Last week news broke of the epic hacking of Gizmodo’s Mat Honan. By exploiting security flaws in both Amazon’s and Apple’s account verification and reset procedures, a hacker was able to obtain access to a wide variety of Honan’s accounts, including his iCloud account. Once they’d gained control of Honan’s iCloud account, the hackers were able to remotely wipe his iPhone, iPad, and his Macbook, destroying his personal data, including irreplaceable pictures of his one-year-old daughter:

In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my

ABA’s Law Practice Management section has launched an App version of their Law Practice Magazine in both the iTunes App Store and on . Here’s a screen shot:

This new digital rendition will be available as both a member benefit (free) and to non-member subscribers for a $20 per year. For current LPM section members, gaining access was as simple as typing in your email address registered with the ABA. The interface has a simple page-by-page finger slide to navigate, and is built on the Texterity platform.

Count me as impressed. The look and feel of the App’s execution seems . . . [more]

One of the many highlights for me at last month’s American Association of Law Libraries 2012 Conference was the opportunity to meet Priya Rai of the National Law University in Delhi and to observe her presentation, Access to Legal Information in the Digital Age: A Comparative Study of Electronic Commercial Databases and Public Domain Resources in Law.

Ms Rai is an accomplished law librarian and legal research instructor trained in law. One of her accomplishments is participation in the Information Institute of India Project. She attended and presented at AALL 2012 as the recipient of the FCIL Schaffer Grant . . . [more]

safely, on Mars – the Mars Rover named “Curiosity”, that is – even if the Americans can’t spell.

Here’s explanations of how it was to work. It did.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/24364591/highlight/281462

http://www.space.com/16503-photos-mars-science-laboratory-curiosity-landing-guide.html

And, here’s a video stream of a collection of very relieved, very happy, people in blue shirts.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/24512027/highlight/282919

I doubt the missing “u” made a difference; however, those who once drove British Leyland vehicles may remember the crack about the best British workmanship going into the parts that fall off.

Fortunately, nothing fell off here.

  . . . [more]

Earlier this week, Tech Vibes reported that as worldwide Twitter subscribership crossed the half-billion mark, Canadian accounts were shown to account for 2% of that total, placing Canada at 8^th spot among all countries in total Twitter subscriber numbers. Canadians, of course, were also among the early adopters of Facebook and routinely top the rankings of ComScore and similar reports for such things as time spent online, so our collective Twitter presence is not actually all that surprising.

The surprise comes courtesy of some recently completed but not-yet-released research conducted by CanLII. Over a 6 week period in . . . [more]

From 3D-printed guns to hacking DNA for assasination via targeted synthetic pathogens, Marc Goodman is capable of throwing a scare into you. Is he a little short on solutions? Well, that would be telling. See his presentation at TED, and a followup interview. Also see his website for more. . . . [more]

A few weeks I posted the 1959 vision of the Law Library of the Future, that got my gears turning and I undertook a visioning exercise the result of which I present now, The 2012 Law Library of the Future: To-Day! . . . [more]

Online users who want a certain amount of anonymity will want to stay off Quora. Their new Views feature is set to track which users have looked at your posts. Some good coverage on the subject via Gigaom.

This type of insider knowledge has always been a bit of a balancing act. On one side, this information is incredibly valuable to the websites that collect it. Heck, it’s a core element of Linkedin’s paid account service — seeing who’s viewed your profile over the last X number of days. As a user, my interests are divided. It both . . . [more]

The July 2012 issue of Connected is available online.

The bulletin covers news about the impact of new social media such as Twitter and Facebook on court proceedings, the ethical implications of judges and court staff using new media, and court policy issues relating to these technologies.

It is published by the Virginia-based National Center for State Courts and the Conference of Court Public Information Officers.

Most of the stories are about the United States, but there is occasionally material about non-US matters. One of this month’s items is about a mistrial declared in a New Brunswick murder case because . . . [more]

Every two years for the past few years I’ve written something before the Olympic games about the IOC’s social media and web rules, which are overly controlling, out of touch, and behind the times. This year is no exception. Even though we are just a few days in, there have been several stories vying for the most outlandish social media excess medal. For example:

Carmi Levy wrote an article just before the games began entitled The IOC’s social media anti-lesson for business that starts off with:

As the final hours tick down until the 2012 Olympic games get started in . . . [more]

A picture is worth a thousand words. A streaming video is worth a lot of bandwidth, or is it? From Supreme Court of Canada live and archived webcasts to CanLII training videos on YouTube to political speeches, there is plenty of valid, useful, legal content on the web that is being blocked from viewing in an office near you.

A common argument used by organizations to support blocking streaming content is based on productivity drain, usually kicked around with the word bandwidth.

What is the bandwidth drain of streaming content? A service provider with the unlikely name of Bummer Hosting . . . [more]

Legal complexity is nothing new. The scope of its unhappy consequences, however, seems to be getting ever wider thanks to the internet. Now texts land right in the living rooms — or the pants pockets — of half the planet at a keystroke. And, as a colleague once complained, computers and the internet “grease the skids of prolixity” where lawyers are concerned: ten words can become a hundred or a thousand at no marginal cost.

The terms of service “agreements” governing almost all the software and services you use are famously long and impenetrable. Just to read privacy policies alone . . . [more]