INTERNET LEGAL
RESEARCH WEEKLY
May 29, 2005
Tom
Mighell
Memorial Day Edition
Welcome to Issue #192 of the Internet Legal Research Weekly, a newsletter that delivers relevant and timely legal research information, and other fun stuff, to your inbox every Sunday. If you like what you read, please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to do the same! To subscribe, all you have to do is visit Inter Alia and fill out the subscription form -- it's free!
Hope everyone has a great Memorial Day holiday!
And away we go....
Your Competitive Intelligence Bookmark File
The folks at the Justia Legal SEO Blog have put together a list of the 60 Essential Free Competitive Intelligence Resources for your Legal Desktop. There are separate pages for 1-11, 12-24, 25-39, 40-44, and 45-60. There are some good sites here -- make sure they're part of your Favorites.Keeping up with your Congressperson
Plogress is a cool site -- here you can keep up with what your representatives are doing in Congress. You can drill down to see what bills they are affiliated with, or just subscribe to the RSS feed for your rep -- then you can get updates whenever he or she takes action!Monitor Your Monitor
You've just bought that big, new 24" flat-panel monitor. Want to make sure you got what you paid for? Check out the Dead Pixels Test, which will show you any bad pixels on your screen. Nifty tool.Blawgs of the Week
Here's a great new selection of law-related weblogs for you to peruse. First, Mary Mack is Technology Counsel and Director of Solution Design at Fios, and she's blogging about her knowledge of Electronic Discovery at Sound Evidence. The folks at Shepard Mullin have another weblog, on another great legal topic -- the Financial Institution Law Blog will concentrate, of course, on up-to-date information on financial institutions. Tech gurus Toby Brown and Lincoln Mead have begun writing at Barchives, a blog devoted to examining various aspects of owning and operating a bar association. Bob Coffield is a member of the firm of Flaherty, Sensabaugh & Bonasso in Charleston, West Virginia, and he is putting his experience in health care law to work publishing Health Care Blog Law. David Gulbransen, who obviously doesn't have enough to do as a Chicago law student with a full-time job, is also blogging about it at Preaching to the Perverted. Objective Justice is a group blawg "dedicated to the objective pursuit of justice in law, politics, economics and culture," which welcomes posts from all law students, professors and practitioners. It's maintained by Sean Sirrine, a law student from Boise, Idaho. Finally, if you thought there was a blog for just about every type of law, you were wrong -- until now. Enter the Video Game Law Blog, which discusses current legal issues regarding the XBox, PSP, and many other video games.
Caught in the 'NetDon't Get WiPhished
Those dastardly phisherpersons are searching for other ways to compromise your computers: now they are using Wireless networks to get to you. When you try to log in at a hotspot, you'll be presented with a fraudulent login page. When you log in to the fake page, the hacker downloads as many as 45 viruses to the computer.
The article mentioned above doesn't say this, but in most hotspots I find, I have to provide a credit card to log in. The phishers could easily provide a fake login page to capture this information, too. Make sure you are logging in to a real wi-fi provider site before you give up this information, or the gateway to your laptop.
Phishing Protection in your Toolbar
Internet services company Netcraft has released its Netcraft Toolbar (), which is designed to spot and thwart phishing attacks. The toolbar helps to identify fraudulent sites that might be masquerading as PayPal or your bank site.
A product like the Netcraft Toolbar is great, but it assumes that the user has been fooled by the e-mail and clicked through to get to a web site. My hope would be that users learn how to spot a phishing attack at the e-mail stage, and never have to worry about getting to the fake web site.
We're halfway through a list of "10 Things to Do Before Calling Tech Support," and Number 5 is:
#5: Roll Back Your Drivers. Part of regularly maintaining your computer is keeping the drivers for your video, audio, and other hardware devices up to date. But sometimes that can backfire, and a driver can cause havoc on your PC. It's okay -- you can roll back that specific driver. Just open the device manager by selecting Start, then Control Panel, then System, then Hardware, and finally Device Manager. Select the device with the driver you want to roll back, right click and choose Properties. Under the Drivers tab, you can choose to update, roll back, or uninstall the driver entirely.
Next week: Isolating Your Problem.
Do you have a question about searching the Internet or your computer in general? Drop me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net – I’ll post your question (don’t worry, I won’t use your real name) and try to get an answer for you!
Legally Relevant – Sites on the Internet
Handbook of Forensic Services
The purpose of this Handbook, compiled by the FBI, is to provide guidance and procedures for safe and efficient methods of collecting, preserving, packaging, and shipping evidence. The chapters include Submitting Evidence, Evidence Examinations, Crime-Scene Search, and Crime-Scene Safety. The Evidence Examinations page is pretty extensive, containing over 50 different types of evidence and how to collect and examine them. This site could be useful to criminal defense attorneys, eh?Institute of Continuing Legal Education
Looks like this service is available only to Michigan attorneys, so the rest of you are out of luck, because this looks like a pretty great site for obtaining CLE. There are some seminars available online, but you have to be a member to take advantage. You can register for upcoming live seminars or order materials from past sessions. There's also a nifty area for new lawyers.International Money Laundering Information Network
Gee, on first glance this looks like a site *for* money launderers. But no, it's really a site that assists governments, organizations, and individuals in the fight *against* money laundering. Many of the resources are available only to government officials, but you'll find a country guide here that features laws and legislation from countries in the world that have some sort of money laundering regulations. You can also review the international regulations for money laundering, new publications on the subject, and a nice set of links to money laundering info sites around the world.Job Accommodation Network
A service of the U.S. Department of Labor maintained by West Virginia University, the Job Accommodation Network is a free consulting service designed to increase the employability of people with disabilities. There are separate portals here for private employers, federal government employers, state and local government employers, individuals with disabilities, and educators. Each contains a terrific set of links with information on the Americans with Disabilities Act and other accommodation resources. The ADA Hotlinks page is also a good source of information. Also check out the Accommodation Toolbox, which offers suggesting ways of accommodating individuals according to their particular disability.Lawpaths
According to the site, Lawpaths "is a project to develop a resource bank of materials to support the learning and teaching of legal information research skills." Here you'll find guides, tutorials, and workbooks designed to help you with legal research. You'll want to spend most of your time on the Resources page, which offers a list of Law Guides, a Resource Database, guides provided by Legal Publishers, a checklist for evaluating Internet resources, and much more. This site deals mostly with United Kingdom resources, but the skills that are discussed will apply without regard to geographical location.
Finally, a few fun and useful sites to peruse on the Memorial Day holiday:
If it's too hot or wet to have fun outside, try your hand at Bowling.
And if you're spending this weekend getting the house in shape, check out the Housekeeping Channel, the Internet's #1 site for better housekeeping.
Well, that’s it for Issue #192 – I hope you liked it! If you did, pass this along to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to subscribe. Also, feel free to drop me an e-mail any time if you have questions, or if you have websites or other topics you want included in a future issue.
Tom Mighell
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