Private Facebook Pages Are Not So Private (Wired)

Private Facebook profiles aren't quite as hidden as many users might think they are. Pages that are supposedly restricted are visible to anyone using searches based on religion, sexual orientation or relationship status.

Security researcher Christopher Soghoian announced the flaw on Tuesday. A quick search by Wired News for women in a major U.S. city who were interested in random hookups with men revealed the names and photos of two high school girls, including one ninth grader.

Like many social networks, the increasingly popular Facebook allows its users to mark their profile page as private, semiprivate or open. However, even if you mark your profile to be visible only by friends, that doesn't change how you turn up in Facebook searches or whether your profile is open to indexing by search engines. (more. . .)

Internet Radio: Day of Silence

Today is the Internet Radio Day of Silence, A one day protect by internet broadcasters protesting over a change in how they will be charged for services.

The Alternative Law-School Ranking Scene (WSJ Law Blog)

Since they first began appearing annually in 1990, U.S. News & World Report’s law-school rankings have been the go-to list for JD wannabes. But amid heavy criticism of the list from deans and legal scholars, at least a dozen upstart Web sites, academic papers and blogs have sprouted up with surveys of their own. Here’s the story from Law Blog colleague Amir Efrati.

For instance, a blogger and Notre Dame Law grad who goes by the nom de plume “law firm addict” began trolling message boards frequented by law students and invited students to share figures on summer-associate and federal-clerkship placements. He posted his finding on lawfirmaddict.blogspot.com and lawclerkaddict.blogspot.com. “Law firm addict” created his blogs after reading a 2005 research paper by Anthony Ciolli (of AutoAdmit fame). Ciolli, then a Penn Law student, traced more than 15,000 graduates from 2001-2003 using databases on firm associates and bar admission.

Then there’s UT law professor Brian Leiter, whose leiterrankings.com posts lists ranging from Supreme Court clerkship placement to scholarly reputation. Even Judge Richard Posner has gotten into the mix, writing a 2005 paper suggesting alternative rankings to U.S. News.

(more. . .)

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

Danah Boyd writes:

Over the last six months, i've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Which go where gets kinda sticky, because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.

(I want to take a moment to make a meta point here. I have been traipsing through the country talking to teens and I've been seeing this transition for the past 6-9 months but I'm having a hard time putting into words. Americans aren't so good at talking about class. It's sticky, it's uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don't have the language for marking class in a meaningful way. So this piece is intentionally descriptive, but in being so, it's also hugely problematic. I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all and be done with it, but instead, I'm going to face the stickiness and see if a point can be made through it all. Hopefully it works. If not, sorry.)

(more. . .)

[via BoingBoing]

Library Repair Causes a Plea to the Pope (NYT)

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

ROME, June 21 — Normally a sanctuary of scholarly meditation, the Vatican Library has been the scene of unusually hectic activity lately, as word has spread that it will close in July for a three-year renovation.

Since the Vatican announced the impending shutdown, dozens of scholars have been lining up each day at ever earlier hours to snatch one of the 92 available spots in the manuscript room, where they can pore over archaic texts in forgotten languages. The library staff, traditionally prompt in responding to requests, has been struggling to keep up with the demand.

“We’re kept waiting like the virgins in the Gospel for their bridegroom to come,” Lucas Van Rompay, a professor of religion from Duke University who specializes in Eastern Christianity, said jokingly. He was referring to Jesus’ Parable of the 10 Virgins, a lesson on maintaining faith, after two particularly frustrating mornings of his own. “It’s getting worse every day.”

Like the British Library and the National Library of France, the Vatican has one of the most important manuscript collections in the world. The prospect of being cut off from their sources with crucial research under way is sowing panic among visiting scholars.

“It’s tragic,” said Barbara Roggema, a scholar who is leading a three-year study on Christian-Muslim relations during the Middle Ages for the University of Birmingham in England and had counted on continued access to the library, which is to close on July 14.

Petitions addressed to Pope Benedict XVI, the ultimate authority on Vatican matters, are circulating among scholars. Some ask that the manuscript division at least remain accessible to the public during the three-year renovation. Others request that the closing be delayed until 2008 so that scholars will have time to wrap up research and meet publishing or teaching deadlines.

The Pope is scheduled to visit the library on Monday, according to Ambrogio Piazzoni, the library’s vice prefect. “He wants to understand what’s going on,” he said in an interview.

(more. . . )

David Chase speaks! (NJ.com)

by Alan Sepinwall from the Star Ledger

What do you do when your TV world ends? You go to dinner, then keep quiet. Sunday night, "Sopranos" creator David Chase took his wife out for dinner in France, where he's fled to avoid "all the Monday morning quarterbacking" about the show's finale. After this exclusive interview, agreed to well before the season began, he intends to go into radio silence, letting the work -- especially the controversial final scene -- speak for itself.

