ARCHIVELegal notice and privacy

Who runs this archive

The archive is run by ETH Zurich, Biomedical Informatics Group, Department of Computer Science.

Responsible for the archive and its content: Prof. Dr. Gunnar Rätsch. ETH Zurich is an autonomous public-law institution of the Swiss Confederation. The group today: bmi.inf.ethz.ch.

What the archive is

The archive holds static copies of former websites of the group, its projects and its workshops, from 1998 to 2025, kept so that old links and citations still work. The bar at the top of every archived page names the site and the date of the copy.

The pages are preserved, not maintained. What they say, including names, positions, addresses and other contact details, reflects the date of the copy and may be outdated or wrong today.

Imprints and copyright notices in the archived pages

Imprints, contact pages, notes on who hosts a site and copyright lines inside the archived pages are part of the historical record. Several of them name the institution that hosted a site at the time, for example the Max Planck Society or TU Berlin. They do not apply to this archive, and those institutions are not responsible for it. Rights in the archived content remain with its authors and original publishers. “© 2026 ETH Zurich” covers only the archive’s own pages: the overview page, this page and the bar at the top of the archived pages.

Addresses

The archive answers at archive.ratschlab.org and other names under ratschlab.org, at svmcompbio.raetschlab.org, and at boosting.org, mgene.org, msplicer.org, easysvm.org and mlsb.cc. The former names svmcompbio.tuebingen.mpg.de and mloss.org only forward, to svmcompbio.ratschlab.org and mloss.ratschlab.org. The same server also forwards the group’s old addresses (such as ratschlab.org, raetschlab.org, grlab.org and tu-pro.ch) to their new places.

Privacy

This section explains which personal data the archive processes when you visit it, under the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP, SR 235.1).

What your browser contacts

Opening an archive page contacts only the archive’s own server: every image, script, stylesheet and font the archived pages use is stored there. The archive uses no analytics, tracking, advertising or social-media buttons, and no user accounts; where a page once embedded such services, they were removed. Search boxes and other forms in the archived pages no longer work; if you use one anyway, the server answers with an error. What a form puts into the address, as search boxes do, is logged like any other request; what a form sends otherwise, as login and comment forms do, is not recorded.

The server sets no cookies. Some archived pages still run their original scripts: the text-size links of the old Plone sites and the formula menu of the Shogun documentation store the setting you choose in a cookie in your browser, for up to a year; the server neither logs nor uses it.

Links in the archived pages lead to other websites, most of them not run by ETH Zurich. Once you follow one, that site’s own privacy notice applies. The same holds once an old address has forwarded you to another site.

Server log

When your browser requests a page or file, also at an address that only forwards, the server records your IP address, the date and time, the request (method, address including any query, such as a search term, and protocol), the response status and size, the page you came from (if your browser sends it) and your browser’s identification string (user agent). Some failed requests and server faults are also recorded in an error log, with the IP address, the request, the site’s name and the page you came from.

We use these records only to run the service and keep it secure, for example to find faults and fend off attacks (Art. 57l lit. b, 57m and 57o para. 1 lit. b of the Government and Administration Organisation Act, GAOA/RVOG, SR 172.010). The log files are deleted automatically after 15 days at the latest. Older logs exist only inside the disk images of the archive’s earlier servers, which are kept to preserve them (see below) and are not read. We do not build profiles or combine the logs with other data, and we look at individual entries only to analyse a fault or fend off a concrete attack.

Hosting in Switzerland

The server is rented from Amazon Web Services (contract partner: Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL, Luxembourg). It runs in AWS’s data centre region in Zurich, so the archived pages and the server log are stored and processed in Switzerland. AWS processes these data only on our behalf and keeps them in that region, except where needed to provide the service or where the law or a binding order of an authority obliges it to disclose them; as AWS belongs to a US company, such an order may also come from the USA. We pass log data to others only where the law requires it.

The disk images of the archive’s earlier servers, with those servers’ logs up to November 2026, are kept in AWS’s archive storage in the USA and on an offline backup disk. Amazon Web Services, Inc. is certified under the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (as part of Amazon.com, Inc.’s certification); for data sent to certified organisations, the Swiss Federal Council recognises an adequate level of data protection (Annex 1 of the Data Protection Ordinance, DPO, SR 235.11).

People named in archived pages

The archived pages contain names, photographs and contact details of former group members, co-authors, speakers and contributors. We keep them as part of the record of the group’s research. If you appear in an archived page and want something removed or hidden, write to raetsch@inf.ethz.ch. We reply within about 30 days and remove or hide it unless an overriding public interest stands against it.

Your rights and contacts

You can ask which personal data about you we process, and ask for them to be corrected or deleted. Write to raetsch@inf.ethz.ch. You can also turn to ETH Zurich’s data protection officer, ds@ethz.ch (see ETH Zurich’s data protection page). The supervisory authority is the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), www.edoeb.admin.ch.

Last updated: November 2026.