North Coast Connections

In every society in recorded history, there have been rats willing to prey on the unsuspecting with legitimate sounding scams aimed at separating people from their money. Some don't even ask for money, but prey on sympathy by asking, for instance, that business cards be sent to a dying boy via Make-a-Wish foundation, or some bogus address in Australia. Others aim to place viruses on your computer. While most appear by email nowadays, the sympathy scams can also appear by snail mail or in person. I'm afraid there is nothing I can do to restore your faith in mankind after falling for one of the sympathy scams. But here are a few tips to keep your money in your bank account and keep your computer virus-free.

TRUST BUT VERIFY
Check out the validity of a plea for help or call to action before passing along an email. There are good resources to use such as:
HOAXBUSTERS: Oddly enough, from the US Department of Energy, Office of Cyber Security comes a great website to test hoaxes. The site also gives good practical advice.
SYMANTEC: The makers of Norton Disk Doctor offer free hoax and virus listings.
BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU: This is a great site to check out whether a charity is legitimate or whether a business offer is coming from a reputable source.

SOME BASIC RULES
If someone contacts you asking for information as opposed to you initiating the contact, don't give it to them unless you are POSITIVE they are who they say they are. This is true for phone calls, emails, mail or someone coming to you at your door or on the street. If an email is sent to you asking you to click on a link, DON'T DO IT unless you are POSITIVE about where that link is taking you. Pass your cursor over the link, don't just read what the link purports to say ... if the address is a bunch of random numbers or is an unfamiliar web address, don't click. If you click on something and get a dialog box asking you to load something onto your computer, DON'T DO IT unless you are positive about what you are doing.

SOME OF THE USUAL SUSPECTS (AND A FEW NEW ONES)
-- CRAIG SHERGOLD is dying and needs business cards to complete his collection - baloney. They haven't even changed the kid's name after this has circulated around the globe since the 1980's. Craig is alive and well and graduated from college.
-- BILL GATES is giving away $5 (or fill in the amount) to everyone who passes along an email. Get real.
-- YOU RECEIVE AN EMAIL GREETING CARD and when you click on the link, you are asked to load a new JAVA script reader so it can play. If viruses have sound and motion, I don't think you'll like what you will see and hear. First ask yourself, who is sending me a card and why?
-- MARS will be so close to earth it will appear larger than the moon on a particular night, and this astrological event won't be repeated for another 2 million years. Unless you are ingesting crack cocaine, Mars will not appear larger than the moon and the whole thing is a crock.
-- A BANK TRANSFER is urgently needed from Somalia, Nigeria, Uganda, Sudan or some foreign country from a trusting relative or attorney of someone who died and the government will take their (anywhere from) $1 to 500 million unless a kind soul will provide their bank account number, for which a 5-20% commission will be paid. Don't laugh ... this old chestnut, officially called the Nigerian 419 scam, still fleeced Americans out of an all time high of $183 million in 2005 alone, a rise of 169% from 2004. WOW !!!!

So I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there are loads of rats in the world looking to do you harm or prey on your sympathy. I used to give money to bums, hand out checks to loads of mailed charity solicitations, and pass along "worthy" emails asking for help. No more.

Now I choose a handful of local, national and international charities that have low administrative costs so that most of my donation goes where it's supposed to, and I look at every email as a potential scam unless proven otherwise.

Remember, the origin of the handshake was to prove to the person you were greeting that you had no weapon. We still live in a dangerous world, it's just that the weapons have been upgraded.

Chris Crawford
www.justiceserved.com

Posted by Chris Crawford at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a modified version of a Tech Beat article that ran in the Times-Standard business section (called TECH TUESDAY) on December 20, 2005. I offer it reheated here as a follow-up to the Blog-o-slander posting from last week. I also offer it as a reverse of my habit of recycling postings from this blog to use for occasional Tech Beat articles. For past Tech Beat articles, some of which are quite good and informative, go the the Redwood Technology Consortium website.

I admit that I wasn't a big fan of blogging for a long time, and I shared the opinion of those that called it the most over rated technology advancement of 2005. However, I've come to change my mind about blogs as they now become mainstream. I suggest you check with Google.com or Wikipedia to learn more about the blog phenomenon, but this article will focus on the legal implications of blogs.

WHAT ARE THE LIABILITIES?
Any time you make oral statements or write about other people, products or services, you expose yourself to legal liabilities, including defamation, intellectual property infringement (copyright/trademark), and trade secret violation. Posting these opinions on a website provides a paper trail attributing the utterances to you. Even if your posted opinions don't cross the line into libel or slander, you could violate someone's privacy rights by disclosing too much about health history, finances, residence addresses or other personal information.

WHERE TO GO FOR HELP
The first stop to learning out your legal blogging exposure is the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), that publishes a Legal Guide for Bloggers. There is a wealth of good information here including a Frequently Asked Questions, guides for blogging journalists, guides for student bloggers and even tips to mask your identity. All the content here is in plain English and easy to understand.