"I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene.

"No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds, or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.' People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them."

(MORE . . .)

Students File Suit Against Ex-AutoAdmit Director, Others (WSJ Law Blog)

Posted by Amir Efrati

In the latest chapter of the AutoAdmit.com scandal, two female Yale Law School students have sued Anthony Ciolli, the Web site’s former “chief educational director,” and more than two dozen others who allegedly used pseudonyms and posted the students’ photos as well as defamatory and threatening remarks about them on the online law-school discussion forum. Here’s a copy of the complaint, as well as previous Law Blog posts (here, here and here) on the AutoAdmit controversy.

The law students aren’t named in the suit — filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Connecticut — which claims the defendants violated copyright infringement by posting photos of one of the women without her permission, falsely posing as the women in posts on the site, and engaging in “unreasonable publicity given to another’s life; publicity that places another in a false light before the public; intentional infliction of emotional distress; negligent infliction of emotional distress; and defamation.”

The complaint asks for judgment against the defendants for unspecified damages as well as punitive damages in the amount of $245,400. Besides Ciolli, named defendants include individuals with pseudonyms such as “Pauliewalnuts” and “The Ayatollah of Rock-n-Rollah.”

(more. . .)

Are Law Students Emotional Wrecks? (WSJ Law Blog)

“The emotional distress of law students appears to significantly exceed that of medical students and at times approach that of psychiatric populations.” That’s the conclusion of a new study, suggesting that law school has a corrosive effect on the well-being, values and motivation of students.

Here’s the 16-page study, “Understanding the Negative Effects of Legal Education on Law Students: A Longitudinal Test of Self-Determination Theory,” by Kennon Sheldon, psychology professor at the University of Missouri, and Lawrence Krieger, a law professor at Florida State. We picked up the study from the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, via the Chronicle of Higher of Education.

In a three-year study of two similar, unidentified law schools, the authors used questionnaires to measure the “subjective well-being” of students, their “need satisfaction,” how motivated they were for a career in law, and their “perceived autonomy support.”

The problem with most law schools, the authors write, is that they place little emphasis on hiring faculty members with proven records of teaching excellence. Instead, they tend to “emphasize theoretical scholarship and the teaching of legal theory, and many hire and reward faculty primarily based on scholarly potential and production,” say the authors. Observers suggest, they add, “that such priorities and processes train students to ignore their own values and moral sense, undermine students’ sense of identity and self-confidence, and create cynicism.”

Link

Gluttony on the Go with a New York City Cabbie

Weekend Edition Saturday, June 2, 2007 · In New York City, David Freedenberg is known as "Famous Fat Dave." But don't confuse him with "Famous Dave" who cooks ribs in the Midwest and certainly not "Fat Dave" — a notorious Long Island gangster.

Freedenberg's moniker comes from his passion for food, which he has managed to turn into a one-man tour company based out of his New York City cab. For tourists who want the inside scoop on the best neighborhood spots to eat, "Famous Fat Dave's Five Borough Eating Tour on the Wheels of Steel" will take them there. (more. . .)

Pet-owning bloggers mobilize on food front (USA Today)

By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY

The online mobilization of a nationwide community of animal lovers may have begun with the Pet Connection, a longtime pet-care website run by writer Gina Spadafori and veterinarian Marty Becker, who together write a syndicated column that runs in 65 newspapers nationwide.

On March 16, after Menu Foods announced a massive recall of pet foods, www.petconnection.com began posting details about what was happening and what owners needed to know.

(more. . .)

New E-mail Scam Targeting Taxpayers (About.com)

There's a new phishing scam circulating via email. The email purports to be sent by the Internal Revenue Service, and states that the email recipient is under criminal investigation for filing a false tax return with the Franchise Tax Board of California. The email is a scam designed to entice readers into opening the email attachment or clicking on the link provided in the email. Recipients should not open the attachment or click on any links. You can also report the scam to the IRS, and the agency will investigate the email thoroughly.

Here's the main points of the email, as reported by the IRS news announcement:

• Claims to be sent by the IRS Criminal Investigation Division,
• Claims the person filed a false tax return in the State of California,
• Entices readers to click a link or open an attachment,
• Both the link and the attachment are "trojan horses," computer code that can hijack a computer and leave it vulnerable to hackers.

