We’ve all used work e-mail for personal stuff, haven’t we? You know: connecting with college friends, organizing family reunions, and making appointments with our lawyers, right?
Wait a second….what was that last thing?
If you live in Northern California, take note: a state appeals court just ruled that an employee’s attorney-client e-mails that use his employer’s company e-mail account are not protected, confidential communications.
On Monday, Gabriel Saldana offered some social media privacy tips for stalking victims. His advice about quitting Facebook is on the mark, and not just for people victimized by stalkers. While Facebook is a popular gateway into a virtual world of friends, status updates, and likes, it may also serve as a social engineering Trojan horse for those seeking to do you harm.
Consider the following security questions that banks and other financial institutions often use to safeguard your account?
We’ve come a long way from a parking garage in Virginia. While some of our readers may already know of MapLight.org, I wanted to make special note of this terrific site that tracks the connection between money and politics, especially in light of recent reports that corporate contributions have surged to the new Republican leaders of the 112th Congress.
MapLight helps citizens hold their legislators accountable by creating an easy interface to drill down and research the relationship between campaign contributions made by lobbyists and corporations to specific lawmakers on the one hand, and the votes these legislators make for or against specific bills on the other. Users can follow the money trail in a variety of ways. If you have a specific bill you’re interested in, you can search for it, or also quickly access “Bills in the News.” For instance, check out the page for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act where you can track the total contributions made on either side of the bill, look at “$ Near Votes” which provides total contributions given to House members within 30 days of the vote, or review charts and graphs generated by this data for some interesting visuals.
Comedians, satirists, and Fake Steve’s everywhere, take note: under California’s new anti-Internet impersonation law, you want to make sure that you show your intent to tickle your reader’s funny bones on the Web.
That’s because under California Penal Code Section 528.5, someone who “knowingly and without consent” uses the Internet to “credibly impersonate[] another actual person” with the intent of “harming, intimidating, threatening, or defrauding another person is guilty of a misdemeanor.”
Some high-profile personalities and companies in California could put the new law through its paces in court. Here’s why.
Lately, I’ve been playing around with the Books Ngram Viewer from Google Labs. This experimental site displays how often searched phrases appear in publications scanned by the Google Books project over time.
For example, open government really jumped in the 1970s.
And, as you may have deduced, it correlates with the rise and fall of Nixon.
British authorities arrested Wiikileaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange on Tuesday based upon a Swedish warrant charging him with sexually assaulting two women there over the summer.
Assange’s arrest, along with decisions by technology companies, finance companies, and banks to distance themselves from the document-leaking web site he founded, have placed Wikileaks in a difficult position. Will the site remain under constant threat of being booted off the web?
Probably, but that just doesn’t appear likely to happen. Once Wikileaks started sharing documents with journalists around the world, it guaranteed that removing the diplomatic cables would be impossible.
Amazon evicted Wikileaks from the company’s servers, telling the group to look for hosting space elsewhere.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, but there’s still time to get terrific gifts for lawyers and clients. Here are some of our favs:
Last week, Tim and I had the chance to attend a panel discussion at Stanford titled, “The Open Government Initiative and the Promise of a Transparent Government.” The panel reviewed various U.S. and international initiatives designed to get citizens more engaged with their government via transparency, collaboration and participation. Of particular interest to us, given Justia’s focus on law.gov, was listening to the panelists share their thoughts on the challenges faced by groups both in and outside government as they work toward collecting and turning raw government data into usable information, processes and systems. The general consensus is that we still have a long way to go, but it was heartening to hear more about some of the exciting things going on related to the transformation of our civic culture. As an added bonus, after the discussion we had dinner with Daniel Schuman, one of panelists and the policy counsel at the Sunlight Foundation, and Stanford friends Vicky Reich and James Jacobs. It was great to sit down and talk about different ways Justia might help in their efforts to bring more transparency to government. Stay tuned. . .
Also, check out the conference proceedings from the International Open Government Data Conference, the first event of its kind, being held right now in Washington, D.C., November 15 -17.
In light of Justia’s commitment to “free law”, we wanted to make sure to note last week’s announcement that Google, in partnership with the USPTO, now provides bulk access to current US patent applications and grants. As noted by Richard Jefferson in his “Science as Social Enterprise” blog, until recently the bulk data available to users was incomplete in that it did not contain 2010 materials. However, users can now download comprehensive 2010 “Redbook” format data for free, considered the “gold standard” of patent data (and previously sold for thousands of dollars). Check what’s available in USPTO bulk downloads on Google yourself or search the entire image database of U.S. patents from 1790s to the present at Google patents.
Related Press Releases / Articles
“USPTO Teams with Google to Provide Bulk Patent and Trademark Data to the Public”
It’s election day and all of us here at Justia hope you get out and vote! Given that we’ll have a new Congress at the beginning of the year, we’d like to point you to some iPhone apps you can download to keep informed on what’s going on in the U.S. Senate and House. Note: All of these apps are FREE.
C-Span Radio – Listen to Congressional hearings along with audio streams of public affairs programming from C-SPAN Radio, C-SPAN and C-SPAN2.
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