Does It Compute?

Social Media and "Privacy"

I don’t generally get involved with e-discovery issues. Not my area. However, just after my recent post on the total lack of privacy for cell phones and the data they generate which is retained by the cell phone companies, I was a bit shocked to see the New York State court ruling on the lack of privacy for social media sites.

In the early days of e-mail the refrain was that sending confidential information in an email was equivalent to sending it on a post card.  It was there for everyone to see and read.

Recently the Supreme Court for Suffolk County in New York ruled that a plaintiff “did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to her Facebook and MySpace pages; notwithstanding certain privacy settings that plaintiff may have used to mark some of the content as private.”  The same is not true in all states, but the bottom line here is that something you post on Facebook or MySpace can come back to haunt you when you are job hunting or involved in legal proceedings. Anything you mistakenly think is “private” is not, in fact.

A recent article in Law Technology News indicates that about 40% of admissions officers research candidates using the web or social media, and close to a third found something they consider damaging.

700 Posts

I just noticed that earlier this month I passed 700 posts in the some four and a half years I’ve been writing “Does It Compute?”

I’ve slowed down some lately, largely because many of my posts come from feedback or interaction with clients, and as I increasingly do only Worldox, that feedback has decreased.

Still, that’s a lot of posts. I plan to keep plugging away at least for the next year or two.

System Integrity: Worldox vs. iManage

I recently acquired a couple of clients who came from an iManage world. One of the first things they asked was “can you save documents outside the system? iManage had a ‘save to local drive’ option.” The answer is that although Worldox has a “back door” that allows you to bypass the system, I recommend against telling clients about it. The function also can be passworded so even if you know it exists, you can’t use it unless you know the password.

But the question raises the more interesting issue of system integrity. Worldox is designed to function as a closed system: everything goes through Worldox. Thus if, say in the process of discovery, the firm is asked: “can you guarantee that this is the totality of the documents on your system?” you can reasonably assert that this is indeed the case.

Once you open a loophole, there is no way to restrict what might pass through it. With iManage, you cannot assert that all your critical documents are saved within the iManage system. Anybody can choose to save anything locally at any point in time.

A related issue is the question of personal documents: “what about my personal documents that don’t belong on the system?” The hardline response is that any document created on the firm’s computers belongs to the firm. Technically there is no such thing as “personal documents.”  However, this principle is generally honored in the breach.

With Worldox, there are three ways to deal with “personal documents.” First, by default Worldox ships with a “Personal” profile group that lets users save documents locally, but still within a Worldox Profile. The disadvantage to this system is that the documents are not indexed and not backed up, and if the user changes computers, or if the computer crashes, they are very likely to be lost.

The second option is to redirect the “Personal Profile” to the user’s home directory on the server. These documents are still not indexed but they are backed up.

The best option, in my opinion, is to create a Personal client/matter structure with security rights so that each user sees only their “own” matter. This is a little more work, but has the advantage that the documents are indexed, backed up, and in the event of necessity can be examined by a system administrator.

So Worldox addresses the massive security loophole in system integrity that seems to be the default for iManage.

HP Printers Last Forever

I’ve always had a position (and recommended to clients) that they should only buy HP printers.

This week my old HP 2420 stopped feeding paper correctly on startup, so I bit the bullet and bought a new printer.

I forget when exactly I bought it but it was at least 10 years ago. The printer was so old it connected via a parallel port. While I never used even close to the duty cycle, that is still amazing.

And since printer prices, like computer prices, have dropped so much, combined with trade-ins, special offers, etc. my new HP 2035n wound up costing me about $140.  Let’s see, that will be $14 a year for the next 10 years.

10 years is forever in the computer world, so I repeat: HP printers last forever.

Big Brother Was a Piker

It is common knowledge that Google and gmail keep all your information forever. That’s why you get those sometimes convenient little popups advertising something similar to what you just viewed/purchased, etc. Similarly, Amazon inundates you with “if you bought X you might like Y” messages.