If you received this email, or a similar email purporting to come from the IRS, you can forward the email to the IRS for further investigation. The IRS has outlined special instructions for forwarding the email so that your risk of being hijacked is minimized. The agency suggests attaching the unopened message to a new email. Alternatively, you can change your message settings to view all the headers, and forward the full email to the IRS. The IRS has a special inbox just for these email scams. It is phishing@irs.gov. (more. . . )

LexisNexis survey: Librarians and Web 2.0

From the LexisNexis press release:

Information professionals are savvy when it comes to leveraging technology to make information more valuable, relevant, and accessible, with 93% of librarians saying they currently use intranets for managing and distributing information, and seeing collaborative workspaces (57%), wireless (44%), and portals (51%) as very important for the future.

The survey revealed an interesting breakdown and frequency of information sources accessed. With Web 2.0 it’s no surprise that information professionals are very in-tune; nearly four in ten access Weblogs at least weekly (39%), and more than a third access wikis (34%).

[via Library Stuff]

Stop me if you've heard this one (Dojo of the Library Ninja)

Library Ninja relates this interesting reference interview:

A young priest walks into the library.

It's not the beginning of a joke, well it is kind of.

"Can I help you Father?" I ask.

"I'm looking for religion." He replied.

I choke down a nervous giggle.

"I thought you would have found it by now."

"It's my first time in the library, I'm not sure where to find the Religion section?"

"Religion is BS."

"What?"
"It's BS."

"WHAT?" He turns a darker shade of red.

"It's BS, up two flights on the right, B...S."

"Oh, thank you."

Keeping Current Can Be Hard to Do for Law Librarians (Law.com)

...So, keeping current has two parts: awareness of new or changing resources/activities and appreciation of possible uses or impact in your institution. Or, there may not be a use in your library. Mash-ups look to be a fun technology, but I do not see a need for it at my institution at this time. Law firm librarians may find it more interesting.

Keeping current is not just for technology advances, although technology does drive much of the change and activity. My "Hats" series is an attempt to describe how the Internet and electronics have impacted and continue to impact our profession. Our traditional hats as modified by technology means current awareness crosses more lines and covers more topics than ever.
(more. . .)

Upcoming calendar

You won't be able to see it if you are reading me in a feed reader, but I've added some of my events to the sidebar on the right using Upcoming.org. I think it kills two birds with one stone - you can see events I'm interested in and I can list events. I like th social bookmark aspect of Upcoming.org, too! You might add me as a friend on so I can see what you're doing. Plus you can send event to your personal Outlook, iCal, Yahoo or Google calendar. Pretty cool.

The Times Morgue Packs Up and Ships Out (NY Observer)

by Michael Calderone

“I seem to be the last man standing here,” said Jeff Roth. Dressed in a sharp gray suit with a white handkerchief peeking from the pocket, Mr. Roth was 24 feet below sidewalk level, in the depths of the New York Times Building at 229 West 43rd Street.

Mr. Roth, a group-three clerk for The Times, is the keeper of the paper’s morgue, the files of millions of clippings that served as the institutional memory for a century. “There were probably 50 guys like me at one time, who knew where everything was.”

The clips currently take up a labyrinthine space, an intricate system of dusty file cabinets and stacked cardboard boxes. Only one elevator currently goes from the Times lobby down to the basement. It was once the pressroom, but the presses were packed up and shipped to the Philippines in 1997. (more. . .)

Mass deletion sparks LiveJournal revolt

By Declan McCullagh
http://news.com.com/Mass+deletion+sparks+LiveJournal+revolt/2100-1025_3-6187619.html

Story last modified Thu May 31 20:41:08 PDT 2007

Editor's note: On Thursday, LiveJournal apologized for the mass deletion and said many of the journals would be restored

Thousands of LiveJournal customers are rebelling against the company's recent decision to censor hundreds of sex-themed discussion groups, a broad swath that has led to the removal of literary critiques and fan-written fiction about Harry Potter.

LiveJournal, which is owned by San Francisco-based Six Apart, confirmed Wednesday that it deleted around 500 journals this week in hopes of better "protecting children." It said the deletion was prompted by activist groups, including one called Warriors for Innocence that claims to track sites promoting pedophilia, the sexual abuse of minors, and other illegal activities.

"We did a review of our policies related to how we review those sites, those journals, and came up with the fact that we actually did have a number of journals up that we didn't think met our policies and didn't think they were appropriate to have up," Barak Berkowitz, chairman and chief executive of Six Apart, said in a telephone interview. The site boasts about 13 million journals.

Some deleted LiveJournal communities went by names like childlove and little_children (a community permits multiple LiveJournal users to post entries, while an individual account is limited to one user). Others, however, broadly fall into the category of science fiction, fantasy or user-written "fandom" stories--and it is those that have sparked the outcry. (more. . .)