WHAT SHOULD I WATCH FOR?
Some particular tips to avoid legal exposure for bloggers include:

# If you quote from some other publication, only use short excerpts to avoid copyright violations.

# It's OK to use the truth about something or someone as a defense against libel, but make sure it's provable.

# While you may be protected under free speech rights to criticize your employer, that won't necessarily protect you from being fired.

# Don't try to avoid exposure by merely saying "in my opinion," or vaguely describing who the person is that you are criticizing, because neither of these ruses will protect you.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU'RE SUED
By all means contact a lawyer if you get sued for something related to your blog. Also, go to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics. This site has loads of self-help resources to enable you to deal with the legal issues on your own, or help you through advice and referrals.

Safe blogging requires some research. Y'all be careful out there, 'ya hear?

Chris Crawford
www.justiceserved.com

Posted by Chris Crawford at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recent article in VNU Network online magazine reported the views of retired Oregon Supreme Court Justice Edward Fadeley that blog posting and comments are a veritable "Wild West" of uncontrolled "verbal ambushes and shootouts." Justice Fadeley opines that defamation enforcement will not go unchecked for much longer.

The context of the article dealt mostly with business, and cited that 50%+ of the attacks were from competitors and those who stand to profit from a sullied business reputation of a rival. However, the phenomenon wouldn't be limited to business. Politics are increasingly slanted through blogs and related comments, as was pointed out in this Tech Web online magazine article on the Lieberman senatorial race in Connecticut.

There may be particular trouble with anonymous comments posted to blogs, that even on the North Coast tend to go over the top in terms of personal attacks. If slanderous statements are made, should the primary blog author have to monitor and edit or remove the comments altogether? Since free speech is jealously guarded in the blogosphere, this will not go over very well. Local blogster Captain Buhne at one time freely allowed comments, blocked them altogether and then switched back to free comments. As of this week, he shut the comments back down due to liability issues. Others such as Fred's Humboldt Blog have to occasionally step in and remove a particularly offensive comment.

I have spend my adult life working in courts in either the public or private sector and this much I can say with impunity ... we live in a highly litigious society and someone, somewhere is going to get sued for defamation of character over this stuff. This will start a chain of similar lawsuits and laws that will attempt to regulate blogs and the terms and conditions under which comments are allowed. None of these are good prospects, in my view.

I am a voracious reader of Abraham Lincoln and as odd as it sounds in today's security conscious world, he used to allow public audiences with just plain citizens who would drop by the White House to tell the President what was on their minds. He called it his daily bath in public opinion.

In some respects, a free an unfettered exchange of comments such as those we see in local blogs gives the reader an unvarnished view of public opinion. This assumes, of course, that the comments are not dominated by a chosen few who purport to speak on behalf of the hoi polloi. But of course that doesn't happen here.

Chris Crawford
www.justiceserved.com

Posted by Chris Crawford at 06:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm a sucker for the Humboldt County Fair horse races at Ferndale. Every year, I set aside the time, get reserved box seats and have a ball during the 10 day meet. Like everything else in life, technology has affected the races.

Let's start with the parimutuel betting ... in the old days before off track betting, the odds were determined by who was physically present betting at the racetrack on the day of the race. Now, off track betting means the complex formulas that determine the final payout odds are calculated from thousands of bets from hundreds of venues around the US. Of course, the whole purpose of parimutuel betting is to ensure that the house will always win.

Then there is a the business of horse training, medication and equipment. If you saw the movie Sea Biscuit, you saw rather simple starting gates, saddles, horse gear and liniment. Today, these things are engineered especially for the task at hand, with light weight and durability as prime deliverables. And that doesn't count the diuretics, hormones and other drugs that are used in horse racing.

Finally, there is the betting itself. What used to be a time consuming process of placing a bet at the window is now a self-serve transaction at a touch screen kiosk.

I had an odd thing happen at the races on Friday when I placed bets on races 1, 2 and 3 just before the 1st race went off. The tickets for the first race printed OK, but the foggy weather jammed the roll of print paper so the tickets for races 2 and 3, and my final cash voucher were over-printed into one black blob of ink.

In the old days I suppose this wouldn't have happened because you would have had your tickets and change before you left the betting window. Today, they were able to reconstruct my bets based upon the number of the transaction that appeared on one of the tickets that printed. Even if the ticket had not printed, they could have reconstructed the bets based upon the machine number that left an audit trail of the entire transaction.

I simply gave the attendant my box number, watched the 1st race, and she showed up with my reprinted tickets before the 2nd post.

The sport of kings still requires skill, courageous horses, vigilant training and luck. But the wheels are greased with high tech.

I'll see you at Ferndale !!

Chris Crawford
www.justiceserved.com

Posted by Chris Crawford at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I hate meetings. I really hate meetings. Most of them are a colossal waste of time, are poorly run, fail to accomplish their aim and annoy those in attendance. Some who crave human contact can't seem to get by without meetings. Those people need to get a job or volunteer in high human contact ventures to satisfy this craving. For the rest of us, please learn some techniques to improve the effectiveness of meetings.

