Minnesota Lawyer

The combination of the tablet and the cloud is as big a change to the current world of personal computing as was the introduction of the graphical user interface to the world of DOS.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve acquired two new pieces of technology: DirecTV and an HTC Evo 4G. Neither is solely applicable to the practice of law, but both can be. Neither are particularly new or high-tech — although each might have been considered high-tech just a few years ago — and both have been around for at least a couple of years. But I have spent an inordinate amount of time learning how to use them. Of course, things will be different when running different operating systems (applicable to the smartphone although not to the TV remote), but these things could and should be somewhat uniform within applications to make it possible to get going with a minimum of bother.

Recently, I wrote about Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Version 11, the latest product in Nuance's Voice Recognition dictation system. I didn't test the $800 full legal system with customized dictionary and voice commands for the legal industry but just the base $200 system for ordinary human beings (i.e., nonlawyers).

The increase in the popularity of e-books, both commercial and in the public domain, is understandable considering they present good value, are easy to acquire and are easily read with the relatively inexpensive commercial readers for currently published books. I am becoming addicted to the offerings of the Nook and Kindle.

Recently I reported on Encrypt Stick which, among other things, supports a "privacy browser" on a USB drive. (The $40 program also has a password vault and an file encrypt/decrypt module.) The privacy browser was rather weak, although it did have some privacy benefits.

Faithful readers of this column know that I am an advocate of laptop computers for most "on the go" legal work for the modern lawyer these days.

Last month I discussed methods for keeping your private communications private. This month I’ll continue with a discussion of virtual private networks (VPNs).

My life is an open book to anyone who is seriously interested in reading it. I didn't plan it that way, but I'm at peace with it.

It has been my tradition for a couple of decades to skulk around the stores, the websites, the magazines and the press releases to get some idea of what lawyers immersed in the latest technology - and their colleagues, employees, friends and relatives - might wish to give or get. It is a dirty job, and I love doing it.

Internet privacy is a hot topic these days. I could go on and on about the privacy issues involved in data encryption, virtual private networks and saving data to "the cloud." Today, however, I am going to discuss passwords - how to choose them and how to keep track of them.