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Another interesting article in the Boston Globe, by the wonderful Hiawatha Bray, about companies whose business is defending against distributed denial of service attacks, as well as other internet attacks. Denial of Service attacks (DDS attacks) essentially seek to overwhelm the victim’s resources by sending so many requests simultaneously that the victim’s computers cannot respond to legitimate requests, and crash, or simply slow too much to be useful. The attacker assembles a zombie like army called a botnet by sending a code to random computers via e-mail attachments or a computer worm. The botnet computers then work together to send out the DDS attack in a coordinated way. The owners of the botnet computers may never know their computers were involved. OOTJ readers probably remember when Google publicized its attack by hackers from the People’s Republic of China. Twitter and Facebook have also been attacked, and as former supporters of Wikileaks have withdrawn financial support, they are facing similar attacks from outraged Wikileak friends.

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Nicole C. Engard continues her series on best practices for libraries to leverage open source tools with a guide on publishing tutorials for using library resources. Rather than creating a printed pathfinder, she suggests creating a video tutorial instead, as the learning experience is often more engaging and has deeper impact when users see something done versus reading about it.

Another article in today’s Boston Globe, in the Ideas section, “Virtual World Order,” by Rachel Nolan, interviews law professor Greg Lastowka, of Rutgers, Camden, Law School’s Institute for Information Policy and Law. Prof. Lastowka has written a book,Virtual Justice, the new laws of online worlds, published by Yale University Press. (On this bio page here, you can link to an audio file of and NPR interview about the book, as well as what is noted as a PDF version of the book. I am not sure he really means to give us the entire file! But maybe so.)

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I enjoy reading the Library Babel Fish blog, which is written by Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College and appears regularly on Inside Higher Ed. The most recent post, “Finals: An All-Consuming Ritual,” hit home for me. Fister describes the “binging and purging” that are as much a part of exam preparation at her school as cramming and last-minute writing of papers. So much food is consumed in her library during finals that “the amounts of food-related trash that [the] custodians … haul out … [is] prodigious.”

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A major blow to the National Health Care Law! Just this week in Richmond, Virginia, U.S. District Court Judge Henry E. Hudson determined a central provision of the national health care law, the Affordable Care Act, to be unconstitutional. Attorneys and co-hosts Bob Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams welcome health care law expert Professor Timothy S. Jost from the Washington and Lee University School of Law and Adam Winkler, a constitutional law specialist from UCLA Law School, to discuss this recent ruling, the constitutionality of this provision and the health care law and the impact of this ruling on other states and those in need of health care.

The Boston Globe reports on a fascinating cooperative effort where GoogleBooks has created a new tool, the Google Books Ngram Viewer which allows a researcher to sift through the materials scanned into the Google Books project, and automatically calculate the frequency of a word and watch it change over time. You can then compare the changing frequency of different words across the decades or centuries.

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When dealing with students, it is usually better not to overreact. Although this is true all year long, it is especially true during final exams, when tension levels rise. Right now, my library is literally packed with students, and it is becoming difficult to find a place to study. The staff is endeavoring to ensure that burned-out lightbulbs are replaced in a timely fashion and that the building is a comfortable temperature at all times. We try to remain calm when responding to complaints brought to us by students, but at times it is difficult. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education made me think about ways that law school administrators interact with students.

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In this edition of the BU Law podcast, host and media veteran, Dan Rea of WBZ-Radio 1030 welcomes Joshua H. Soloway, the Managing Director of Rainmaker New York and the CEO of Soloway Group, P.C, to discuss his role as an entrepreneurial lawyer in today’s legal business world. Dan and Josh take a look at the practice of law in new ways - filling a specific gap in the marketplace, preparing mid-size foreign companies who are trying to grow into the US market and offering advice to young attorneys and law students who are looking to start their own firm.

Suffolk Law’s Rappaport Professor of Law and Public Policy Alasdair Roberts discusses health care costs in Massachusetts with Commissioner David Morales of the Division of Health Care Finance and Policy in this week’s Rappaport Center podcast.

The “craft” of legislative history construction is practiced with unique and outstanding expertise by law librarian Rick McKinney. This history is designed in a streamlined fashion so as to allow users to more easily check when provisions in the law got into bill and then check for related remarks concerning those provisions. It also has links to earlier legislation related to different titles of the Act, to the Administration’s proposed legislation in 2009, to related CRS reports, and to various summaries and commentaries of the law on the Web.