Legal Research

Cuil Has Tanked (In Case You Actually Care)

Posted on December 30, 2008
Cuil, the new search engine that launched in July with massive media hype, is getting almost no search traffic, reports TechCrunch.  I’m not surprised — it was almost unusable when I tested it.  Apparently, I wasn’t the only one, either...

Money For Nothing

Posted on December 30, 2008
Last month my son — Mr. Monosyllabic — set the family record for text messages: 5,001.  If I hadn’t already surrendered to inevitability back in the spring and agreed to shell out $30 a month for unlimited texting, he would have dinged me for $1,000...

Garner on Language and Writing

Posted on December 29, 2008
By Bryan A. GarnerIn her foreword, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declares the book to be “a ‘must read’ primer” for her law clerks. Anyone with a lively interest in language, writing, and law will find this book hard to lay aside...

A Lean Christmas For Google Staff

Posted on December 23, 2008
No cash bonuses for them this year — the company’s stock is trading at less than 50% of what it was last year.  So they only get a free G1 phone. I’m sorry, but they shouldn’t kvetch, for the following reasons: (a) 570,000 people are unemployed, the highest number in more than 25 years (b) The G1’s a [...

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PACER Turns Twenty [UPDATED]

Posted on December 22, 2008
Here’s an article from The Third Branch celebrating PACER’s 20th birthday.  Usage is up, way up: in 2008 alone, they added more than 130,000 new users. Even though Carl Malamud of public.resource.org thinks PACER is “broken” and suffers from a “mainframe mentality”, the system is still innovating: “The latest enhancement to the PACER system is the availability [...

The Little Red Book of Wine Law: a Case of Legal Issues

Posted on December 21, 2008
By Carol RobertsonWine is a great passion of many professionals and this book takes an interesting look at how law and the wine have intersected, sometimes with very interesting results. In this book you’ll find a number of fascinating stories that examine the various legal concepts that are related to wine, vineyards, and wine-drinking, [...

YouTube’s Now The Second-Largest Search Engine

Posted on December 19, 2008
It says so right here: 2.7 billion searches in November, about a quarter of all Google-based searches, and more searches than Yahoo. And Google’s starting to figure out how to monetize YouTube.  According to CNET, Universal Music Group (one of the Big 4 labels) is receiving “tens of millions of dollars” is advertising revenues from YouTube...

No Color Monitor. No Hard Disk. No Keyboard. But It Had Switches and Blinky Lights.

Posted on December 19, 2008
Thirty-four years ago today the world’s first commercially-successful personal computer, the Altair 8800, officially went on sale.  (Notice I didn’t say “world’s first personal computer”.  Obsessive techno-nerds get all manner of cranky when you call it the first PC...

HHS Secretary’s Blog

Posted on December 19, 2008
I recently (yes, I know, better late than never) discovered (stumbled upon) Mike Leavitt’s blog. He is the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. I must say that I am impressed that a member of the President’s cabinet has a blog that he writes himself so that he can [...

Yahoo To Anonymize Data After 90 Days

Posted on December 18, 2008
Yahoo has announced a new anonymizing policy — by mid-2010 they’ll begin scrubbing search logs after 90 days.  According to the NY Times: “Under Yahoo’s new policy, the company will strip out portions of users’ IP addresses, alter small tracking files known as ”cookies” and delete other potential personally identifiable information after 90 days in most [...

Steve Deserts Us In Our Hour Of Need

Posted on December 18, 2008
The economy’s tanked.  January’s short, cold days loom ahead.  Could it get any gloomier? Yup … Steve Jobs won’t be giving any more keynotes at Macworld. Not this year.  Not ever. Hyperventilation ensued after the announcement by Apple on Tuesday...

Yahoo Tries To Get All Facebooky With Its New Smarter Inbox

Posted on December 16, 2008
Yesterday Yahoo announced its new Smarter Inbox, which adds a whole bunch of social networking stuff to your email account.  I haven’t used it, since it’s in a limited beta right now, but from what I can tell it looks like they simply duct-taped some of the features that Facebook popularized — friend invitations and [...

69% Of You Have A Problem [UPDATED]

Posted on December 16, 2008
That would be all of you IE users.  There’s a serious security flaw that hasn’t been patched.  Wired reports that there’s already been an exploit aimed at stealing passwords for games.  But you can bet there’ll be others coming along that will look for other, more lucrative stuff, such as credit card numbers...

An Australian Couple Got Served Papers. Thankfully All I Got Was A Lousy Cowbell.

Posted on December 16, 2008
When my daughter found out I had a Facebook profile, she said hello by sending me a cowbell.  (Cute … but useless.)  Then she friended me.  (Awwwwww.) Anyway, last week an Australian couple in default on a home loan were served a default judgement via Facebook after attempts to reach them at their home, and via [...

50 Unique Legal Paths: How to Find the Right Job

Posted on December 15, 2008
By Ursula Furi-PerryOne of the best-kept secrets about the law degree is its versatility. Few degrees can match the 600 career tracks that can be followed upon its receipt. Today’s world requires increased flexibility, and a law degree can provide diverse career choices and many legal paths that still allow you to impact the [...

