Is it just me, or does there seem to be an increase in fraudulent activities these days? I have seen increased evidence of activities such as phishing, spoofing, faux lottery schemes, and calls asking for renewals of directories never previously purchased, as well as the ever popular grabbing of company logos from websites and using them on letters to defraud people out of money in their bank accounts.

And as if phishing weren’t enough, there is something even more targeted called “spear phishing“:

How spear phishing scams work
Spear phishing describes any highly targeted phishing attack. Spear phishers

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ArchiveGrid is an important destination for searching through historical documents, personal papers, and family histories held in archives around the world.Thousands of libraries, museums, and archives have contributed nearly a million collection descriptions to ArchiveGrid. Researchers searching ArchiveGrid can learn about the many items in each of these collections, contact archives to arrange a visit to examine materials, and order copies.ArchiveGrid is available to both individuals and institutions free of charge through May 31st.

1. Edward Tufte
2. visualcomplexity.com
3. Slashdot: eBooks – What’s Holding You Back?
4. Toronto Star: Families steamed over winning Tim Hortons’ cup
5. Microsoft Press Release: Microsoft Unveils Details for Ultra-Mobile Personal Computers
6. eWeek: What Will Make ‘Origami’ Devices Tick?
7. Red Herring: Microsoft Reveals Origami
8. CultureLibre
9. Olivier Charbonneau
10. VLLB: list of Canadian law blogs
11. Writely
12. ZDNet: Google acquires Writely – one of my Web Office Suite picks
13. Software Garden: wikiCalc
14. Kiko.
15. LawyerRatingz.com
16. RateMyProfessor.com
17. RateMyTeachers.ca
18. SCL: R. Susskind, The Next 10 Years Audio Webcast/Podcast
19. Arma International: Canadian Policy Brief: New Supreme Court Judge Could Have Big IP Impact
20. Now: Patently ludicrous
21. The Age: The law

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Like many people with a yen for systematizing, I like diagrams. When I think a problem out I doodle and draw lines to boxes, circle words, do double underscores and the like. When I assemble something from, well, you know where, I look at the pictures and almost never read the instructions.

So I’m mightily impressed when someone can represent a complex situation with a clear picture. My hero in this regard is Edward Tufte, whose three last books — 1983: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (pictures of numbers). ISBN 096139210X; 1990: Envisioning Information (pictures of nouns). ISBN . . . [more]

Just stumbled on a wonderful blog on legal translation, at the same time as Deborah Cao at Griffith has published a major monograph on Translating Law. . . . [more]

Some may be interested in quite an active discussion about “eBooks – What’s Holding You Back?” which has been happening on Slashdot today: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/10/1555203&from=rss . . . [more]

Please welcome our newest occasional contributor, Professor John Davis, from Osgoode Hall Law School. John, as most all of you will know, has been law librarian at the University of Victoria and at Osgoode. It’s a great pleasure to have John with us and I look forward to his contributions, occasional though they may be.

In fact, I think I see one coming up in a matter of moments. . . . [more]

I have observed a lot of frustration lately from various quarters regarding legal seminar providers. While my comments below are directed primarily at commercial seminar providers, these comments may prove useful to other organizations who put on legal seminars. These are changes I, and many others, would like to see:

• Customer service, customer service, customer service! That means answering your phones, returning calls, and responding to email in a timely fashion. Customer service staff should be knowledgable about the seminars you hold, past and upcoming, and the products you sell. I know seminars are always in great demand, but alienating

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Alice Andrew, ten years of age, found a used Tim Horton's coffee cup in a garbage can on her school playground.

Blogs have been abuzz for the last few weeks with one of the worse kept secrets in the technology business — the new Microsoft Origami mini-note computer. Launched at CeBIT Technology Conference in Germany, March 9th, this sub notebook computer creates a newly named category of computers — Ultra-Mobile Personal Computers (UMPCs). [See the Microsoft site for official details] By the way, didn’t anyone tell them this doesn’t conform to the need for a Three Letter Acronym or TLA?

Anyway, heres the skinny on this new device. eWeek reports that:

“The new devices are expected to weigh in at

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Take a look at CultureLibre, a blog en ce qui concerne “Le droit d’auteur, Internet et les bibliothèques par Olivier Charbonneau.” Steve Matthews might consider adding it to his list of Canadian law blogs, though it straddles categories. . . . [more]

The application we used to collaboratively put together the Rothstein Pages, Writely, has now been acquired by Google. Am I disappointed? Sure–is there any web-based application I use that Google doesn’t wind up purchasing? Am I surprised? No, not really. While Writely isn’t (yet) perfect, it is a fabulous tool and I have been using it for a wide range of projects, both individually and collaboratively.

Now, all I need is to develop a great little app that Google will quickly snap up…. . . . [more]