Mindmaps can be useful tools, when hierarchical arrangements don’t get at the scope of an idea or plan. (See Mind42, MindMaps Online, Thinkature, and Free Mind for some posts about mindmaps here on Slaw.) But it can be tedious to put the players on the field. Text2Mindmap is an online application that creates an online mindmap (in Flash) from a simple text outline. You’re then free to do some modest rearranging and styling of the components — though there’s as yet no ability to move an element from one node to another, for instance. This is a . . . [more]

The wonderfully named Digital Standards Organization, i.e. Digistan:

seeks to promote customer choice, vendor competition, and overall growth in the global digital economy through the understanding, development, and adoption of free and open digital standards (“open standards”).

Open standards are specifications that are “immune to vendor capture.” Digistan has tightened up the EU definition of that key phrase, and is now promoting its adoption by (European at first) governments within a digital Hague Declaration. . . . [more]

Canadians can now rent or purchase movies online from Apple’s iTunes. We can then watch the movies at home on our computers or on the go with our iPods. The Globe and Mail article “iTunes Canada Adds Movies” points out the challenges Canadians will face in adopting to this new technology for renting and buying movies. They include:

• Movie files are much larger than music files and take up a lot of room.
• The lack of a universal digital video format that allows movies to be played on any device.

According to the article, iTunes starts off . . . [more]

“Draft it yourself,” that is, using the wiki set up for that purpose by McGill University’s Centre for Intellectual Property Policy (cipp).

It’s interesting to see the points made by the cipp folks to try to get the wiki to work for such a serious and exacting project:

• Like any wiki, justify your comments, add links, etc.
• Let’s be serious. If we want this to be an alternative piece of legislation, we have to be balanced. (David Lametti, for example, would personally like to see copyright’s term reduced radically and the re-imposition of a registration requirement, but he appreciates that

Jennifer Stoddart, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, tabled her 2007 Annual Report in Parliament yesterday:

“The year 2007 will no doubt be remembered in the privacy world as the year of the data breach.”

“The size of some of the data spills reported around the globe was staggering: An estimated 94 million credit and debit cards were exposed when hackers broke into the system at TJX Companies Inc., the U.S. retail giant which owns Winners and HomeSense stores in Canada. In the United Kingdom, two computer discs holding the personal details of some 25 million child benefit recipients vanished. ”

The Attorney General of Ontario Chris Bentley announced yesterday that his department is setting targets to reduce court delays and appearances by 30 per cent in routine criminal cases over the next four years.

“To ensure transparency and accountability, the province is also making available criminal court statistics to the public for the first time.”

To meet the targets, the province will be expanding 2 initiatives:

• Dedicated Prosecution: “Under Dedicated Prosecution, small tight-knit teams of Crown prosecutors and support staff are given ownership of cases from the beginning of the court process until the case is resolved, or until

Those of you who, like me, were born… less recently than others, might enjoy playing with a new interface to Google developed by Stefan Grothkopp that mimics Unix command line functionality, and which takes me back to MS-DOS, Pine, Basic and beyond.

Goosh (Google shell) starts you out with a simple command line:

Put in your search terms (I used “recission”), and you are given back:

There is a help function (type h and return) that lists the various commands this front end will accept. You can search Google’s videos, images, news, maps etc, type m to get more results, . . . [more]

As announced on Google’s blog the day before yesterday, Google Finance is now displaying real-time stock quotes.

  . . . [more]

Some time ago in his column, Joel Alleyne wrote about Law and the Semantic Web. He borrowed a definition of the semantic web that described it as “… an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily”.

For those of us just getting up to speed on the potential of this way of organizing and discovering the internet, here is a great . . . [more]

The Precedent Blog reports that four University of Ottawa law students have filed a complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada over alleged poor privacy practices by social networking site Facebook. The students are working with The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa. On May 30th CIPPIC filed a 35-page complaint under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) against Facebook, alleging 22 separate violations of the Act.

According to the Press Release from CIPPIC:

A team of law students, some of whom are dedicated Facebook users,

Ted Tjaden sparked a good discussion here on whether lists of links are useful on a firm’s intranet. But whether or not your useful links live in such a corporate location, there has to be a way to record URLs that interest you. Of course, each browser has a bookmarks feature, replete with the ability to create folders and to organize them according to your own sense of order. But, as the post on ReadWriteWeb says, you don’t always want to clutter up your more-or-less permanent list with ephemera — those sites that you think might be interesting to look . . . [more]

There’s a good little piece from Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP on the legal state of play when it comes to taking your laptops and PDAs across the U.S.-Canada border. “Electronic Devices and Borders – A Privacy-Free Zone?” by Edmonton Associate Dana Bissoondatt cites chapter and verse and mentions as well that Canada has taken up the practice of peeping, it seems.

We’ve broached this topic before on Slaw in
Laptops and Cross-Border Security, and
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Resources. . . . [more]