Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Category Archives: Recommended Books

Hitting the Books: How the ‘Godfather of Cybercrime’ got his start on eBay

Engadget – “From bunk Beanie Babies to signal-stealing cable boxes, Brett Johnson has scammed them all. The internet has connected nearly everybody on the planet to a global network of information and influence, enabling humanity’s best and brightest minds unparalleled collaborative capabilities. At least that was the idea, more often than not these days, it serves as a popular medium for scamming your more terminally-online relatives out of large sums of money. Just ask Brett Johnson, a reformed scam artist who at his rube-bilking pinnacle, was good at separating fools from their cash that he founded an entire online learning forum to train a new generation of digital scam artist. Johnson’s cautionary tale in one of many in the new book, Fool Me Once: Scams, Stories, and Secrets from the Trillion-Dollar Fraud Industry, from Harvard Business Review Press. In it, Professor of Forensic Accounting at DePaul University, Dr. Kelly Richmond Pope, chronicles some of the 20th and 21st century’s most heinous financial misdeeds — from Bernie Madoff’s pyramid schemes to Enron and VW, and all the Nigerian Princes in between — exploring how the grifts worked and why they often left their marks none the wiser…”

This Is Why You Feel Existential Dread When You Open Instagram and TikTok

Gizmodo: “In Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities, David Auerbach argues the the distinctly modern feeling of a loss of control over our lives is the result of these new online forces. The vast influence of Facebook, Google, TikTok, and other tech giants is neither in the… Continue Reading

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm

London Review of Book, Laleh Khalili – “When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe. Bodley Head, 354 pp., £20, October, 978 1 84792 625 8: “…Bogdanich and Forsythe’s​ book is a damning account of the way McKinsey has made workplaces unsafe, ditched consumer protections, disembowelled regulatory agencies,… Continue Reading

Data Cartels

Data Cartels The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information. Sarah Lamdan is Professor of Law at the City University of New York School of Law: “In our digital world, data is power. Information hoarding businesses reign supreme, using intimidation, aggression, and force to maintain influence and control. Sarah Lamdan brings us into the unregulated… Continue Reading

Restating the Law in the Shadow of Codes: The ALI in Its Formative Era, in The American Law Institute at 100: A Centennial History

DeMott, Deborah, Restating the Law in the Shadow of Codes: The ALI in Its Formative Era, in The American Law Institute at 100: A Centennial History (Andrew S. Gold & Robert W. Gordon eds) forthcoming 2023, Oxford University Press (August 28, 2022). Duke Law School Public Law & Legal Theory Series No. 2022-53, Available at… Continue Reading

Book Review – A Sober Look at the ‘Cartoonishly Chaotic’ Trump White House

The New York Times: “In The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, political journalists keep their cool as they chronicle the outrageous conduct and ugly infighting that marked a presidency like no other. If “The Divider” has a dominant theme, it may be the struggle within the “almost… Continue Reading

A Prehistory of Social Media

Driscoll, Kevin. “A Prehistory of Social Media.” Issues in Science and Technology 38, no. 4 (Summer 2022): 20–23. “The standard account of internet history took shape in the early 1990s, as a mixture of commercial online services, university networks, and local community networks mutated into something bigger, more commercial, and more accessible to the general… Continue Reading

Why you (probably) won’t finish reading this story

Vox: “We live in a distracted world, almost certainly the most distracted world in human history. And if you’re part of this circus, you’re drowning in options and gadgets and screens and you’re being pulled in a million directions seemingly all at once. If you spend any time online, you already know this. You’re constantly… Continue Reading

The Propagandists’ Playbook How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy

“The Propagandists’ Playbook by Francesca Bolla Tripodi, assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a research affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute. “The Propagandists’ Playbook peels back the layers of the right-wing media manipulation machine to reveal why its strategies are so… Continue Reading