TO CONVENE OR NOT TO CONVENE
Think seriously whether a face to face meeting is needed. Can this be resolved by an email? How about a telephone call? Too many people? How about a teleconference call? Here is my rule every time I attend a meeting ... I mentally calculate the billable rate of those in attendance and add up an imaginary bill at the end. Want to guess how many times the result justifies the expense? Not many, in my view.

CONFERENCE CALLS
I like to use Teleconference.com, which has exceptionally low rates for dial-in conference calls but there are tons of other providers you can find by conducting a Google search. This is especially useful when participants are required to travel for an in-person meeting.

WEB MEETINGS
So you say there is too much detail to resolve in a phonecall or email? How about a web meeting? A Google search shows several providers including Webex.com, GoToMeeting.com, MeetMeNow.com and WebConference.com. Personally, I've used Webex with significant success. You can run a Powerpoint presentation, get interactive responses from participants and cover a lot of detailed information in a relatively short period of time.

PREPARATION
Ask yourself the purpose of the meeting and put together a well constructed agenda with clear delineations as to what is informational and what are action items. If there are mostly or all information items, consider sending this material to the group instead of calling a meeting.

RUN THE MEETING EFFECTIVELY
Begin and end the meeting on time, and preferably end it early. Keep order, don't let the extroverts dominate, make sure that everyone has a chance to participate and move things along. By turning chaos into order, most will appreciate your taking charge.

SET THINGS ASIDE
If you run against a roadblock, set it aside and move on. You'll find that most roadblocks occur with new items that are not the original purpose of the meeting. If you prepared a good agenda to begin with, the roadblock would probably not occur.

MINUTES
For gosh sakes record the meeting results in minutes. Try to keep them at or under one page, and concentrate on action items. List who is supposed to do what, why and within what timeframe. Verify agreements made at the meeting.

My father was an ophthalmologist who claimed to have taken more glasses off of kids than he put on them because he believed that most would grow out of their astigmatism. Similarly, I tend to cancel more meetings than I schedule. My least favorite are "standing" meetings that are supposed to occur within a set schedule (weekly or monthly) regardless of whether there is anything meaningful to be accomplished.

So please send me an email if you need to communicate with me. Call if you have to, though this should be used judiciously as well. If you call a meeting, it had better be for a compelling reason and you better convince me that you have prepared and will run the meeting efficiently.

Most people are willing to help and do the right thing, but most people also resent wasting their time.

Stepping off of soapbox ...

Chris Crawford
www.justiceserved.com

Posted by Chris Crawford at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's little wonder that average folks lose respect for the law when there are so many screwy statutes on the books. This one came to me from the American Bar Association Journal describing a new law in Maine that allows the addition of pets to restraining orders. Like many things in life, this is not a simple matter and probably justified as it relates primarily to domestic relations (divorce and spousal battery) cases in which the offender threatens to harm a pet if the significant other decides to leave the relationship or to press domestic violence charges.

OK, so why does this subject belong in a blog describing technology on the North Coast? Because the law, like seemingly everything nowadays, is as much about technology as it is about legalities.

As a court management consultant, I have been involved in nationwide initiatives attempting to solve the thorny problem of enforcing domestic relations restraining orders across state lines. Since we are an increasingly mobile society, it is not unusual for domestic partners to obtain a restraining order (also known as a "keep away" order) in one state, yet have an encounter with the significant other in a different state. How does law enforcement verify that: (a) a restraining order exists, (b) is valid, and (c) pertains to identifiable individuals?

While it may appear to some that creating a massive database is the answer, this is not an easily achievable feat. First of all, the "data elements" in a restraining order are not consistent state-to-state. Second, putting together a database means that someone has to keep it up to date with adequate privacy protections. Third, there has been an age-old problem of legal recognition of the validity of these orders from one jurisdiction to the next.

Slowly, the legal, law enforcement and technology communities have come together with surprisingly successful results. The first step was to work for legal recognition of restraining orders by all jurisdictions. This has not only been achieved (largely), but the tribes are also included, which is a huge advancement considering the separate sovereignty that tribes have. The second step was to develop a model restraining order form with a cover sheet containing a set number of uniform data elements. Since some states' restraining orders run several pages, it was important to have all the vital information up front and uniform. Third, each state has developed a statewide database of restraining orders for use internally and externally as needed by courts and law enforcement. The next step is to develop a secure ID card that could be easily carried to prove on the spot that a valid restraining order exists.

News that the state of Maine has added pets as allowable restraining order petitioners gives me a tech brain cramp. It is difficult enough to describe a person sufficiently to allow identification on the street ... how do you describe a dog, hamster, frog or cat? Do we now have to take DNA samples and record the DNA code in a database? Do we indicate that they respond when called by their name?

Still, these and similar screwy laws are a sort of full-employment-act for me and my colleagues who will undoubtedly get called in to develop solutions. You can bet that the solutions will involve technology.

Sit, stay, good boy !!

Chris Crawford
www.justiceserved.com

Posted by Chris Crawford at 12:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)