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Jim Roberts joins Mashable as executive editor, chief content officer

Jim Roberts joins Mashable as executive editor, chief content officer

Jim Roberts on his new role at Mashable:

To some it might seem a bit of a departure. You might imagine a headline like: “Longtime New York Times and Reuters veteran forsakes legacy media for digital upstart.”

Interesting. Roberts is suddenly a living metaphor for the future.


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On being a female lawyer

On being a female lawyer

Worth a read whether you’re a male or a female.

Hat-tip to Sheryl Axelrod, immediate past president of the Temple Law Alumni Association and a preeminent Philadelphia-area lawyer, for sharing this on LinkedIn.

(Yes, I visit LinkedIn, even when not looking for jobs.)

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Whose Fault Is a Driverless-Car Crash?

Whose Fault Is a Driverless-Car Crash?

Some possibilities not contemplated in this brief Time piece:

  • software developer for driving computer
  • component designer/manufacturer of driving computer
  • technician who performed final calibration of driving computer
  • technician who installed driving computer
  • creator of simulation software used by technician to test computer

In fact, car manufacturers and passengers are probably less likely to be at fault than any of the folks I list above.

After all, when a computer messes up in the present, it’s not really messing up: it’s telling you a human messed up in the past.

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Poetic copyright troll illustrates need for reform

Poetic copyright troll illustrates need for reform

Linda Ellis, copyright troll:

If protecting my rights in your eyes makes me a “troll,” then I’ll wear the badge proudly and keep fulfilling my role.

Current law does allow hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for sharing drivel like the Ellis train wreck above. Real reform is needed, but it’s unlikely to get the requisite congressional attention any time soon.

Advocacy group Public Knowledge has a good start, called the Copyright Reform Act. It’s model legislation meant to provide a starting point for practical copyright reforms.

I haven’t read it all yet, but I’m confident it doesn’t allow hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for having your crappy poetry shared on the internet by strangers with bad taste in literature…

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Why You Need Several Versions of Your Resume

Why You Need Several Versions of Your Resume

Absolutely necessary.

Just like cover letters, every resume you send should be tailored to the recipient, highlighting the experience you have that’s most relevant to that company and integrating some basic research on the employer.

If you’re sending the same resume with every job application you’re doing it wrong.

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Liberals, Tea Partiers unite to protest NSA in DC

Liberals, Tea Partiers unite to protest NSA in DC

The march attracted protesters from both ends of the political spectrum as liberal privacy advocates walked alongside members of the conservative Tea Party movement in opposition to what they say is unlawful government spying on Americans.

What a weird image.

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Corporations Have Personhood. Why Not Dogs?

Corporations Have Personhood. Why Not Dogs?

What a good survey of animal law, where it came from, where it is and where it’s going. A pleasant surprise, as I usually write off Huffington Post pretty fast.

The only people that argue against the treatment of dogs, and other animals, as more than property are those who have never experienced the profound bond that develops between a human and a pet.

But the ASPCA efforts are the ones to watch here. Their moderate approach is more palatable to the establishment and therefore more effective in the long-term than the jarring advocacy of more extreme groups like PETA.

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The Hidden War Against Gay Teens

The Hidden War Against Gay Teens

Alex Morris wrote a great piece at Rolling Stone about what can only be called the social abuse being perpetrated at Christian schools.

You should know before you read the quote below that “they” refers to the leadership of one of the Christian schools discussed in Morris’ article:

"They found out she was a lesbian, and they made her go in front of the entire school and tell them," says Tristan. "And then they kicked her out the next day."

I was raised Catholic.

I know the Bible inside and out.

I read it twice, cover to cover, in addition to about 16 years of Catholic-affiliated schooling.

I know Catholicism and other forms of Christianity are sometimes mutually unintelligible.

But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, Christian about behavior like that by an adult authority figure.

To out someone against their will, before their peers, only to cast them out afterward, as a means to teach them they are inferior, is the very definition if evil.

It is petty, resentful and indicative of a disgusting superiority complex coupled with a total lack of moral intelligence.

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One Google, two different privacy rulings

One Google, two different privacy rulings

Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, in an email to the Wall Street Journal’s Elizabeth Dwoskin and Rolfe Winkler:

Courts are doing pretzel twists to slot modern electronic privacy issues into antiquated statutory schemes. Congress badly needs to update the nation’s privacy laws; we can’t leave the courts with so little guidance and expect consistent results.

