The Florida State College of Law Research Center Blog

Pharos Print System

For students at FSU Law School, instructions and drivers for the Pharos Print System have been updated and now support Mac users.  They are here: http://csserver10.csb.fsu.edu/new.html

Posted by Jon Lutz

Free App Offers iPhone CLE Courses

The iPhone is now offering a free app for CLE courses, the ABA Journal Law News Now reports. Here's an excerpt:

Lawyers looking for continuing legal education credit can download a new app that allows them to find courses, listen to audio programs and access materials on their iPhone and iPod touch.

Users can set up a free account at West LegalEdcenter to buy programs that can be downloaded using the free app, known as CLE Mobile, according to a Thomson Reuters press release. More than 2,000 audio courses are available.

But don’t think that you can get credit just by downloading CLE programs. The app tracks and ensures that the program has played, and randomly verifies interaction in states that require the feature...

Read more here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

News Corp Considering Blocking Google

News Corp. is considering blocking Google's search engine as reported by Bloomberg.com.  Here's an excerpt:

News Corp. is considering blocking Google’s search engine from displaying its news articles and is talking to Microsoft Corp. about displaying stories on its Bing site, people familiar with the situation said yesterday.

Read the Bloomberg article here.

Read a cnet news article here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

How Google Wave is Changing the News

Mashable has an interesting article online about how Google Wave is changing the news.  Here's an excerpt:

Andrew Nystrom, senior producer of social media and emerging platforms at the Los Angeles Times, collaborated with social media reporter Mark Milian on the blog post “How Google Wave Could Transform Journalism” that ran on the newspaper’s web site a couple of months ago.

Among some of the ideas listed in the post were: collaborative reporting, smarter story updates, live editing, discussing while reading, and a transparent writing process. Nystrom said in an email interview they’re looking at all the potential uses that Milian posited in the blog post. In a case of “eating his own dogfood,” so to speak, Milian even embedded the post as a wave and it has since received more than 350 blips.

“That experiment was definitely an eye-opener. My understanding of Wave has always been that it’s a valuable tool for small-team collaboration. So to see it succeed as a larger-scale crowdsourcing tool was unexpected to say the least,” Milian said by email. “People quickly swarmed the wave and provided a ton of really smart insights. Things we had never thought of.”

Read more here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz 

Broadband Internet is Now a Legal Right in Finland

Finland has become the first country to declare Internet access a legal right.  Here's an excerpt from Mashable:

The EU Parliament has on several occasions stated that access to the Internet is one of basic human rights. Now, Finland has become the first country to actually declare fast (broadband) Internet access a legal right.

In practice, this means that telecom companies in Finland will be required to provide all Finnish citizens – all 5.3 million of them – with broaband Internet connection of at least 1 Mbps, starting in July.

Read more here.  

Posted by Jon Lutz

Why the White House is Hiring a Social Media Archivist

The Whitehouse is attempting to archive its social media content.  Here's an excerpt describing what they are trying to do:

“In order to comply with the Presidential Records Act, the White House New Media team is looking for a non personal service contractor to crawl and archive PRA content on all third party sites where the EOP has a presence (i.e. Facebook.com/whitehouse, Twitter.com/whitehouse). Currently, the Government team is capturing the data and content both programmatically (via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from social networks) and manually (through daily screen shots). EOP requires a provider to ensure we automatically capture this content in a scalable, efficient and reliable manner.”

Read more here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Appeals Court Throws Out $358 Million Verdict in Microsoft Case

A federal appeals court on Friday affirmed a jury verdict that Microsoft, with their Outlook calendar function, infringed an Alcatel-Lucent patent, but ruled that the $358 million dollars awarded to the software company was excessive.

Read more about the case:
From : WSJ | Bloomberg | PCWorld

Posted by Jon Lutz

Hackers Routinely Sell E-Mail Passwords

From the ABAJournal Law News Now Hackers Routinely Sell E-Mail Passwords with Virtual Impunity; here's an excerpt:

Think you're personal e-mail's secure? Think again.

Hackers can obtain virtually anyone's password, experts say, and the penalties for doing so, in the rare cases that are prosecuted, ordinarily provide little or no protection, according to the Washington Post.

Those who wish to obtain someone else's e-mail password can purchase it through a variety of online services that advertise openly on the Internet, the newspaper states.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Microsoft Wins Emergency Stay of Judge’s Ban on Word Product Sales

From the ABAJournal Law News Now Microsoft Wins Emergency Stay of Judge's Ban on Word Sales.  Here's an excerpt:

A federal appeals court has granted Microsoft's emergency appeal of a Texas federal judge's order that would have banned the computer Goliath from continuing to sell some Word software products next month unless they could be reconfigured to avoid infringing on a Canadian company's patent.

In a ruling late yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit stayed the U.S. District Court order. Meanwhile, a fast-track appeal on the merits continues, with oral arguments scheduled for Sept. 23, reports Computerworld.

Both Dell and Hewlett Packard filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the appeal, arguing that the Word revisions required by U.S. District Court Judge Leonard Davis would also require extensive, time-consuming work on their own part to reconfigure personal computers that use Word software.

Read the article online here.  

Posted by Jon Lutz

Computer Hacker Albert Gonzales Indictment

In what is probably the biggest identity theft prosecution in US history, computer hacker Albert Gonzales has been indicted.  His hacking may have exposed data from as many as 130 million credit and debit cards. 

You can see the indictment here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz