August 2004

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New war on spam

23 August 2004 in Internet law

Internet service providers (ISPs) have declared war on e-commerce web sites run by spammers in a new ‘get tough’ policy on spam. Shutting down these web sites is intended to remove the financial incentive to send spam. The decision to extend the battle against spam onto web sites was taken by ISPs belonging to the London Internet Exchange (LINX), which handles more than 90 per cent of the UK’s Internet traffic. This initiative tackles spammers who host their e-commerce web sites with a reputable ISP while sending spam from another network. ISPs’ anti-spam policies will now also target web site owners even when the site owner uses a third party to send the spam itself.

LINX codes of Best Current Practice (BCP) lead ISPs’ development of acceptable use terms of service, the contract between an ISP and it customer.

LINX Press Release

LINX Best Current Practice

The Law Society site revisited

19 August 2004 in Law sites

The quiet holiday period has afforded time to revisit and review in more depth the new Law Society site.

Reading Room, the site developers, describe the Law Society project thus:

Reading Room are implementing a fully integrated internet, intranet and extranet solution, including the creation of a knowledge management portal powered by Autonomy. // Reading Room has a strong track record of undertaking enterprise projects involving the development of complex content management systems and integration with internal resources. This website will be personalised using the world leading intelligent pattern recognition software, Autonomy. It is Autonomy that will also power the internal knowledge management platform. // The design of the site will benefit from Reading Rooms commitment to creating usable and accessible sites that are simple to use.

It is surprising therefore that the site is – it has to be said – a bit of a dog. I’ll pick just two aspects of the site to illustrate:

Basic navigation

The Main Menu is arranged vertically in the header panel with two unfortunate consequences: the rolling Javascript sub-menu items are difficult to select; and the header panel occupies a full one-third of the browser window (at 1024 x 768 resolution).

The secondary menu includes two items with quite substantial content – Links and Areas of Law. One would expect to find these in the main menu.

The Links page is headed by a linked list of categories. When activating a link, the category list remains in place with the search results listed below – out of view! So it’s not obvious the page content has changed.

Automatic hyperlinking

One of the features of Autonomy is (to quote):

the ability to suggest contextually relevant legal content pertinent to the legal issues being researched. Through automatic Hyperlinking, Autonomy significantly reduces the time taken to navigate to the right information, identify previous precedents and facilitate reuse of existing material.

This automatic hyperlinking works well when applied to articles internal to the site, but falls down substantially in relation to external resources. Here are two examples of its application:

  • Selecting News and Events – Legal News, generates external links under the UK Legal News heading (see here)
  • Viewing a News article generates external links under External related articles in the sidebar panel (example)

While the technology is undoubtedly smart, the effects of the current implementation are dismal.

  • These pages are slow to load.
  • The only external articles linked to appear to be judgments in the Court Service judgments database and items on the GNN (Government News Network) site.
  • The link texts, being generated from the target page’s Title, lack “information scent”. For example Court Service titles are in the unhelpful form “Court Service Judgments Neutral Citation Number …”, and GNN titles “Published 29/11/2001 P/2001/660 28 November…”
  • The relevance of these articles is typically very low (hover over a link to view details) – reinforcing the second point above
  • Links to the GNN articles don’t work

Law Society

Reading Room press notice

Autonomy

e-Conveyancing plans approved

10 August 2004 in Government

Land Registry’s latest plans for the development and delivery of its electronic conveyancing services have been approved and endorsed by David Lammy, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Constitutional Affairs. The key proposals are:

  • Land Registry will develop and operate the central e-conveyancing service which will link all participants in a conveyancing transaction, co-ordinating key milestones of exchange and completion, and updating the Land Register.
  • Access to the service will be via public and private channels. Land Registry will develop and implement its own basic channel access and will encourage the development of added value commercial channels alongside this to offer customer choice.
  • An Electronic Funds Transfer Service, to be supplied by an ‘agency bank’, will be linked to the central service facilitating all money movements associated with property transactions.

Land Registry aim to pilot the e-conveyancing service during the spring of 2006 and begin an incremental process of national rollout during 2007.

Land Registry Press Notice

Browser Wars: Firefox trumps Internet Explorer

4 August 2004 in Browsers

Fed up with your browser being hijacked at every turn? This alone is reason enough to switch from Internet Explorer now to Mozilla’s Firefox (formally known as Firebird). It’s a complete browser filled with tons of features. It’s not bloated like IE, and it loads sites more quickly. The interface is simpler and cleaner and its tabbed browsing will be a revelation to those who haven’t used tabs before. Amongst the many featrures there’s a built in pop-up blocker that works better than most. But most importantly you’ll be spared the disruption caused by the many plagues which exploit the security vulnerabilities of IE. To be fair to Microsoft the primary reason that “malware” writers target IE rather than other browsers is that it’s the browser that everyone uses. Quite likely if Firefox becomes the most popular browser, it will become target number one for malware writers. But that will be some time off, so until then here’s wishing you trouble free browsing.

Firefox