Monthly Archives: August 2009

How To Fix the Gmail Notifier Unavailable Bug

[UPDATE 7/3/15: Google has killed the notifier function as part of its attempts to drive us all towards Chrome.]

I've been using Gmail notifier for some time. It's not that I particularly want to know when I get gmail, since I have that forward to my main account anyway. No, the great thing about gmail notifier is that I can set it to make Gmail the default email program for “mailto” links on web pages.

But a while ago I started getting error messages from the notifier; I didn't mind not having the unread mail count, but there's something about error messages at boot up that makes me grumpy.

An error has occurred.
Cannot connect to your mailbox.
Service temporarily unavailable.

Except it seemed permanent.

So I was happy to find out that the problem was because I forced gmail to use https, and that there's info on a patch,

If you've tried the new https setting and are using the Gmail Notifier, you've probably noticed a conflict between them by now. Good news for Windows users – we have a small download available that will set the Notifier to use https. Here's the instructions:

1. Download http://www.google.com/mail/help/downloads/notifier_https.zip http://www.google.com/mail/help/downloads/notifier_https.zip
2. Open up the folder.
3. Double-click on the file called notifier_https.reg to install it.
4. Click 'yes' when you're asked to confirm if you want to add the information to the registry.
5. Restart the Notifier.

And you're done! The Notifier will now work with Gmail set to always use https. If you decide you don't want to use that setting anymore, you'll need to install the other file in the zip folder – notifier_https_undo.reg – to reset Notifier.

And it works!

Posted in Software | 36 Comments

There Really Are “Death Panels’

It turns out that there really are death panels. Only they are run by insurance companies.

Posted in Health Care | 7 Comments

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Via South Florida Daily Blog an only-in-South-Florida story:

A man with a tattoo of Britney Spears' name on his arm or neck allegedly stole a Chihuahua with pink earrings from a South Florida gay bar.

Posted in Miami | Comments Off on You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

The Threat Level Remains Unchanged

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has a book coming out in which he says the Bush administration politicized the terror alert system — Tom Ridge: I Fought Against Raising Security Threat Level On The Eve Of 2004 Election. Everyone is very excited about this revelation.

But this isn't really news, is it? Didn't Ridge say more or less the same thing in 2005:

The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.

And Ridge did it anyway one way or another. He sat there and allowed the national security apparatus to be abused for political gain. He made the country less safe by allowing false alarms. He gave the terrorists free victories they didn't even have to work for. And then he and Cheney trashed Howard Dean and anyone else daring to say it was the unprincipled slimy political move it turns out to be.

Once upon a time we had a concept of “disgrace”. People with money, power, office, social position, actually cared about whether they acted dishonorably, because if they did they wouldn't get invited to corporate boards and dinner parties. People would cross the street to show their disdain. Now we give them book contracts, TV deals, visiting professorships, and they get interviewed as experts by the media.

Maybe it's time to bring the notion of respectability back. If we won't have public justice to sort out truth from fiction, no special prosecutors until after the statute of limitations has run, maybe instead we need a quiet form of the private personal justice we can manage based on the facts on the public record. Shun Ridge. Shun Yoo. Shun Rove. Shun Gonzales. Shun all the torturers and torture enablers, and shun the perverters of law and justice. Don't ever put anything their way. Don't give them a visiting gig. Don't invite them on TV. Don't buy their books. And make it contagious. Make them professional lepers. Make the people who give them treats sorry they did it.

But it won't happen. Not because there's always the risk that social shunning gets out hand, brings out the worst in some people who then punish the innocent, for all that these are real and demonstrated dangers not to be taken lightly. No, it won't happen because the people who put those unprincipled traitors to law and decency in power and who then coined it thanks to their connivance at kleptocracy hope to do it again and again and again. And that means that even used and dishonored tools need to be kept on financial life support so as not to discourage their successors.

Angry? I'm beyond angry. I'm tired of angry.

Nixon was a piker. He kept cash in a safe. These guys moved it by the airplane load.

Posted in National Security, Politics: The Party of Sleaze, Politics: US: 2004 Election | 11 Comments

Congratulations to Bernie Oxman

This just in:

University of Miami School of Law professor Bernard H. Oxman has been invited by The Hague Academy of International Law to give the inaugural lecture of the 2010 Public International Law Programme, the academy's principal and best-known program.

He will be the first American to give the inaugural address for the academy's summer programme, which has been held since The Hague Academy was established in 1923.

The amazing thing is that this isn't the most amazing thing about Bernie's career.

In 2003 he served as a judge ad hoc of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, and from 2003-2005 he was a member of an arbitral tribunal in a dispute between Malaysia and Singapore. He has recently been named judge ad hoc of the International Court of Justice in a maritime delimitation case between Romania and Ukraine. He is the only American lawyer ever appointed to serve as judge ad hoc before both of these international tribunals.

Having people like Bernie Oxman here is one of the things that makes UM the place it is.

Posted in U.Miami | 3 Comments

Government Data Breaches

I've posted a draft of my latest paper, Government Data Breaches to SSRN.

This paper addresses the legal response to data breaches in the US public sector. Private data held by the government is often the result of legally required disclosures or of participation in formally optional licensing or benefit schemes where the government is as a practical matter the only game in town. These coercive or unbargained-for disclosures impute a heightened moral duty on the part of the government to exercise careful stewardship over private data. But the moral duty to safeguard the data and to deal fully and honestly with the consequences of failing to safeguard them is at best only partly reflected in current state and federal statute law and regulations. The paper begins with an illustrative survey of federal data holdings, known breach cases, and the extent to which the government’s moral duty to safeguard our data is currently instantiated in statute law and, increasingly, in regulation.

I then argue that the government’s duty to safeguard private data has a Constitutional foundation, either free-standing or based in Due Process, at least in cases where the government failed to take reasonable precautions to safeguard the data. This right is separate from any informational privacy rights that constrain the government's ability to acquire personal or corporate information. The key is Chief Justice Rhenquist’s opinion in DeShaney.

Under the DeShaney logic, victims of many governmental privacy breaches should have a claim against states under § 1983. Similar constitutional claims against the federal government would require a Bivens action but this is unlikely to work under current doctrine. As a result, persons injured by federal data breaches will have substantially inferior remedies available to them than will victims of state errors. And even when suing a state, however, the provision of effective remedies may be hampered by arguments based on governmental immunity, and the problem of valuing the harms caused by a breach.

It's forthcoming in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal

Posted in Writings | Comments Off on Government Data Breaches