Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

Can government agencies use online services (analytics, hosted video) who's privacy policies are unclear and that track each and every visit, mostly unknown to the internet user? (that is, apart from the branding issues)
Strange, because:
"Eight years ago, the issue of cookies tracking users on government sites was a fairly big issue in tech policy circles, drawing the attention of those in Congress. Eventually, the Office of Management and Budget issued a directive that forbid the use of persistent cookies on federal agency sites."

EFF uses a Drupal module that shows a Youtube video screenshot hosted at their own servers instead of the embedded flash file. Only if you click the screenshot, the embed code will be loaded.

"The problem is that Google Analytics cookies are not third-party cookies, they are true first-party cookies. To opt-out using Firefox you need to block all cookies on all domains that are using Google Analytics. And that would also make some of the websites harder to use since many websites uses cookies to save your prefereces."

Microsoft's image search has the option of searching for similar-looking images starting from one result in its image search…

Feature comparison of online polling services Toluna, Micropoll, Google Docs, Polldaddy, Strawpoll, Poll Everywhere, Notifu, Vizu Polls

"- free Windows application that makes it easy to view and manipulate files stored in online services like Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, Windows Live Skydrive and Amazon S3
- mounts a network drive and lets you access the files from remote servers in Windows Explorer"
(using Jungledisk at the moment myself – does the same thing)

"Greasemonkey script that enhances Google's cached pages by adding a virtual scrollbar with all the matches of your keywords. Google highlights your search terms using different colors and this script shows the position of the matches. The virtual scrollbar is clickable and it shows snippets for each match of your search terms."

"MultiMatch is developing a multilingual search engine specifically designed for access, organisation and personalised presentation of cultural heritage information"
EU-funded project (€3 million budget) run by a consortium of scientific institutions