Notes, links and conversation

A court in Brussels has ordered on September 5th that Google remove all news stories from the French and German-language Belgian publishers*.  “Removing” means: both from Google News, as well as from the Google cache of the regular search Google.be/.com search engine.  The verdict is confusing because it mixes up aspects of the regular search engine and the news.google.be portal, both in its analysis and its ruling.  And it is a dangerous precedent, because it assumes search engines should explicitly ask permission to to index and cache content.

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You encounter a link to an MP3 file but it takes ages to download before you can even start to listen. You probably even haven’t got the time to sit down and listen right now, so you’d want to save it on your MP3 player without too much hassle - the way you do with MP3s in a podcast. Recognize the situation? If so, here’s my MP3 lifehack for you: (more…)