Email Disclaimer:

This email and any attachments are confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, any use, interference with, disclosure or copying of this material is unauthorised and prohibited. This email and any attachments are also subject to copyright. No part of them may be reproduced, adapted or transmitted without the written permission of the copyright owner.

If you have received this email in error please immediately notify the sender by return email and delete the message from your system. Although this email has been checked for viruses and other defects, no responsibility can be accepted for any loss or damage arising from its receipt or use.

Oops, looks like I just disclosed part of it…

I’ve seen this kind of nonsense in e-mails before and generally ignore it, but on this occasion, it really stood out, being twice the font size of the message itself and all. I won’t go into the nature of the e-mail (which has more to do with decency than feeling threatened) but it wasn’t even of the kind that would warrant any disclaimer.

To make my point: I will not take seriously any e-mail containing such bullshit. I also feel in no way obliged to hold myself to those conditions. I never asked to receive the e-mail, nor was I given a chance to refuse agreement. Had I been given the choice, I would never have agreed. To explain why, let’s go over it sentence by sentence.

This email and any attachments are confidential.

Nothing wrong with that, but e-mail isn’t exactly known to be secure. Moreover, the recipient is usually informed of the confidential nature of the information before the information is actually received, not afterwards.

If you are not the intended recipient, any use, interference with, disclosure or copying of this material is unauthorised and prohibited.

An e-mail client must copy “the material” from the server in order for the disclaimer to be read in the first place, whether it’s the intended recipient’s e-mail client or not. And by merely reading the disclaimer, one is already using “the material”.

This email and any attachments are also subject to copyright.

Of course they are. I, too, have copyright on everything I produce. Happens automatically.

No part of them may be reproduced, adapted or transmitted without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Did sending the message constitute a written permission? Because my server transmitted it to my client, which then transmitted it to my screen, which transmitted it to my eyes, which transmitted it to my brain for processing. I’m sure it was adapted somewhere in all those reproductions.

If you have received this email in error please immediately notify the sender by return email and delete the message from your system.

To notify the sender, one would have to use “the material” to extract the sender’s address. Exactly that was prohibited a few sentences ago, remember? And I don’t delete e-mail that’s not spam, it gets archived for possible later reference. Disclaimer or not.

Although this email has been checked for viruses and other defects, no responsibility can be accepted for any loss or damage arising from its receipt or use.

Sure. Whatever you do, never take responsibility, for anything. Way to go!

Now, I happen to be the intended recipient in this case, but still. It most certainly is not the recipient’s responsibility to make sure he/she is in fact the intended recipient. That’s entirely up to the sender, even more so if the message is confidential as claimed.

Last but not least, a tip: When requesting a favour, it helps not to include such draconian bullshit. Kinda takes away any and all incentive to help.

Google Street View 3D

Funny, but not sure if it’s an April Fools joke. Just looking at some Street View imagery, when I noticed a little orange guy with 3D glasses right underneath the controls, as can be seen to the right. Turns out that when you click it, it will show you the imagery in — yeah, you guessed that right — 3D. You do need a pair of those red/green 3D glasses though. Which of course, I don’t have. That figures…

So, unfortunately I can’t try it out right now, but if you do happen to have some 3D glasses laying around, you could, for instance, have a look at the entrance of the Efteling, which is a theme park a few kilometers from here. I have no idea how extensive this 3D coverage is, but it might just be available everywhere, just some feature Google’s camera cars have had since the beginning but they just haven’t told us about. Anyway, I didn’t do an extensive search, but I have yet to discover a Street View area that hasn’t got 3D imagery.

Next up on my todo list: fashion some 3D glasses somehow, or just get a pair somewhere.

Update (April 9th, 2010)

Apparently, it was just an April Fools joke after all. The option is now gone.

Klup.nl is a Dutch web site for people looking for a house. It apparently once posted some text about a car dealer named Zwartepoorte, and somewhere on the same page, another text about the bankruptcy of a totally different company. The two texts had nothing to do with each other, nor did it appear that way on the web site.

Google, in their everlasting effort to index everything, crawled the page with the mentioned texts, and generated an unfortunate summary for the page that suggested that the car dealer was bankrupt. This summary was shown when searching for “Zwartepoorte failliet” (failliet meaning bankrupt in Dutch). It appeared beneath the link to to said page on Klup.nl in the search results (you know, those grey summaries we all see every day). The summary goes as follows:

volledige naam: Zwartepoorte specialiteit BMW…Dit bedrijf is failliet verklaard, het is overgenomen door het motorhuis (…)

Literally translated: “full name: Zwartepoorte specialty BMW…This company has been declared bankrupt, it has been acquired by the motor house (…)”.

So far, there’s nothing wrong. Until John Zwartepoorte, CEO of the car dealer, used the query mentioned above on Google, and found the summary suggesting his company was bankrupt. So he sued Klup.nl, the site that originally posted both texts.

Weird, you think? Well, not according to the judge. He made a consideration between the right of free speech (don’t ask me what free speech has to do with Google botching up some text) and the interests of Zwartepoorte, and ruled ¹ that Klup.nl was indeed responsible for Google’s summary.

That’s not all, though. Free speech is a constitutional right in the Netherlands, and it has always been very liberal, there weren’t many things one couldn’t say. Discrimination and slander are some of the few things that do not fall under free speech. This judge now added to that, than whenever Google pulls things out of context, the original text must be adjusted. Rather futile, I might add, because there’s no knowing what kind of summary Google will generate for the new text on its next crawl.

Well, luckily there’s the possibility of appeal, which the owner of Klup.nl is of course pursuing. But as it is, until the appeal has been treated in court, this verdict stands. Let’s just hope Google doesn’t generate any “unfortunate” summaries of my site…

1. This page is in Dutch, here’s a translation by Google.

Google supports this initiative by serving a black home page to people living in the San Francisco Bay area.

Google users in the San Francisco Bay Area will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a citywide energy conservation event called Lights Out San Francisco.

http://www.google.com/lightsoutsf/

Well, I don’t live anywhere near San Francisco, but I am treated with a (rather ugly) black Google home page:

Google with lights off

So far nothing really special. But apparently, everyone else I’ve asked gets the standard white home page. I haven’t pulled off any tricks, I’m not connecting though a proxy, and my IP address is a Dutch one. In fact, Google redirects me to www.google.nl when I visit www.google.com if I don’t turn that off manually (by visiting www.google.com/ncr once). So Google actually knows my IP address is a Dutch one. Everyone else with a Dutch IP seems to get the white home page.

I know, this deserves some explanation.

Today is the 25th birthday of the :-). I stumbled upon that page a while ago, remembered it just now, and was fortunate enough to find it in my browser history.

I just thougt it was worth a little remembrance, because I use smilies all too often.

And something of a whole different matter: users can comment without registration again. I got myself an Akismet API key (why haven’t I done that sooner? ) so spam should no longer be a big issue.

For those using a localized version of Google, this is what google.com looks like now:

Google front page

Or you could go to google.com/ncr to see it yourself (this link prevents redirecting to your localized Google version).