Google Quits Scanning Email, Permanently Kills Ads For Apps for Education Customers

Today, we’re taking additional steps to enhance the educational experience for Apps for Education customers:

  • We’ve permanently removed the “enable/disable” toggle for ads in the Apps for Education Administrator console. This means ads in Apps for Education services are turned off and administrators no longer have the option or ability to turn ads in these services on.
  • We’ve permanently removed all ads scanning in Gmail for Apps for Education, which means Google cannot collect or use student data in Apps for Education services for advertising purposes.

via Official Google Enterprise Blog: Protecting Students with Google Apps for Education.

Good news! This is especially important for K-12 edu users. No more scanning of email by Google really will help support privacy issues surrounding use of Gmail in education. Personally I’m happy they won’t be scanning at least one of my email accounts.

Amazon Web Services Launches City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge

Cloud computing can help local governments to spur economic development, expand citizen services, and break through siloed bureaucracy by providing innovative & scalable services without wasting taxpayer funds on expensive and inflexible hardware infrastructure.
We’ve already seen a lot of amazing work, including GIS applications, emergency preparedness and response, open access to data, mobile applications, and more.
Our new City on a Cloud Innovation challenge is designed to recognize and reward the technologists responsible for putting the cloud to use for the benefit of local governments in eligible countries around the world.

via Amazon Web Services Blog: City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge.

Prizes totaling $250,000 in AWS credits will be awarded to winners in best practices in local government and application developer partners in innovation categories.

Sounds like a great opportunity for recognition of folks working to make local government better. Get all the details on the City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge page.

 

LSN Captures How Law Schools Respond to USN&WR Rankings

Over on the Law School News site the release earlier this week of the US News & World Report law school rankings has triggered the collection of many press releases and blog posts about the rankings. Typically schools that placed well in the rankings are letting the world know about it, while others remain silent.

You can track the news yourself with this saved search: rank | Law School News.

Law School News (LSN) is a hobby site I run that aggregates news feeds from about 100 US law schools and makes the  feeds searchable.Preview

HeinOnline Law Reviews Now Available on Fastcase Adding Secondary Sources to the FC Mix

Today, we’re happy to launch the second phase of this partnership, integrating HeinOnline’s extensive law review collection in Fastcase. Using your Fastcase account, you now have access to search one of the most comprehensive databases of law review articles in the world. The HeinOnline collection includes more than 2,000 law review titles, each going back to the first page of the first volume. It’s by far the largest collections of law reviews and law journals in the world — and starting today, you can search the entire collection in Fastcase, and subscribe to HeinOnline whenever you want at a discount.

via Two Great Services that Work Great Together: Announcing HeinOnline Law Reviews on Fastcase « Fastcase.

This expansion of the Fastcase HeinOnline partnership that was announced last year brings secondary legal materials to researchers using Fastcase’s primary materials. Fastcase will offer its subscribers with suggested results from HeinOnline resources that compliment the primary resources found. Researchers need a separate subscription to HeinOnline to view the HO articles.

Overall this service will be a boon for Fastcase subscribers and make the service more valuable to legal researchers both in practice and in academia.

Who Really Owns America’s Large Mutinationals? It’s Hard To Say According to Penn Law Prof.

There is no way to tell whether America’s largest multinational companies – the Googles, Apples and Ciscos of the world – are in fact American-owned, a surprising gap in financial reporting that has important implications for U.S. international tax policy, according to new research by a University of Pennsylvania Law School professor.
The research by Chris William Sanchirico suggests that the extent of foreign ownership of U.S. multinationals is unknown even to the companies themselves, due to the way many shares of stock are purchased and registered.
Sanchirico, the Samuel A. Blank Professor of Law, is co-director of the Center for Tax Law & Policy. His research paper As American As Apple Inc. was recently issued by the Penn Law Institute for Law & Economics.

via Who owns Apple? New research from Penn Law argues no one really knows • Penn Law.

Interesting article that highlights an intriguing issue with America’s largest multinationals: who benefits from the tax benefits the corporations receive? Since it is often not clear who owns stock in these corps and the businesses take advantage of US tax law to move profits offshore, any sort of tax break given for repatriating those profits may actually have more benefit to foreign than US stock holders.

Paperless Office Is Closer As DocuSign Apps Come To Microsoft Office 365

“Today, Microsoft and DocuSign announced a long-term strategic partnership to make DocuSign’s industry-leading eSignature apps widely available from within Microsoft Office 365. DocuSign’s new solutions, which are built on the Office 365 platform, will include integration within Outlook, Word, SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server 2013”, says the Office team.

via Betanews: Paper is passé — DocuSign eSignature comes to Microsoft Office 365.

