Legal Research

Thirteen Million

Posted on April 16, 2009
The Wall Street Journal has a post today titled The Susan Boyle Bubble. Ms. Boyle was an unknown Scots woman who wowed the panel of judges — including Mr. Nasty Pants Simon Whatshisname — on “Britain’s Got Talent” by belting out an amazing rendition of I Dreamed a Dream from Les Mis...

Google Latitude Is Now Only 99% Creepy

Posted on April 15, 2009
TechCrunch has retweeted (oops, got my social media all confused there) posted a link to a video from CBS5 in San Francisco. Thieves stole a young woman’s purse. Unbeknownst to them, she had Google Latitude installed on her phone — as a “joke” so she and her sisters could stalk each other...

Spamming Twitter Two Different Ways

Posted on April 14, 2009
If you’re 17 and bored, you can exploit “a cross-site scripting vulnerability” (!) so that infected Twitter accounts spam their followers with tweets promoting a Twitter knockoff, StalkDaily.com. Or if you’re a Fortune 500 company — or, to be fair, one of their affiliates — you can use a service called Magpie to send fake tweets [...

They’re Leaving Home After Living Alone For So Many Years (Bye Bye)

Posted on April 14, 2009
On Friday I read a NY Times article about how Skype’s founders are trying to arrange financing so they can buy their Internet-based phone service back from eBay. In 2005 eBay bought Skype for about $3 billion. Then yesterday I read about how StumbleUpon, a Web 2...

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Lawyers at Midlife: Laying the Groundwork for the Road Ahead

Posted on April 13, 2009
By Michael Long, John Clyde, and Pat FunkLawyers at Midlife is a detailed planning guide to help mid-and late-career lawyers lay the financial, medical, and social groundwork for the next chapter of their lives. Library Record • Borrow it • More Titles

Harry Kalas, 1936-2009

Posted on April 13, 2009
Longtime Phillis announcer Harry Kalas collapsed and died today at 1:20 pm. Once more, for old times’ sake: Harry calls the last pitch of the 2008 World Series. Listening to games just won’t be the same any more.

If You Give Me 80 Thou, I’ll Be Glad To Go Away For a Year

Posted on April 13, 2009
Heck, I’ll stay away as long as you want, at least until the money runs out. The NY Times has an interesting article about how Skadden Arps is offering their 1,300 associates a deal: they’ll pay them a third of their base pay if they go away and not cost them any more money for a [...

Don’t Be Coy … Tell Us What You Really Think

Posted on April 09, 2009
Here’s the first paragraph of a Silicon Valley Insider post titled “YouTube Is Doomed“: “YouTube, that incandescent tower of video Babel; monument to the sloughed-off detritus of our exponentially-exploding digital culture; a Technicolor cataract of skateboarding dogs, lip-synching college students, political punditry, and porn; has reached the zenith of its meteoric rise; and Icarus-like, wings melting; [...

It’s Alive. It’s Aliiiiiiiiive!

Posted on April 09, 2009
Elinor Mills is reporting that the Conficker worm has come to life, a week late: “The Conficker worm is finally doing something — updating via peer-to-peer between infected computers and dropping a mystery payload on infected computers, Trend Micro said on Wednesday...

Two Stories I’d Love To Link To [UPDATED]

Posted on April 09, 2009
But since they’re from the Wall Street Journal, which is subscription-only, I can’t. But I can write about them, and include some quotes, which (I guess) makes me an aggregator, so the lynch mob’s probably due here at Jenkins any minute now...

In Only 3 Months, Facebook Gains 50 Million More People With Too Much Time On Their Hands

Posted on April 08, 2009
Back in January I posted about how Facebook was up to 150 million users.  (At the time, they would have been the 8th most populous country, larger than Japan or Russia.) Well, they’ve added another 50 million folks in 3 months, which bumps the People’s Republic of Facebook up 3 notches to #5 in the [...

New iTunes Pricing Now In Effect

Posted on April 08, 2009
Yesterday the new iTunes pricing I wrote about previously went live. I would have loved to perform an in-depth test of it last night, but someone (and she knows who she is) seems to feel our Mac belongs to her and hogged it all evening. So I had to install iTunes on my work laptop [...

Windows XP Is Sort Of Like Freddy Krueger

Posted on April 07, 2009
I couldn’t call it Jason Voorhees, ’cause I used him already for IE6. Anyway, Gizmodo reports that Windows XP will live on — long past its eXPiration date (heh heh) — well into 2010 on certain HP machines. (And not just netbooks, either...

Solo by Choice: How to Be the Lawyer You Always Wanted to Be

Posted on April 06, 2009
By Carolyn ElefantThis book is dedicated to every lawyer who ever wanted to run the show but worried that going solo was career suicide … every lawyer who wanted to solo but didn’t know how to set up the office and make it work … every lawyer who never set foot in a courtroom [...

