Phishing emails

We're seeing a spate of phishing emails asking us to click on a link to verify our network passwords or the account will get shut off. If you start seeing such emails that appear be from your internal IT folks, I recommend that you check with them first before clicking. Most of the times, these are fake, just trying social engineering to get access to your accounts.

Eggs in a basket

The recent break-in and subsequent spams from companies using Epsilon services for email marketing has Greg Lambert at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog musing about the risks and benefits of putting your virtual eggs in the same virtual basket.

New lawsuit over unpaid time

From the Ars Technica web site:

Off the clock? Hyperconnected workers sue employers

Ubiquitous Internet connections and a proliferation of smartphones have put more employees "on call" than ever before, and many aren't being paid for the extra time. Some are pushing back in lawsuits against their employers, but it may simply be time for companies to draw a clearer line on out-of-office communications.

By Jacqui Cheng Last updated August 10, 2009 12:30 PM CT

Interesting article bringing up the basic question of are you working or not when required to answer work calls/emails after work hours?

Thank you, Ars Technica, for including the court and docket number!

Further reading:

If you have PACER access, the case against T-Mobile is 1:09-cv-02955-RJD-RML in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

Being Wired or Being Tired

Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload
Sarah Houghton-Jan explores different strategies for managing and coping with various types of informational overload.
Ariadne
Issue 56 July 2008

Sarah Houghton-Jan of Librarian in Black blog fame, wrote an article on information overload, pointing out that people started complaining about overload after the invention of the printing press. She pulls together quite a few tidbits about managing information and time.

Fake CNN emails

I've seen multiple emails in my daily spam filter report - if you have too, here's an article that explains why not to click on the link in the email.

Massive faux-CNN spam blitz uses legit sites to deliver fake Flash
More than 1,000 hacked sites serving up phony update; Adobe issues warning
By Gregg Keizer

August 6, 2008 (Computerworld) More than a thousand hacked Web sites are serving up fake Flash Player software to users duped into clicking on links in mail that's part of a massive spam attack masquerading as CNN.com news notifications, security researchers said today.

The bogus messages, which claim to be from the CNN.com news Web site, include links to what are supposedly the day's Top 10 news stories and Top 10 news video clips from the cable network. Clicking on any of those links, however, brings up a dialog that says an incorrect version of Flash Player has been detected and that tells users they needed to update to a newer edition, said Sam Masiello, vice president of information security at Denver-based security company MX Logic Inc. (cont.)

Blackberries and deposition ethics

Read on - this article is funny, but brings up very interesting points about whether or not it is ethical for attorneys to check/reply to emails during depositions.

Whacked Out on BlackBerrys in Depositions

By Jerold S. Solovy and Robert L. Byman
The National Law Journal
June 19, 2008

...Our BlackBerrys keep us connected. We are in a service business and these wonderful devices let us render service to our clients in real time, every
waking moment. But here is a caution -- when we use them at a deposition to
check and return and compose e-mails, we may be violating ethical rules. ...
(cont)

Law-lib archives

I just saw this a few minutes ago in an email from Judy Janes at UC Davis.

Law-Lib archives can now be reached at:
http://lawlibrary.ucdavis.edu/lawlib/

Which reminds me, Christopher Noe has updated his Law-Lib Listserv FAQ (dated Sept. 27, 2007). You can find his FAQ at http://home.olemiss.edu/%7Enoe/llfaq.html.

Managing email

Ernie the Attorney has an interesting blog post on managing email. His professed greatest tip is that not all emails require a response. Read the post for the explanation as to how he determines whether or not an email requires a response.

I also have a tip. If you're like the typical librarian, you subscribe to multiple listservs and get a number of listserv related emails every day. What I've done is to create Outlook folders for each listserv and to create rules to shuttle emails from the listservs into their proper folders. This means I don't have to read all the emails immediately, I can check them regularly. I do, of course, read the ones from the DALL listserv almost immediately.

Does anyone else have any great tips for managing email?

Email and confidentiality

I read a post at Ed Foster's GripeLog about appending the email confidentiality note and whether or not it is enforceable. What is most interesting are the comments after the post; you can easily pick out the ones from non-legal folks and from the attorney posting. Look for yourself and see what you think.

http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/2007/7/19/84040/3002