Rites of Passage

I just want to take a step back for a moment and appraise my Blog thus far.

As i have gradually progressed through the last few months, i have noticed a few changes, namely

• My posts are getting shorter
• My posts are contain more contemporary information and slightly improved HTML skills
• My posts, i think, are more appropriately focused on the target audience.

At the outset i looked upon blogging with a cynical eye, but i think i have now developed a more curious appreciation of the power and value of blogs.

Roll on.

IPOD’s and the law

A 22-YEAR-OLD Norwegian hacker claims to have cracked the security coding on Apple’s iTunes music store and iPod music player.

Jon Lech Johansen, who runs a software company in San Francisco called DoubleTwist Ventures, said yesterday his program would fool computers into thinking that any MP3 player was an iPod. He said it would also make any piece of music or video downloaded from the internet appear to have been bought from iTunes.

Take a look

HERE

Mr Johansen, a self-trained software engineer, is one of the world’s most notorious hackers. He was accused of breaking the coding that protects DVDs from being copied – a hack that Hollywood claimed cost billions in lost revenue – but was acquitted of all charges after a lengthy trial in Norway.

The hacking of the security code once again raises some complicated legal questions.

At this stage however, it appears that Apple may not be able to take any action, because, rather than removing protection, his programs are technically adding copy protection. 

Email and Privacy

The troublesome nature of the “forward” key found in most email interfaces has led to one lawyers undoing.  When the NZ law clerk Craig Dale sent an email to a fellow NZlawyer suggesting a saucy encounter, he had no idea his invitation would end up travelling the globe via a multitude inboxes in most of the big legal and banking firms.

The forward button or the “reply all” button provides a way for someones personal message to be instantly forwarded on to a global audience.

Such problems raise security concerns for law firms who stand to lose credibility and reputation.

Take a look HERE

Law Blawgs Revisited

Over at Mark’s Blog he makes mention of LexBlog.com, which provides blogging tools and support for lawyers and other professionals.

The creator of LexBlog.com, Kevin O’Keefe, sees law blogs as an important way to enhance one’s reputation and to network with both your prospective clients and those that would influence your prospective clients. 

He suggests that a good legal blog focuses on a niche topic.

He notes that there is a danger that blogs could be used as blatant public relations marketing tools.

Further details can be found here:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003213602_btinterface21.html

My personal view is that legal blogs are of limited value.  In the legal sphere, accurate information is the key.  Blogs are primarily concerned with opinion and anecdotal comments which cannot be relied upon to any great extent.

Law vs Bloggers

Ever thought that posting on internet forums and blogs was inncoent fun.

Take a look HERE and think again. 

Thoughtless musings in cyberspace can have costly consequences.

A trial which ended today, involved a Florida jury ordering a Louisiana woman to pay $US11.3 million ($15.2 million) in compensation, after she used an internet forum to accuse another woman of being a con artist and a fraud. The damages award is believed to be the largest relating to amateur postings on the internet.

The Louisiana woman, Carey Bock, posted the accusations against Sue Scheff, of Florida, on Fornits.Com, a bulletin board used by parents of troubled teenagers.

For Australian defamation experts, the US jury’s order is a reminder that online communications are subject to the same legal risks as older media such as newspapers.

The essential message here is that bloggers do need to take care because liability can attach to what you write.

Take a look at recent coverage here (updated link 13 October 2006)

Thanks to Graeme’s blog here for the SMH link.

Aide and Rulebases

I have been busily working away on my AIDE rulebase.

AIDE which stands for ‘AustLII Inferencing Development Environment’ is a prototype rulebase application.  It is essentially the outcome of ongoing research at AustLII into the use of rulebase inference techniques in law.

AIDE aims to provide a quasi-natural language form of knowledge representation which is reasonably close to statutory language, while at the same time representing knowledge so that it can be used by an inferencing engine using predicate calculus, not only a propositional form of representation.

As the definition shows it is not necessarily a simple concept to understand.

More details can be found here:

http://bar.austlii.edu.au/au/other/CompLRes/2001/32.html

and

http://aide.austlii.edu.au/

Law by SMS ;-)

Over at Adam’s Blog Adam has made some interesting comments on the move by one legal firm to provide legal advice by SMS.

Read more : here

Legal firm JDRLEGAL who has operations both in Melbourne and Los Angeles, provides client advising services to clients mainly busy executives via sms and mobile-phone messaging services.

As something of an unexpected development in the sphere of legal advice, it will be interesting to see how successful an idea will be.

The premium package goes for $5,000 for a full 12 month subscription.  Subscribers can request unlimited legal advice by SMS.

the eGANGES River

We heard again today from Xenogene and Pamela Gray, the creators of the eGanges expert shell.

We worked through an interactive example using eGanges focusing on an international accounting standard.

I can see the logic behind the program, but on a practical note i’ not sure it is as complete as it could be.

Over at Sachin’s Blog, Sachin makes some interesting comments on this point.

Digital Certificates

Is anyone familiar with the concept of digital certificates?

While the definition may not spring into everyones mind, we unknowingly use digital certificates almost every time we visit a website. 

