Yearly Archives: 2009

Off to the Internet Identity Workshop

Posted on May 17, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

iiw2009a.pngI'm off this afternoon to California, where I'll be at the 8th Internet Identity Workshop, which will take place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

I've never been to one of these before, but people who do this stuff — that is, make the tools that do and use ID — say it's the place to be, and there's an impressive list of attendees, so I'm giving it a try.

This will also be my first out-of-town unconference, I think, in that I don't count the chaos which was the first ever DNS-related meeting I attended almost exactly 10 years ago, the International Forum on the White Paper, in Reston, Virginia. (I've also been to local barcamps, but they're small.)

I'm back late Wednesday. No idea what blogging will be like in the interim.

Posted in ID Cards and Identification, Talks & Conferences | Comments Off on Off to the Internet Identity Workshop

What the World Is Seeing Online Today

Posted on May 16, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

wolfram.gif

Actually, I did get through eventually, but I couldn't figure out how to get Wolfram Alpha to give me a graph of the the national debt in dollars / GNP in inflation-adjusted (real) dollars over time.

I'm sure it will be a Very Cool tool once I get the hang of it.

Posted in Internet | 1 Comment

Textbook Takedown

Posted on May 16, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Statistical Proof that You Hate Freedom: Daily Kos has a textbook takedown of a hack study purporting to show a correlation between the lack of freedom in a US state (measured, it turns out, according to a somewhat peculiar metric) and the propensity to vote for Democrats.

Posted in Politics: US | 12 Comments

HTML Footnoting Made Too Easy

Posted on May 15, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Law professors rejoice; the rest of the world undoubtedly will see this as a sign that the web has gone to Hell: behold the Footnoter!

Footnoter lets you embed footnotes in the middle of an HTM document. [[For example, this might be a footnote]] It looks for the designated delimiters, pulls the footnote out, puts it at the end, and leaves a hyperlinked number in its stead. It defaults to the quick-and-dirty HTML that uses <sup> to superscript the number, but the Advanced section lets you instead insert CSS classes for the marker in the text, the marker that precedes the footnote, and for the footnote itself.

Early beta now, but once an idea like this is out, it can never be suppressed.

Posted in Internet | 1 Comment

Practice Tip: Tell Your Clients “Don’t Text to the Witness”

Posted on May 15, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

We've all heard about the jurors who go home at night and Google the witnesses or the lawyers — and I'm sure the cases we hear about are only the tip of the iceberg.

But the feisty South Florida Lawyers Blog has got a story that tops any of that: a party text messaging with a witness during a break in that witness's testimony.

Instant mistrial when discovered. (Note: the lawyers were at a sidebar with the judge when it happened, so they're not to blame for this one.)

Posted in Law: Ethics | 1 Comment

Westboro Baptist Church Plans Picket at UM Law Graduation on Sunday

Posted on May 15, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

The Miami Herald reports that ferociously bigoted Westboro Baptist church plans a media event at our graduation. They call it a 'protest' but it's really just one of a whole series of made-for-TV events they'll be staging in the area that day.

That we've been included for our support of gay rights is, in some weird way, a badge of honor, although I feel bad for graduates and their families who may have a few moments of their day spoiled by the famously vicious demonstrators.

As it happens, I will be on an airplane at the time, so I will miss my chance to share with them what I think of them, or even to ignore them (which might be the better thing to do).

Posted in U.Miami | 1 Comment