I just received an e-mail purporting to be from PayPal, warning me that my credit card is about to expire and advising me to click on a link to update my account — the usual phishing scam that we're all exposed to. What's charming about this particular phishing attempt is the domain name contained in the return address: "service@paypal.con." I guess that's what you call a Freudian slip.
Steve Minor, proprietor of the SW Virginia Law Blog, has posted a comprehensive outline on net neutrality, in eight parts:
Courtesy of Journalism.org, here are 12 tips for writing news on-line by Jonathan Dube. Many of the tips apply to anyone writing for on-line readers (for instance, bloggers).
I find this story inspiring. It's the story of the geeks1 in this photo, taken in December of 1978 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The caption that typically accompanies the photo is, "Would you have invested?" If you had, you wouldn't have to work for a living today.
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1 Used in this sense: "A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept." See Answers.com.
With regret, I've decided to stop accepting trackbacks. The reason is simple: spam trackbacks have far outnumbered genuine trackbacks. But comments will remain open, and my comment settings allow HTML. So if you link to Minor Wisdom, feel free to leave a link to your linking post here in a comment.
Today, to get done a couple of things that I needed to get done, I relied on technology — no cutting-edge stuff, but stuff that nowadays is run of the mill. The accomplishment of both tasks got me thinking about how much change has occurred where technology intersects with the practice of law.
This morning at home, between breakfast and showering, I checked my office e-mail via the Web and my home computer (in itself, something unheard of in 1990). A team of lawyers was collaborating on putting together a document that needed to be finished by mid-morning. Among other things needed to finish the document were insertions of quotations from and citations to some caselaw. So I ran down those quotations and citations on my home computer via Westlaw web access, cut and pasted them into an e-mail, and sent them to the lawyer who was putting everything together. Then the writing lawyer needed a quotation from a court decision in our case. I thought the decision could probably be found on a legal blog. So I visited the blog, searched for and found the decision, downloaded it, and located the quotation that the writing lawyer needed.
When I started practicing law in 1990, I couldn't have done any of this from home. To help the team, I would have needed to be physically present in the office, running to the law library and the file room to pull what was needed. But in 2006, technology made it easy to do all this at home, between breakfast and showering.
Toward the end of the day, I was looking for some forms to use in drafting something. When I started practicing in 1990, this would have meant looking at my own form file (paper), and maybe asking some folks in nearby offices, "Do you have a form for ...?" Instead, in 2006, I just ran a search in our document-management system, and immediately located a dozen examples of what I needed to draft. Again, run-of-the-mill stuff in 2006, but miraculous by 1990 standards.
Two concluding thoughts: First, technology really does make practicing law easier in 2006 than it was in 1990. Second, I'll bet that in another 16 years, we'll be doing things with technology that, today, we can't imagine.
Chris Schultz of New Orleans has launced a new search engine called Huckabuck (www.huckabuck.com). It's a meta-search engine that queries Google, Yahoo, and MSN. And it has an interesting feature, a "search tuner," which looks like a stereo equalizer and allows you to assign varying weights to the search-engine results. (The description sounds complicated, but the operation is easy.) For more information about Huckabuck, read this story in New Orleans CityBusiness.
My inbox showed an e-mail with my departed mother's name on the subject line. So I opened it. It was spam — some sorry excuse for a human being trying to sell me some HGH.
Do tactics like these actually work? I mean, do people who receive such e-mails actually buy the shit that's being hawked?
Here is an interesting e-mail I received from Amnesty International:
Everything about the Internet company Yahoo! screams fun – from the name itself to the bright purple colors, to the endless array of online services and distractions. Around the world they are associated with creativity, innovation and the free flow of ideas.
I think that’s why it is so shocking to learn that Yahoo! has colluded with the repressive Chinese government to help identify Internet dissidents who were subsequently thrown in jail.
...The details are shocking. Investigations by Amnesty International and others show that:
- At the Chinese government’s request Yahoo! routinely censors search engine results in China -- without disclosing that the censorship has happened.
- Yahoo!-disclosed private user information has allegedly been used to persecute at least three political dissidents in China.
- In one case, that of journalist Shi Tao, information turned over by Yahoo! was submitted as evidence in a trial that ended in a 10-year prison sentence. A primary piece of evidence was a private email Mr. Shi sent to the United States from his Yahoo! email account.
To learn more about Yahoo's doings in China, click here.
Sometimes when registering on line, I get stuck when asked to come up with a password. You've probably heard some advice for creating passwords: Don't use real English words; don't use your children's names, pets' names, or other nouns easily associated with yourself; create nonsense words; mix letters and numbers, etc. Often I have trouble inventing a password that follows this advice.
Yesterday, I discovered a simple password generator sitting right there on my desk: my dictionary. Here's how it works: Open your dictionary1 at random to any page. Combine the first two or three letters of the first word on the left-side page with the last three to four letters of the last word on the opposite page. Between those two segments, insert one of the page numbers that you're looking at. If you want to get fancy, capitalize the letters of either the first or last segment.
Actually, you don't need a dictionary to use this system. Any book that you plan to keep forever will do. Use your Bible2 if you have one: God won't mind.
To remember your password, just keep a note of the page number you got it from. Heck, you might even keep the list on a piece of paper hidden inside the front cover of whatever book you get your passwords from.
Here are a couple of additional resources for creating passwords:
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1 You do own a dictionary, right?
2 For people of faith, same question as footnote 1.
3 If you're using Internet Explorer as your browser, then don't copy the generated password to your clipboard for pasting elsewhere. Instead, write it down on a scrap of paper and manually enter it. The reason for this precaution is explained on Law Dawg Blawg and Jim Calloway's Law Practice Tips.
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