Digital Certificates are the electronic counterparts to driver licenses, passports and membership cards. You can present a Digital Certificate electronically to prove your identity or your right to access information or services online.

The most well known Certification Authority is Verisign, which can be found at <http://www.verisign.com.au>.

The use of digital certificates has become an issue in the online banking sector, where in recent times, security concerns have been raised by the emergence of fake websites which have been set up to obtain users’ login details.

Users can verify the authenticity of the site, by checking the digital certificates underpinning the website.

Wiki’s

I came across an article in a recent Sydney Morning Herald which explored the use of Wiki’s in the field of journalism.

<http://www.smh.com.au/news/TECHNOLOGY/Wired-News-Lets-Users-Write-Wiki-Article/2006/09/07/1157222232030.html>

The online news service “WIRED NEWS” offered readers the opportunity to edit and contribute to an online article.

At first glance, the idea appears to be a success with over 300 drafts of the article and the word limit doubling.

However, the author of the SMH article noted that the quality of the Wiki depends on the quality of the contributions. Which opens the door to things like spam and other crudities being unleashed on the Wiki.

Worth a read!

Law Blawgs

Most people are familiar with the use of blogs. 

But what is a blawg?

A blawg is the name given to describe a blog that has a legal slant.

While not being a known reliable source of legal information they have proven to be an excellent source of gossip, tales of fiction and, best of all, a place to vent pent up energy.

They have been quite popular in the US and the UK, but they have been quite slow to take off in Australia.

A detailed list of interesting law blogs cn be found at:

http://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/blawgs.asp

Quite a useful blawg which has a technology slant can be found at:

http://www.lawfont.com/ 

And for pure entertainment value:

http://www.reallyquiteunlikely.blogspot.com/

The Wide World of Portals

Today, i would like to take a quick look at Web Portals and their relevance to the legal sphere. 

Web Portals are sites on the World Wide Web that provide personalized capabilities to their visitors, providing a pathway to other content.

What makes portals different from home pages, subject gateways and directories is the fact that they have been designed with flexibility in mind. They make only the necessary assumptions as to what the users’ needs and preferences could be (customisation), leaving the rest of decisions to the users themselves (personalisation).

In the late 1990s, the Web portal was a hot commodity. After the proliferation of Web browsers in the mid-1990s, many companies tried to build or acquire a portal, to have a piece of the Internet market. The Web portal gained special attention because it was, for many users, the starting point of their Web browser.

One of the first search engines was Yahoo!, which started life in late 1993 as “Jerry Yang’s Guide to WWW”, which was followed by others like Altavista, Excite, Open Text, Magellan, Infoseek, and Lycos. They were also competing against the ISPs, who were offering internet access and access to a wide range of information. In the battle for popularity, most of these sites realised the more features they offered the greater possibility users would stay at their sites longer.

Today, the most popular Web Portal remains www.yahoo.com

The percieved benefits of portals include:

• Improved client services
• Easier navigation
• Secure environment
• Higher level of access to some online services
• Increase awareness of the usefulness of online environments
• Personal data capture and subsequent customisation (future)

Some of the percieved problems of Web Portals include:

• Technical issues e.g. PHP / Oracle & other systems (eg.  student interfaces)
• Load, load & load!
• Irrelevant search results
• Confusing interfaces

There a few examples of legal portals.  In the Australian context, www.comlaw.gov.au is quite useful.

It provides an expansive array of search categories and topic areas linking to a multitude of Australian government legal materials.

The many advantages of legal portals are demonstrated at this site.

Take a look!

9/11

Its the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

I can still remember the night it happened.

I was up late playing an online computer game <www.half-life.com>, and one of the guys on the server started saying that terrorists had blown up the WTC.

Everyone thought it was a poor joke.

The Invisible Web

Has anyone heard of the invisible web?

Well if not, i think most people are familiar with the “visible web” which we use very day. 

The visible Web, or the Web as it is more commonly known, is comprised of HTML documents. They are crawled and indexed by search engines. Taken together, the information they contain is sometimes called the surface Web.

The invisible Web is the information that is hidden below the surface and runs very deep, hence it is also called the hidden Web or the deep Web. A recent study estimates that the invisible Web is 500 times larger than the visible web. The invisible Web is comprised mostly of database content that can only be found using the search interface provided by the site the database is connected to.

Further information can be found at:

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/InvisibleWeb.html

You can find searchable databases containing invisible web pages in the course of routine searching in most general web directories. Of particular value in academic research are

• Librarians Index
• AcademicInfo
• Infomine
• Incy Wincy
  

Metasearch engines

To be honest, i had never heard of metasearch engines.

But now i am something of an expert
A metasearch engine is a search engine that sends user requests to several other search engines and/or databases and returns the results from each one. They effectively allow users to enter their search criteria only one time and access several search engines simultaneously.

The basic premise is that as it would be logistically and theoretically it would be extremely hard to catalogue the entire web (i.e. through the use of web crawlers for instance), the idea is that by searching multiple search engines you are able to search more of the web in less time and do it with only one click.