But what about cell phones? The American Civil Liberties Union recently obtained a Department of Justice compilation of what the cell phone companies do. Dated from 2010, but apparently still accurate.

Verizon Wireless keeps information about which cell towers subscribers' phones connect to for a year. AT&T has kept that data since July of 2008.

Verizon keeps information for up to a year that can determine if a particular phone visited a particular website.

Sprint Nextel's Virgin Mobile brand keeps the content of text messages for three months and Verizon for 3-5 days. The other carriers do not keep text content but do keep records of who texted who for more than a year. AT&T keeps records of who texts who and when for up to seven years. Virgin Mobile keeps that data for 2-3 months.

While the carriers do not record phone calls, they do keep information about calls made and received for at least a year.

Every seven seconds, your cell phone automatically scans for the nearest cell tower.A GPS chip in your phone can reveal your location within a few yards. In just one year, Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with the specific whereabouts of an unknown number of customers more than 8 million times without requiring the cops to provide neither a warrant nor probable cause to access this information. Sprint even set up a website for law enforcement agents so they could access these records from the comfort of their desks. "The tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement," said Sprint’s “manager of electronic surveillance.” Big Brother was a piker.

Click here to access the full Justice Department chart.

But that’s only the half of it. Combining cell phone data with tracking the cookies on your computer and information garnered from social media sites, it is becoming possible to use this data both to identify individuals and to predict where people will go and what they will do. Any traditional assertion of privacy is rapidly becoming extinct.

Worldox GX3

I had the privilege last week of attending a briefing for top resellers and consultants for Worldox concerning the next version Worldox GX3 (available some time in the first half of 2012).

Worldox GX3 will be available in three versions: Professional, which is the same thick client running off a server as exists today. For smaller firms, this will be a straight upgrade from what they have now.

But the big news is the other two versions: a fully cloud-based Software as a Service (“SaaS”) version and an Enterprise version which offers larger firms the ability to deploy within their own data center, allowing for enhanced Wide area network performance. The interface for all three versions will be identical.

Smaller firms that have offices in multiple cities will be able to go with the SaaS version and save significant infrastructure expenses.

More details will be forthcoming in the next couple of months, but this means that Worldox will be more able to compete in larger firms and firms with multiple offices without some of the limitations that exist today. In addition to the usual new features and functionality, GX3 promises to offer significant new functionality for many larger firms.

Travelling in Europe

Because our trip to the Dordogne was in a very restricted area, we rented a house of a week in the town Domme, France for significantly less than a hotel would have cost. This medieval city was the site where the Knights Templar were held prisoner for a good part of the 14th century after their dissolution in 1307. The instructions that came with our 14th century house and its 3 foot thick stone walls noted that while the toilets/sewer system worked, it didn’t work very well, since the system was commissioned in 1290! The house and the views were fantastic.

Typical of the internet world, we accessed a British site to rent a house in France, owned by a couple in Miami, Florida!

The house had all the modern amenities (dishwasher, washer/dryer, etc.). It had a wifi connection to the French internet, so there was no problem in bringing a laptop (feasible since I didn’t have to cart it from place to place). An iPad would not have worked, since without a USB port, it would have been impossible to download pictures from our camera. Since US cell phones typically do not work on European systems (superior to the American GST system), and since I was only planning on making limited phone calls, I got a “loaner” phone from Verizon which worked in Europe. You have to watch out for those per-minute roaming charges, especially for data, though. The loaner was a Blackberry, which is great for phone and email, but lacks some of the productivity-wasting apps that iPhone and Android users get addicted to. Does have some nice features, though – the ability to turn itself off between, say, 11 pm and 7 am to save battery. Also a nice “Bedside” mode that displays the time when you pick it up.

In addition, I used Skype from my laptop (although recipients of calls complained that I sounded “distant”). So when we got back from our daily tourist activities I could check my email, phone messages and respond to the most important.  Several Skype calls a day cost me about $2.00 for the week.