http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl About search engines, digital civil rights and more Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:08:07 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Blekko, a new general search engine in development, has started a private beta. I've waited for a few years so this is pretty exciting. Blekko has progressive ideas on the ranking of search results and transparency of the search process for users. Blekko will empower its users through what it calls ... http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/?p=305 Chris Soghoian's research about law enforcement access to customer records in the United States, made it to the Cobert Report: The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/?p=304 In its long awaited opinion in the French Google Adword cases about trade mark infringement of keyword advertising, the European Court of Justice's Advocate General, the young Miguel Poiares Maduro, has concluded that the sale and use of keywords to trigger sponsored search results does not constitute infringement. In ... http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/?p=303 The European Court of Justice's Advocate General Maduro is reported to support Google in the high level court case of LVMH over trademark infringement. This would be a big win for Google, and in my opinion for Internet users as well. I am looking forward to reading the actual opinion, ... http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/?p=302 The Dutch digital civil rights organisation Bits of Freedom has been relaunched. I have been lucky to be able to contribute to the relaunch as a board member. Many have already welcomed the announcement of Bits of Freedom's renewed efforts to make a change for freedom in the digital age. ... http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/?p=300 Yesterday I borrowed a tent and I just started to finalize the slides for my presentation at HAR 2009, the Dutch Hacker Camp. I will speak about censorship in the search engine context, coming Thursday, August 13th, 20:00, Dutch time. Everybody who managed to get a ticket (the event was ... http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/?p=298 Rosalie Marshall reports for V3.co.uk that the Global Network Initiative, which was launched in the end of 2008, still did not find qualified staff. The result is that the initiative is failing to really take off. What could stand in the way of finding a qualified director, if the network ... http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/?p=297 Interesting decision in the U.K. about the liability of search engines for their search results under English defamation law. Thanks to Google's lawyers, it provides a great overview of some common law principles, the relevance of freedom of expression and the e-commerce directive and its implementations. http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/?p=295 The Dutch data retention implementation law (31145) is on the plenary agenda of the Dutch Senate next Monday and Tuesday, 6 and 7 July 2009. So far, the Senate has been very critical of the implementation law, has held an expert meeting and asked two rounds of questions to the ... http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/?p=294 Our German neighbors are about to vote about a controversial legislative package introducing mandatory internet censorship at the network level. Netzpolitik has an excellent overview of the political debate until now. AK-Zensur, the Working Group on Internet Filtering and Censorship, has a comprehensive overview of arguments against the proposals. ... http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/?p=292