The ease of use and high probability of finding the desired page(s) make metasearch engines popular with those who are willing to weed through the lists of irrelevant ‘matches’. Another use is to get at least some results when no result had been obtained with traditional search engines.

Metasearch engines create what is known as a virtual database. They do not compile a physical database or catalog the web. Instead, they take a user’s request, pass it to several other heterogeneous databases and then compile the results in a homogeneous manner based on a specific algorithm.

No two metasearch engines are alike. Some only search the most popular search engines while others also search lesser-known engines, newsgroups and other databases. They also differ in how the results are presented and the quantity of engines that are used. Some will list results according to search engine or database. Others return results according to relevance.

They are particularly useful when you are looking for a unique word or name, or an overview of what is available.

Two of the most commonly known metasearch engines are:

Dogpile <http://www.dogpile.com/>

Search.com <http://www.search.com >

The main advantages of a metasearch engine are that they:

• search in many different search engines
• some are able to eliminate duplicate records, or pages on similar topics at the same address
• some will sort your pages into topics, or will eliminate duplicate pages

The main disadvantages of a metasearch engine are that:

• can often return too much material
• because they are searching in many different search engines, all with different rules, complex searching techniques may not be possible
• some don’t sort the records very well, or will only show some of the search results

I gave the Dogpile engine a quick road test and it appears to be surprisingly useful.

Definitely consider giving them a try.

The Rise and Rise of Google

The rise and development of the internet search engine www.google.com has been nothing short of astronomic.

The history of Google can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google

 A brief timeline of Google’s rise can be found here:

 http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2004-04-29-google-timeline_x.htm

While not being specifically focused on legal research, Google is seen by many legal researchers as an extremely useful tool.

Specifically, Google’s expansive scope and access to resources such as online media not normally captured by traditional search engines provide value to legal researchers and lawyers alike.

Funnel Web Spiders

Search engines have become by far the most powerful tool available to researchers in the last two decades.

Over the next few weeks i will be taking a look at the common types of search engines, including:

- web crawlers

- portals

- meta search engines

- the invisible web

In this post, i will take a look at web crawlers.

A Web crawler, also known as a Web spider, Web robot, bot or worms are programs or automated script which browse the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner.

Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine, that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a Web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code.

Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).

Some of the most commonly known web crawlers are

- Google

- Altavista

- Lycos

A more detailed list can be found at http://www.fedcourt.gov.au/legalinks/searchengines.html.

Creating Legal Websites

Why are particular legal websites more popular than others?

While there are many answers to that question, a primary answer is what is referred as to Hypertext Design. 

Hypertext is defined as a user interface paradigm for displaying documents which, according to an early definition (Nelson 1970), “branch or perform on request.”

While this may not appear to be immediately clear to the layperson, hypertext can be most readily identified in the computer applications we use each and every day. Namely, the internet pages which are accessible through the world wide web.

The use of hypertext to enable user friendly browsing gives legal websites advantages over other less friendly sites.

By default, good hypertext design will be seen as the avoidance of the mistakes that constitute bad hypertext design.

The latest version of Neilsen’s defining article  (<The Top Ten Design Mistakes of 2005>)  lists the following as the most relevant problems with todays hypertext design:

1. Legibility Problems

2. Non-Standard Links

3. Flash

4. Content That’s Not Written for the Web

5. Bad Search

6. Browser Incompatibility

7. Cumbersome Forms

8. No Contact Information or Other Company Info

9. Frozen Layouts with Fixed Page Widths

10. Inadequate Photo Enlargement

Essentially, a good legal website will be one which deals with these problems. 

Thoughts and eGanges

Ok, although it has taken some time, my Blog is off and rolling.

Just an aside about my expectations for this Blog over the next few months:

In brief, i hope that it will resemble a polished product and will have provided the readers with some useful information!

In my first foray into the world of blogging, i would like to briefly intoduce the eGanges expert system shell.  eGanges was designed by Pamela and Xenogene Gray and can be found at

http://www.grayske.com/

eGanges will be discussed in greater detail at a later stage.

An expert system, also known as a knowledge based system, is a computer program that contains some of the subject-specific knowledge of one or more human experts.

A more detailed discussion of expert systems may be found at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

eGanges is essentially a shell for an expert system that has been primarily designed to be used in a legal environment.  It can, however, according to its designers be adapted for an extensive variety of uses.

In my view, EGanges is a kind of mapping program, that allows users to map anything from thought processes to legislation.  In a legal environment, the designers suggest that the program can be used to essentially map areas of the law, which can then be used by legal practitioners and students to step through the law. 

At first glance, this process would not appear to be an easy task.  Given the complexities of the common law, it would appear somewhat adventurous to suggest that an area of the law can indeed be comprehensively mapped.  Moreover, given the ever changing nature of the law, any mapped areas of the law would not remain accurate for long.

I plan to play around with the sample shell on the eGanges web site to explore my intial thoughts a little further.

 Stay tuned.

Hello world!

Welcome to my Blog!

This Blog will track my thoughts and progress as i make my way through computer applications to the law.

Having never used a Blog before, it will be very interesting to see how it all plays out.