Journal
Filtering information on the internet
While the world discusses Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize (I’m on the “what has he done so far?” side), I wish to draw your attention to something entirely different: law and technology.
I am in the process of finding a topic for the 15,000-word dissertation that I shall write during this year, and therefore wish to lay out my current ideas, in the hope that one or two might give their opinion.
When using the internet, most of us feel free: we can type anything in Google, and find our way to a million different results. We can go to Amazon or eBay, search for anything, and probably find one or two things of interest to us. We can read a blog, click on a link, and find ourselves reading articles of diverging points of view. A seemingly infinite realm of information is available at our fingertips.
However, all is not golden in this world of apparent freedom. In many States (from China to the UK), users are limited in their use of the internet by “filters”, which are meant to block access to specific (categories of) websites. Certain items of information are blocked in a more specific manner at the level of websites, when the website owner/administrator/moderator applies censorship. All in all, these intermediaries control available information.
As such, when user tries to access content, such access may be denied. Sometimes, the user is fully unaware of the existence of the information in question, but not all the time. Does this hinder freedom of access to information? Does this hinder the information creator’s freedom of speech? Whence does the right to censor/block information come? Is the creator or intermediary liable to the user if illegal/offensive/… material isn’t blocked? Is the intermediary liable to the creator or to the user for information wrongfully blocked? Does the creator not have a right to access the information created by himself?
This is the kind of question that I believe I would ask and try to answer. Concerns of legitimacy and effectiveness must be addressed, though the focus would be the legal point of view.
Any thoughts on the matter?
Two weeks later, still intrigued
Something is in the air, one might say. Or perhaps something about it speaks directly to my inner self. Whatever the reason, London never ceases to surprise me in a positive way, and feelings of attachment have grown within the heart of a person otherwise indifferent to large cities.
Another poet’s soul captured by an immortal city, perhaps? I did write a poem about the Serpentine lake, a magnet pulling all visitors towards its shores in Hyde Park and the Kensington Gardens:
Serpentine Song
Glitter, glitter, Serpentine,
May your birdsong grow, may your surface shine
In the light of day, you have frozen time
With an air so sweet that it tastes sublimeWhisper, whisper, Serpentine,
Such a mystic view makes you seem divine
When you speak to the trees, to the rose and lime,
Nature bows to the sound of your glorious chimeRemember, remember, Serpentine,
I shall always cherish this memory of mine.
It is worth stating that the mere writing of a poem about a place is not enough for me to fall in love with the place. As such, we must dig deeper to understand my sudden appreciation of this metropolis.
Good-bye Brussels, Hello London!
It’s been just over 50 hours since I arrived in London, but I have already taken a liking to where I am, the Hampstead Residence, and to the inner parts of the city, where I’ll be studying.
On the one side of the Hampstead Residence, walking for one minute will land you amidst Aston Martins, Jaguars and even the odd Rolls Royce, in an area of architectural magnificence. Rich, peaceful and quiet are the adjectives one might attribute to this zone.
On the other side, around Finchley Road, a squirrel hides from the busy traffic, seeking refuge in the green areas. The architecture is no longer grand but more heterogeneous, and during the 15-minute walk separating the Hampstead Residence from Finchley Road Tube Station (10 if you keep a good pace), residential areas mingle with shops.
Supermarkets are generally also 15 minutes away at a “student” walking pace, which makes for good exercise if done regularly.
Big cats and themes
As of yesterday (Thursday) evening, my MacBook runs Snow Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X. I’m very pleased of the functionality changes, even though I was saddened to see that the user interface hasn’t changed one bit.
There had been rumours of the “Marble” interface, but nothing (I repeat: nothing) has changed visually as regards the general interface (bar a few luminosity adjustments and the changes required by the new functionality). Icons, scrollbars, list headers, the “traffic lights”, …, everything with which Mac OS X themes generally deal, it’s all unchanged.
Except that Apple decided to change a couple of things in the structure of its theme files, which means that a) we can’t simply copy our theme files from Leopard to Snow Leopard, and b) we haven’t a clue how to decode one of the core UI files, “SArtFile.bin”. Hopefully there will be a decoder soon.
In the meantime, I’ll be using my external drive every now and again to boot under Leopard, because the only theming tool we can use (Themepark 4) works only under Leopard.
If you are an iTunesque user, expect a bunch of new packs for Snow Leopard in the coming days/weeks.
Edit: many iTunesque packages are now available. See the iTunesque page for more details.
The joys of a multilingual environment
With less than three weeks to go before I leave for London on a one-year course at university, I’m starting to realise that there’s one thing I’ll definitely miss about Brussels: its multilingual aspect. Though in London I’ll have to tackle a wider array of English accents than I have ever encountered so far, which in itself will be quite a challenge, it’s not quite the same.
Come to think of it, compared to a multilingual environment, studying & working in a monolingual environment must be boring.
Have I become European (and/or Belgian) to the point of looking down upon “lesser people” such as the Brits and the Americans, who rarely have to venture outside their linguistic comfort zone?
Arpia – version 1, at 171,060 words
The day has finally come where I can say the following: I have finished writing Arpia.
I never imagined it would happen, but I have indeed written the last words of the full version 1 of the Arpia novel (version 1 as in “the parts that haven’t been revised three times already will be revised, and I’ll then revise the entire thing”).
As such, the Arpia novel page has been updated, and I’m in dire need of reviewers for the whole thing (I already have some reviews for part I [the first half], but you can never get enough reviews).
If you are therefore interested in reviewing the novel, letting me know what doesn’t flow, what is amazing, what is awful, do drop me a line by using the contact form.
To get some of you intrigued (hopefully), here are the very last lines of the novel:
One mind pondered a question.
“Is she ready now?”
The answer came from the second mind.
“We shall consult with the Shroud.”
If you know who the Shroud are, you’ll get easier access to the novel for review.
Comments that make it all worthwhile
Though ARPIA2 is nearing its third birthday, every now and again I receive comments from people regarding the plug-in.
And just as the end of “draft 1″ of the Arpia novels enters in sight (“Operation Firestorm” is what I’m writing about right now), here’s a little comment posted on the Ambrosia Software webboards that made me smile:
I just finished the Regular string today. Very, very impressive.
I have to say: I was a bit shocked when the two “destroy the Hogun” missions came along. Up until that point, the Regular string was honestly feeling a bit too safe (pirate-kill missions tapered off, courier missions involved little to no blockade-running). And then suddenly, oof. I think it took at least a dozen attempts, plus several million credits worth of escorts and upgrades to them (n.b., I am about the worst starfighter in the known galaxy), to beat that one. (None of my escorts or manta fighters survived, even in victory.)
Which is pretty awesome, all in all: I put EVERYthing I had into beating back the enemy and it was just barely enough. Now that’s a feeling of accomplishment.
This plug-in really lived up to billing. I never expected to pull off missions like that, or even “go take out two pirate carriers” (yikes!), or to command a (now extinct) fleet that included an Enterprise and a Manticore.
And I can tell there’s still a ton of stuff that I haven’t done yet. Thanks for all of the effort that went into this.
- source
Thanks mattkuhns!
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…