Cory Doctorow – Boing Boing – A tip on how to keep your name and address off the internet. “There are dozens of free “peoplefinder” sites that buy up commercial databases and combine them with other sources to make your home address searchable. You can find instances where this has happened to you by googling… Continue Reading
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Monthly Archives: August 2019
Update Windows 10 Immediately, Warns Microsoft
Fortune: “Microsoft is sounding a red alert to Windows 10 users, warning them to update their operating systems immediately. The company, in a blog post Tuesday, warned of two “critical” vulnerabilities that rival the previous “BlueKeep” crisis. As with that bug, the new issues are described as “wormable,” meaning hackers could use them to spread… Continue Reading
The Regulation of Cryptocurrencies – Between a Currency and a Financial Product
Jabotinsky, Hadar Yoana, The Regulation of Cryptocurrencies – Between a Currency and a Financial Product (February 7, 2018). Hebrew University of Jerusalem Legal Research Paper No. 18-10. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3119591 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3119591 – “As cryptocurrencies gain popularity, the issue of how to regulate them becomes more pressing. The attractiveness of cryptocurrencies is due in… Continue Reading
Google open-sources Live Transcribe’s speech engine
VentureBeat: “Google today open-sourced the speech engine that powers its Android speech recognition transcription tool Live Transcribe. The company hopes doing so will let any developer deliver captions for long-form conversations. The source code is available now on GitHub. Google released Live Transcribe in February. The tool uses machine learning algorithms to turn audio into… Continue Reading
To Everything There Is a Season
The American Archivist, Frank J. Boles: “Three ideas, not always juxtaposed to one another in the literature, have had a pro-found impact on what archivists preserve. The ideas that archivists should create a universal record of human activity, that social justice should inform archival selec-tion decisions, and that archivists hold a unique form of power… Continue Reading
5 times when using paper and a pen is better than using an app
FastCompany: “We’re living in a digital world—one where screens dominate our time. The average American adult spends three hours and 43 minutes on mobile devices, according to 2019 research by eMarketer. This doesn’t include the time spent on a computer at work or parked in front of the television at home. It’s easy to find… Continue Reading
ABA Profile of the Profession 2019 Survey
“The growth of the legal industry has slowed in recent years, according to the 2019 ABA National Lawyer Population Survey, a tally of lawyers by every state bar association and licensing agency.In the past year, from 2018 to 2019, the number of active lawyers grew 0.7%. It was the third time in the past four… Continue Reading
The Version Museum
Kottke.org: “The mission of Version Museum is to record and present what the interfaces of software and websites looked like, from their earliest versions until now. The site’s tagline is “a visual history of your favorite technology”. Here’s the history of Facebook; …The collection isn’t huge, but the father/son team behind it hits the high… Continue Reading
Amazon launching new program to donate unsold products after reports millions were destroyed
CNBC: “Amazon wants its third-party sellers to make better use of their unsold or unwanted products that often get dumped — by giving them away to charity. Amazon is launching a new donations program, called Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) Donations, for third-party sellers that store their inventory in Amazon’s warehouses in the U.S. and UK,… Continue Reading
Was E-mail a Mistake? The mathematics of distributed systems suggests that meetings might be better
The New Yorker: “The walls of the Central Intelligence Agency’s original headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, contain more than thirty miles of four-inch steel tubing. The tubes were installed in the early nineteen-sixties, as part of an elaborate, vacuum-powered intra-office mail system. Messages, sealed in fibreglass containers, rocketed at thirty feet a second among approximately a… Continue Reading
Danah Boyd on the Spread of Conspiracies and Hate Online
PBS – “Danah Boyd is a senior researcher at Microsoft and founder of the research institute “Data & Society,” where she studies how media manipulators may be responsible for mass shootings and other crisis events. She sat down with Hari Sreenivasan to explain how digital media amplifies the spread of false information…” Continue Reading
ABA Votes to Urge Legal Profession to Address Emerging Legal and Ethical Issues of AI
Robert Ambrogi – LawSites: “The American Bar Association’s House of Delegates, its policy-making body, voted this week to approve a resolution urging courts and lawyers to address the emerging ethical and legal issues related to the usage of artificial intelligence in the practice of law. Among the AI-related issues the profession should address, the ABA… Continue Reading