The Buggy Whip Manufacturers’ Lynch Mob Is Forming [UPDATED]

Posted on April 06, 2009
… And it looks like they’ll head straight for Henry Ford’s house Google. Huh? Here’s a collection of recent articles by outraged folks from what could be termed “buggy whip” industries — those whose business models have been destroyed by new technologies...

Tying Up Loose Ends

Posted on April 06, 2009
In case you still care, here’s a Conficker “eye chart” — if you can see all the images, your PC’s not infected. If not, well get up close and read the fine print. And that deal I mentioned previously? The one that had IBM buying Sun for $7 bil? It’s off (for now)...

U.S. Govt Beginning to Check Airline Passenger Lists; I Feel So Much Safer Now

Posted on April 02, 2009
Wired reports that 4 unnamed airlines are the lucky guinea pigs for the federal government’s Secure Flight program, which has been in the works for about 6 years now: “The program, known as Secure Flight, will require all passengers to provide more information when booking a flight, including their date of birth and gender...

Twitter Announces “Discovery Engine” But Makes Me Wait For It

Posted on April 02, 2009
Yesterday Twitter announced changes to its search engine. Now there’ll be a search box on the sidebar of your home page, rather than a link buried at the bottom. I believe the search engine will default to the accounts you’re following; it’s unclear to me if you’ll be able to broaden it to everyone...

Wanna See a Work of Art?

Posted on April 02, 2009
Here it is. That, my friends, is a typical Google server. That’s what handles your searches for paris hilton. Home made. A model of efficiency. About 1,110 of ‘em are packed into shipping containers. Each Google data center — and there are at least 20 of ‘em worldwide, but nobody knows for sure how many they [...

“Wiki” Isn’t Necessarily a Magic Word

Posted on April 01, 2009
Yesterday Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that he will shut down his new(-ish, it’s about a year old or so) search engine, Wikia Search: “… our project, Wikia Search, has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped...

Wikipedia Forces Microsoft To Surrender

Posted on March 31, 2009
Ars Technica reports that Microsoft will discontinue their Encarta encyclopedia on October 31, 2009. Here’s what they said: “Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed...

Ten Years Of Bullet Time

Posted on March 31, 2009
Wired reports that today is the 10th anniversary of the release of The Matrix. The other 2 movies in the trilogy sort of lost their way, but the original sure changed the way we looked at cyberpunk.

Google Decides To Give Money Away

Posted on March 31, 2009
Google has announced Google Ventures, a venture capital fund that they will use to fund promising start-ups: “We’ll be focusing on early stage investments across a diverse range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and, no doubt, other areas we haven’t thought of yet...

Editorial Note

Posted on March 31, 2009
Due to a shocking lack of editorial oversight, the name of a certain Internet worm has been misspelled from time to time in four posts from this blog. The posts have all been corrected. The editor in charge has been disciplined. Dan Giancaterino, naturally, is not at fault...

Yes, They Launched On April Fool’s Day

Posted on March 31, 2009
Gmail was born on April 1, 2004 — here’s the earliest version I could find at the Internet Archive — an interesting day to launch a new product. On the eve of its fifth birthday, Todd Jackson, Gmail Product Manager, gave an interview with the folks at Ars Technica...

Tomorrow’s The Day For Skype On The iPhone

Posted on March 30, 2009
Wired reports that Skype will announce a version of its software for iPhones on Tuesday. Your VoIP calls will be free to other Skype users; if you call a landline, you’ll pay the same rates as you would with SkypeOut on your PC. The Skype app will even recognize the numbers in your iPhone address [...

Guide to Representing Religious Organizations

Posted on March 30, 2009
By Lisa A. Runquist, Jeannie Carmedelle FreyThe book addresses critical issues and risk factors of concern for religious organizations ranging from formation and governance, to taxes, fundraising and employment issues, and property rights. It outlines the general requirements of applicable law and highlights areas in which religious organizations receive special consideration under the law...

If You Can Read This Then My CAPTCHA Isn’t Squiggly Enough

Posted on March 30, 2009
David Pogue ranted last Friday about CAPTCHAs, those codes you have to enter on certain Websites so that they know you’re a human and not a bot. He even points us to a Website with examples of CAPTCHAs even humans couldn’t decipher. Only a geek would know that CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public [...

Conficker Specifically Targets Jenkins … Site Down … Employees Reduced To Playing Solitaire On Computers

Posted on March 30, 2009
Sorry … Just warming up for Wednesday, the day that the Cornficker worm’s supposed to go nuclear. There’s been a fair amount of buzz about Cornficker — some of it from yours truly — but apparently 60 Minutes went over the top last night...

Sending Tweets At 65 MPH

Posted on March 30, 2009
Apparently in the near future, cars equipped with OnStar will allow you to send and receive Tweets. They’ll be converted to and from text using voice recognition technology. Given my experiences with people trying to multi-task while driving, I’m not exactly thrilled by this.

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