The Perils of Self-Diagnosis via the Web

Posted on December 15, 2008
A recent study by Microsoft Research reports on the perils of cyberchondria, which the study defines as “the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology”, e.g. assuming the worst while attempting to diagnose your own health problems by searching the Web...

Another Article About Carl Malamud

Posted on December 12, 2008
Back in September I blogged about a couple of articles on Carl Malamud, the driving force behind public.resource.org.  Today Wired has another profile of Mr. Malamud.  It’s an interesting read.  Here are two pithy quotes I’d like to share with you: “The PACER system is the most broken part of our federal legal mechanism...

Hard Drives: Present and Future

Posted on December 11, 2008
Whether you store all your data locally (on your desktop computer or laptop) or keep it on the Cloud, it’s gonna live on a hard disk somewhere.  Two articles I stumbled upon today summarize the present and future of hard disk technology.  First, Gizmodo demystifies the current technology...

Gmail Adds a Slew of New Features, Pushes Me to the Brink

Posted on December 11, 2008
… To the brink of giving up my Yahoo mail account, which I’ve used for a decade, that is.  I’ve resisted switching over to Gmail just because I don’t want my eggs in one basket, but since I’ve recently gotten a G1 Android phone, which requires a Gmail account to activate it, I think the [...

Google Further Fragments Itself

Posted on December 09, 2008
Google announced today that they’ve begun digitizing millions of article from magazines such as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony.  The articles are part of Google Book Search.  If you want to search ‘em specifically, Google advises that you use the GBS Advanced Page, which now has a Magazines radio button in the Content [...

Buyer’s Remorse? Nah.

Posted on December 09, 2008
It’s been a week since I got my T-Mobile G1, the Google Android phone.  I’m really pleased.  I don’t regret passing on the iPhone 3G.  The G1 feels a lot like my Linux desktop — it’s different enough from Windows that you notice, but everything works together perfectly...

40th Anniversary Of The Mother Of All Demos [UPDATED]

Posted on December 09, 2008
It was 40 years ago today that Doug Engelbart introduced the world to the wonders of the computer mouse, hypertext, video- and teleconferencing, and more.  The 90 minute presentation, part of the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, stunned attendees, and was dubbed The Mother of all Demos by Steven Levy in his book [...

Easy Ways to Lower Your Taxes: Simple Strategies Every Taxpayer Should Know

Posted on December 08, 2008
By Sandra Block, Stephen FishmanEasy Ways to Lower Your Taxes provides legitimate tactics and useful insights that can really lower your tax bill without running afoul of the IRS.  Each rule is accompanied by excerpts, strategies, ideas, and real-world examples, plus information on retirement plans, home mortgages, student loans, charitable contributions, medical expenses, and [...

Etiquette Traps, And How To Avoid Them

Posted on December 08, 2008
Yesterday Michael Smerconish published a column about Facebook.  He’s skeptical about its value.  According to Michael, “Texting is for chicks, Facebook is for teens, and nobody is going to convince me otherwise.” Hmm … interesting perspective...

Tweets From Mars

Posted on December 08, 2008
The Discovery Channel has a short article about the Mars Phoenix Lander’s Twitter stream.  NASA staffer Veronica McGregor hit on a brilliant idea: use Twitter to send short, 140 character updates about the lander’s progress to thousands of interested people...

DoJ Was 3 Hours Away From Stating The Obvious

Posted on December 04, 2008
… That the Google-Yahoo advertising deal would make Google a monopoly.  From an interview in The Am Law Daily with Sandy Litvack, lead counsel for the government: “We were going to file the complaint at a certain time during the day … We told them we were going to file the complaint at that time of [...

New Domain: .Tel

Posted on December 03, 2008
The NY Times reports that there’s a new domain, .tel, which will allow you to store your contact info — email address, Skype address, cellphone number, work phone number, location, keywords, and more.  According to the article, .net “has the potential to become a phone book for the Internet...

iPhone Lawsuit Update

Posted on December 03, 2008
Back in late summer a couple of lawsuits were filed over the iPhone’s tendency to drop calls and suffer other network-related problems.  Well, the Empire has Struck Back.  According to Wired, in an answer to the one of the suits, Apple has stated that: “Plaintiff’s claims, and those of the purported class, are barred by the [...

Tops Hits, 2008

Posted on December 03, 2008
Search engine end-of-year “top lists” can be pretty darn boring.  Number one at Yahoo this year?  Britney Spears.  Do I care?  No.  (Here’s the list for Ask.com.  Google’s isn’t out yet, but it’ll be available here soon...

Google Walks The Tightrope

Posted on December 03, 2008
There was a great article in the NY Times on Sunday about the challenges Google faces as it becomes the world’s Internet gatekeeper.  It focused especially on YouTube — which is ground zero for Google’s free-speech battle — and noted Google’s attempts to satisfy takedown requests made by countries such as Turkey and Thailand, as [...

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