Anyone following me online right now knows that I’m currently on the West coast. Considering that last year I mentioned that social media can potentially affect home insurance premiums, why aren’t I being more surreptitious about my travels?

For me it probably has a lot to do with the net worth of all of my belongings at home being no more than a few hundred dollars on the Craigslist or Kijiji markets. But not everyone lives so sparse, and there are some emerging solutions to help mitigate the risk of robbery when people are posting their travels. . . . [more]

From Dr. M Veerappa Moily, the Centre’s Minister of Law & Justice comes a Press Release:

The scope of this program is creation and management of the ‘National Legal e-library’ for 933 schools in India, Bar Associations, Government Legal departments etc. and meet the needs of academic librarians, students, faculty and young practitioners. It aims to provide a practitioners view and a comprehensive understanding of core subject areas of law.

Various technology tools that make the concept of E-Library indispensable are Easy Access to provide a campus wide access using IP Authentication, Results clustering to familiarize new users

. . . [more]

In a recent training session I attended, I was surprised to hear how many of the participants indicated that, to control business-related driving hazards, they use global positioning systems, or GPS, to help keep track of their employees, whether using an employer-provided vehicle or personal vehicle.

Every now and again judges have to deal with unrepresented plaintiffs. Sometimes there’s a good reason why P couldn’t find representation. That will usually make the judge’s job harder.

Consider this description of of a recent claim. The amount claimed was a 200 hundred million. There’s no indication why the plaintiff chose that figure.

The action arises from the purchase of a … refrigerator by the Plaintiff on or about September 25, 1999.

P alleges as against the defendants defective repair service, electronic surveillance by the defendants of the plaintiff, theft via Internet of his personal files, data and emails,

. . . [more]

NOTICE: The Washington and Lee Current Law Journal Content service that was providing data for this page has stopped publication. Various groups in Canada are working on replacement services for Canadian law journals. The data below was provided by the Bora Laskin Law Library, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, and offers content published as of May 2011.

• Alberta Law Review (v. 48, no. 3 2011)
• Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice (v. 53, no. 2, 2011)
• Canadian Journal of Women and the Law (v. 23, no. 1, 2011)
• Canadian Tax Journal (Volume 23, no. 1, 2011)

. . . [more]

January was all about lists. Every blog, publication, and column uses this season to either reflect on the year that was or look ahead to the year that will be – and I want in on the prognosticating party. Thus I give to you, fair SLAW reader, my picks and predictions for the top five trends to watch in Canadian criminal justice in 2011. To build the anticipation, I have listed my picks in reverse order. No cheating by scrolling straight to the bottom of the page.

5. Increased emphasis on case management.

For a number of years, governments have . . . [more]

This week in biotech was all about surveillance:

Two Toronto scientists studied over two million tweets to assess the social network’s value as a public health surveillance tool and came away impressed. Even though social networks open some completely new avenues to gathering data and interacting, for the most part they are just valuable tools for use in traditional processes according to a recent Deloitte report. and .

MaRS CEO Ilse Treurnicht, doing a bit of surveillance of her own on some publication surveillance data, noted that China is now second in publication of biomedical research articles globally . . . [more]

I don’t know if this letter is a significantly new version – I haven’t seen it before and am too lazy to check the scam information sites – but it’s the first time I’ve seen it. It’s worth a read and giggle. It’s the version of the scam that involves scammning the mark by warning him or her that there are scams out there. In this version, the mark is explicitly told that he or she has to travel to Nigeria to get the money. . . . [more]

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) released last month a report out of the Oversight and Review Division, Office of the Inspector General (OIG). The mandate of the OIG is to conduct independent investigations and special reviews of DOJ personnel and programs. The purpose of this 200-page redacted report, A Review of the FBI’s Investigations of Certain Domestic Advocacy Groups, was to respond to media reports and Congressional inquiries alleging that the FBI had improperly targeted domestic advocacy groups between 2001-2006bsolely based on their peaceful exercise of their First Amendment Rights.

Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren’s letter to the . . . [more]

The Open Net Initiative has new internet censorship maps up identifying which popular social media sites are blocked and partially censored around the world. I did not know, for instance, That Mexico censors Flickr and Youtube.

This complements their more general map, which tracks a number of broad categories of censorship.

About the ONI:

The OpenNet Initiative is a collaborative partnership of three institutions: the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto; the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; and the SecDev Group (Ottawa).

Our aim is to investigate, expose and

. . . [more]

Legal Watch blog recently reported that Apple has applied for a patent on technology that, among other things, would allow Apple to identify and punish users who “jailbreak” or unlock their iPhones or who otherwise tamper with their devices against Apple policy.

I recently read a biometrics-related article on CNET News (I am obsessed with the subject) indicating that a group of Japanese railway companies has installed 27 facial recognition-enabled billboards in subway stations around Tokyo as a one-year pilot project that will collect data on passersby in order to tailor advertisements to them in real time.