July 24th 2008
The Sanfrancisco Chronicle reports that after a secret visit by the mayor of San Francisco, the network administrator who locked the cities technology staff out of the network surrendered his password. See earlier coverage of this story. Terry Child’s defense attorney, Erin Crane, claimed that Mr. Childs was merely protecting the network from incompetent staff, […]
July 24th 2008
Slydial is a free voice message service that directly connects you to someone else’s mobile voicemail. Their phone never rings, and you get to leave a message without actually speaking with them. (Wait for the legal angle; it’s coming.) Their wonderfully written weasely website spells it right out. There are people you must phone: bosses, significant others, […]
July 23rd 2008
Do You Own What You Buy? Increasingly, it seems that we no longer own our own stuff. Is Your Website Yours? Are we getting used to governments seeking to regulate websites? If I own or rent a server, and pay to connect it to a private network so that other users can access my private […]
July 23rd 2008
James Boyd White is a distinguished professor of Law and English at the University of Michigan. In the spirit of Erazim Kohak, his recent talk on Law, Economics and Torture admonishes us against reducing life, democracy or law to mere economics, and to resist this trend when it is presented as inevitable. Long ago I […]
July 22nd 2008
Last week, the whistle-blower site Wikileaks published a confidential 2006 contract in which Venezuelan and Cuban firms agreed to lay an undersea fiberoptic cable connecting the countries. The cable is to be completed by 2010. Among the agreement’s stated objectives is to build a relationship of “strategic value,” which will permit Cuba and Venezuela to […]
July 21st 2008
Prof. Michael Scott of Southwestern Law School has started four microblogs that send out breaking headlines in law news categories. You can subscribe to these via RSS, or use Twitter to get links as Professor Scott finds them. Check out InternetLaw, CopyrightLaw, PrivacyLaw, and LawProf, his personal tweets. I narrowly escaped a Twitter invervention, aimed […]
July 21st 2008
2008 has had a string of huge spam convictions. Sanford Wallace and crew gathered $230 million in fines, while “Spam King” Robert Soloway faces extended jail time. Now Adam Vitale will receive 30 months in prison and $183,000 due in restitution to AOL for a week of spamming back in 2005. Yes, the wheels of justice grind slowly, […]
July 20th 2008
About twenty years ago. I was fortunate to study the social psychology theory of Lay Epistemology with a student of its developer, Arie Kruglanski. Thirty or so social media experts joined me for a discussion at Podcamp, taking place at Harvard Medical School, to introduce this remarkably durable theory as one way to assess and plan influential marketing communications. […]
July 19th 2008
I’m a believer that innovation is driven by communities. The friendships we make with smart creative people can do more to drive our success in business and life than any new technology or tactic. Wow, this is such a theme in my life, and I bet yours too. Read about it as it happens So, […]
July 19th 2008
Do you remember last month’s post about the toy designer who wiped his laptop with Evidence Eliminator before providing it for discovery? That didn’t help enough. The jury’s back; Mattel won. MGA Entertainment, the maker of the Bratz, is liable for copyright infringement and contract interference. Now the penalty phase of the trial begins. The […]
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