The inconsistent application of the law across states suggests the issue may be ripe for appeal on both fronts, and may be on a long journey to the Supreme Court. The Delaware court saw no harm in Google’s circumvention of browser-based privacy settings and thus no cause of action.

What interests me is that the information you can collect via someone’s browsing behavior with a cookie is probably similar to the information you can collect by scanning their email, the action at issue in the North Carolina case, in which the judge denied Google’s motion to to dismiss the suit.

Thus, it’s the difference in the method of collection, even where the subject of collection is the same, that may be triggering the proliferation of multiple interpretations of privacy law.

Of course, it’s worth noting that the wiretap law refers specifically to communication interception, which applies directly to email. While browsing history can tell a great deal about someone, it’s not, strictly speaking, a mode of communication, so plaintiffs probably need to rely more on the common law.

I wish I had more time to sink my teeth into the issue, but I’ll have to settle for sharing a few useful links on privacy law for those interested in learning more:

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Living man declared dead, too late to overturn ruling

Living man declared dead, too late to overturn ruling

Hancock County Probate Court Judge Allan Davis, who declared Donald Eugene Miller Jr. dead in 1994, eight years after he vanished from his rental home in Arcadia, told Miller in court Monday the law only allows death rulings to be overturned within three years of the ruling.

Sometimes the law refuses to be boxed in by little technicalities like reality. This is very much one of those times.

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EFF's Legal Guide for Bloggers

EFF’s Legal Guide for Bloggers

This is useful. If you have delayed starting your own blog because you’re nervous about the legal issues, give this a read and reconsider.

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Some oaths are apparently more oathy than others

Some oaths are apparently more oathy than others

This is a great article, but this bit is particularly rich. Tyler Bass of Vice’s Motherboard reports the now well-known Petraeus affair with an elegant juxtaposition of facts:

“Oaths do matter,” David H. Petraeus, then C.I.A. director, said at the time. “And there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with the requisite degree of secrecy.”

Just weeks later, Petraeus would fall from grace after FBI agents, conducting a separate investigation, discovered emails that revealed an extramarital affair.

Oaths indeed.

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Reuters nixes Next: Failed redesigns and the challenge of expanding a digital audience

Reuters nixes Next: Failed redesigns and the challenge of expanding a digital audience

That’s a shame. This image alone illustrates the design strides made by the Next team (the cancelled redesign is on the right). 

The Reuters iOS app is better than that of Associated Press, for what it’s worth.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin says Berlusconi would not have been tried if gay

Russian President Vladimir Putin says Berlusconi would not have been tried if gay

This guy is in charge of a country. 

Crazy.

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NYT managing editor: Guardian story on Israel and N.S.A. Is Not 'Surprising' Enough to Cover

NYT managing editor: Guardian story on Israel and N.S.A. Is Not ‘Surprising’ Enough to Cover

New York Times news editor Dean Baquet suffered a serious lapse in editorial judgment. I mean, he can’t be serious, can he?

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John Gruber on the convergence of smartphones and tablets

John Gruber on the convergence of smartphones and tablets

John Gruber:

Better, I think, not to treat smartphones and tablets as separate categories, but merely as different sizes of the same thing.

I think he is absolutely right, but even a year ago I would have argued like a lunatic against that very point.

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Michael Poulshock’s Hammurabi Project aims to make law and regulations accessible to the masses

Michael Poulshock’s Hammurabi Project aims to make law and regulations accessible to the masses

Terry Carter, writing at the ABA Journal:

Poulshock, 38, is writing source code for each law, which can then be entered into computers and applied to fact patterns. (The project is open source, online at GitHub). Tax and immigration law lend themselves to this approach more easily than some other areas, but in many instances, he says, law can be turned into a mathematical function: If this, then that; if these, then that or those.
This is a great idea, and one I’ll definitely keep an eye on. Very cool.
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On Law, Policy, and (Not) Bombing Syria

On Law, Policy, and (Not) Bombing Syria

Ian Hurd, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, writing at preeminent international law blog Opinio Juris:

It is well known that the [U.N.] Charter forbids the use of force except as self-defense or as sanctioned by the UN Security Council. Everything else amounts to aggression and is illegal.

The issue of whether and how the U.S. and/or the rest of the world should react to the use of chemical weapons in Syria is open to debate on ethical, moral, political, and practical levels.

But it is not open to any debate from an international law perspective: the U.S. proposal, whether approved and implemented by President Obama or the Congress to which he has deferred on the decision, is prohibited generally by international law and specifically by the United Nations charter.