DocuSign’s eSignature apps have been available to Google Docs users for some time and the addition of Office 365 just increases the market penetration. As acceptance of digital signatures through trusted apps like DocuSign increases fulfilling the longtime dream of a paperless office becomes more likely.

Tauberer On Creating A Good API

Let’s take the common case where you have a relatively static, large dataset that you want to provide read-only access to. Here are 19 common attributes of good APIs for this situation. Thanks to Alan deLevie, Ben Balter, Eric Mill, Ed Summers, Joe Wicentowski, and Dave Caraway for some of these ideas.

via What makes a good API? Joshua Tauberer’s Blog.

This lengthy article provides an interesting set of points that anyone creating an API for a data set or service should at least consider as they create. I think it’s worth listing the points here, but be sure to go read the article to get all of the details. Then think of these things when you are creating your API.

  • Granular access
  • Deep filtering
  • Typed values
  • Normalize tables, then denormalize
  • Be RESTful , and more
  • Multiple output formats
  • Nice errors
  • Turn intents into URLs
  • Documentation
  • Client libraries
  • Versioning
  • High performance
  • High availability
  • Know your users
  • Know your committed users more
  • Never require registration
  • Interactive documentation
  • Developer community
  • Create virtuous cycles

I think it is also interesting to consider these points when you are developing applications that consumes data or services through an API. If the API you are using is deficient on any of these points consider contacting the API’s developer to see about making the API better.

 

Red Hat Finally Adopts CentOS, Brings Legitimacy To Enterprise Open Source

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a wonderful operating system for commercial users. However, there is one major downside to it — it costs money. Luckily, Red Hat provides the source code to the open-source community. This enables groups to use the code to build their own free distributions, such as CentOS. While these distributions are just as functional as RHEL, they lack support from Red Hat.

Even though the existence of CentOS can potentially take money from Red Hat’s pockets, there never seemed to be any resentment or animosity. In fact, just yesterday, Red Hat surprised the Linux community and announced that it will sponsor that distribution going forward. In other words, CentOS is now owned by Red Hat Inc — the father has officially adopted its illegitimate baby and Fedora has a new step-brother.

Via Beta News

This is great news for the open source community. CentOS provides an excellent open alternative to RHEL but has suffered from quite a bit of lag that has left it a step or two behind other server grade distros. I’ll be taking a close look at this to see if it warrants a shift away from Ubuntu LTS.

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9th Circuit To Begin Live Video Streaming of En Banc Proceedings

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will provide live video streaming of its en banc proceedings, beginning with five cases scheduled for oral arguments December 9-11, 2013, in the James R. Browning U.S. Courthouse in San Francisco.  Effective December 9, Internet users will find links to the video streams here or by visiting www.ca9.uscourts.gov and clicking on the link labeled “En Banc Video Streaming.”

via Internet Viewing of En Banc Proceedings.

In a move that is sure to get my portion of the Internet buzzing the 9th Circuit today announced that it will being streaming live video of en banc proceedings starting with next weeks hearings. The court notes that it will be using its own technology to do this and is not relying on an outside vendor for the service.

This represents a major step forward for the US Federal courts and it may set an example for other courts to follow. Now if they would just start releasing the text of opinions in a format other than PDF…

 

An idea that would make GitHub really interesting for Open Law

Successfully architected solutions do two things: First, they rely on existing open standards rather than reinventing the wheel. They rely on some of the internet’s greatest hits, things like OAuth and REST, and store data in formats born in the internet age, formats like GeoJSON and markdown. No licenses, no SDKs, just data. Second, they’re built as a dumb core with a smart edge. Upgrading a standard is a monumental task. Upgrading a tool is trivial. But more importantly, there’s room at the edge for experimentation, and with readily available libraries, amazing vehicles of empowerment like geojson.io, something that nobody knew could exist six months ago, suddenly start appearing over night.

Ben Balter :: That’s not how the internet works

First, go read the article, it’s really good and packed full of interesting points. I’ll wait.
Welcome back!
Now imagine the CFR stored as data on GitHub. A GitCFR repository would be open to all and exposed to the APIs of GitHub. Besides using GeoJSON to locate fire hydrants in your neighborhood you could use GitCFR to find regulations relevant to the manufacture of those fire hydrants. Any API call would return just a specific piece of the regs that could be displayed as the app builder desires.

Of course any of this would require that the GPO set up a system for loading the CFR to GitHub so we don’t have to worry about issues of authenticity. While anyone can grab the bulk XML of the CFR from the GPO’s FDsys website and load it into GitHub, it really needs to the be done by the GPO so that developers can rely on the authenticity of the data.

 

I know, your first question is “What format?”, but that doesn’t really matter. It could be be JSON, Asciidoc, Markdown, XML, anything so long as it’s regular and structured.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5
That said it would certainly make for an interesting weekend project to throw some section of the CFR into GitHub and see what can be done with existing API calls.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5