Journal entries - July 2009
Droïdes launched!
There we go, the new webboard for the law students at the “Université Catholique de Louvain” (the UCL that isn’t “University College London”) has been launched, at www.arpia.be/droides.
It took probably around the whole free time I had during this last month (i.e. not all that much, what with all the time I spent doing my law internship), and is still not finished, but at least, the website is now accessible once more to students.
Hopefully, it’ll improve in the coming month, and hopefully people will like it!
Free speech on the internet
In my 14 effective days of internship so far in a large law firm, i.e. at the 2/3rds of the internship, I have mainly worked on one single, important case involving freedom of speech on the internet. Though there were times during my research when I felt despair for lack of tangible results (basically, few people seem to tackle the subject in a manner of interest to us in the case), the subject was truly interesting, and the occasional golden find encouraged me to keep going.
This research, mainly focussed on internet liability (legal responsibility, for non-lawyers), was a true eye-opener, because I had never thought of the internet from that angle: how free is speech on the internet?
Are we all “Big Brother”?
As some of you may know, I am on the verge of becoming the owner of the student website of my (former) Law Faculty. This week-end (after a start of internship with Allen & Overy where I have worked an average of 9h30 a day), I started work on porting the current database to a local installation, to try to get it all to work on my own design and all that.
However, encoding problems (we’re going from Western Roman to UTF-8, for those who understand the jargon) have made it such that all accented characters (é, è, û, …), very common in French, are messed up in the exported database. As such, I’ve had to replace these everywhere.
One thing I noticed when doing these replacements was the full control I had over content: I could easily check all the private messages sent in the forum. The temptation was oh-so-great, naturally…