’s Social Media and the Courts Network gets an update (a new site that provides information on how courts are currently using social media)
• Courts using social media to warn public of scams
• Harvard’s

What phone, that is.

At one time a Blackberry was the de facto standard for lawyers. (For the record, I have used various types of portable device over the years, but never a Blackberry. I’m now using an Android phone. I have an iPad as well, which you couldn’t pry away from me, but when it dies I won’t replace it with another iPad.) Lawyers in our firm who use a Blackberry are dwindling in number. Our IT department tells me that Android phones are becoming more popular. Even some iPhone users have switched to Android.

For some reason, Windows . . . [more]

The question relates to the discoverability of social media information and whether having something on a ‘private’ page makes any difference. Case law has dealt with this too. My own summary is that any document relevant to civil litigation has to be disclosed by a party, wherever it is and however private it is. However, the opposing party will not be given free access to fish among private documents on mere speculation that there is something relevant there.

Once lawyers know this (and presumably most litigation lawyers now do), can they advise their clients to move stuff to private sections . . . [more]

In my seemingly never-ending quest to grasp the underlying technical components that feed into the various linked data efforts out there, I happened on an interesting talk given at last year’s SymfonyLive* conference. This presentation, by Markus Lanthaler, was called “Building Next-Generation Web APIs with JSON-LD and Hydra.”

If you’re interested in JSON coding at all I would recommend the first half of this presentation for Lanthaler’s nice overview of the differences between JSON and JSON-LD (JSON for Linking Data).

However, what really struck me in this presentation were a couple of slides he . . . [more]

A few weeks ago I was fortunate to see Gordon Ross speak on a panel talking about the social intranet and KM for legal knowledge management practitioners in the public sector. Ross is a partner with the Vancouver-based consulting firm Open Road and the Vice President responsible for strategy and professional services for their social intranet platform ThoughtFarmer. He has written a blog post outlining his thoughts from that talk: How Social Intranets can Support Legal Knowledge Management.

While the post is quite a theoretical discussion, pointing to thinking by Max Boisot in his 1998 book Knowledge Assets around . . . [more]

As many of you know, the US National Institute on Standards and Technology (NIST) recently published its Framework on Critical Infrastructure Security. Here is one of many articles about it that gives a good summary.

Does Canada need something similar? If so, who would be the appropriate authority to issue it? Will the US framework spill over in any event to Canada, to set a civil standard of care for cybersecurity practices?

A number of American lawyers are advising that boards of directors of ‘critical infrastructure’ operations — a very broad class — have to be aware of these guidelines, . . . [more]

Check out Google’s new Map Gallery.

Sourced from various governments, nonprofits, and businesses, this newly launched service works as a jumping off point to locate historical and resource-based map collections. Once a map of interest is identified, the user can click in and see that map as an overlay, layered together with Google maps. See the examples below to get a better idea:

• 1814 published map of the Lewis and Clark expedition
• Ecological and cultural features and areas of northern Vancouver Island and the Central Coast (Living Oceans Society)
• 1995 Heart of the Rockies Map
• Bylaw Infractions – City

A recent piece in University Affairs profiles Toronto lawyer Arshia Tabrizi and his academic community engagement start-up, Vidoyen. The name, the article explains, blends “video” and “doyen.” But I’m not sure how many Deans, if any, are on the roster: The site does, though, boast “academics, scholars, experts and thought leaders.”

The site features two-minute video mini-expositions falling in a range of categories. In a quick look through the categories, I don’t see any law professors or practitioners, other than Mr. Tabrizi himself. The slate of advisors includes Former Mayor David Miller and David Cohn, the Director of News . . . [more]

Apple fans often brag that Apple devices are far less susceptible to hackers and security breaches than PCs and other devices. While that was the case in the past, you can no longer use Apple devices and blissfully assume you can’t or won’t be hacked or infected with malware.

Last Friday, without a lot of fanfare, Apple released iOS update 7.0.6. iPads and iPhones use the iOS operating system. This update fixes a coding mistake that could allow a hacker to capture the information you think you are securely sharing with an online merchant or when logging in on a . . . [more]

Like many in the legal profession, I spend a significant proportion of my days working at the craft of writing.

Sometimes, I write on risk management topics for Canadian Lawyers Insurance Association. Weekly, I sit down to write a post for publication here on Slaw. From time to time, I also write reports, meeting minutes and more.

Because I work mostly alone, I often have found myself lamenting the absence of another set of eyes to review what I have written. No matter how many times I review my drafts, it seems I always miss something that any good . . . [more]