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Comment by curiousgal | Hacker News Reader

As I am currently in a North African country I freaked out when the ISIS shit started popping so I immediately deleted my google history and nothing happened now.

I still don't get why something so malicious was upvoted so much.

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I believe the original intent of that site was to get you on the NSA watch list

I always use a VPN so I am not worried about my IP address getting listed somewhere but I only hope Google does delete my search history... Yeah I'm on that list now.

Many VPNs do actually leak your IP address. Beyond that, your VPN traffic could be associated with your billing information for said VPN. Also by coresponding the traffic to the VPN and coming out of the VPN. Or if you have any personal information associated with your Google account or have ever accessed it with an IP associated with you.

Look out the window. They're in the ice cream truck.

"your VPN traffic could be associated with your billing information for said VPN" - that's why I asked a friend from a completely different country to sign up for me (we are good friends with high technical prowess and he knows what he's up to).

Does he have high tolerance to torture or are you kind enough to let him give out your name as soon as someone scary asks? :)

In other words, I don't think your solution is very good. It might delay things a few minutes or hours at best.

Thats why hypothetically it's best to use one accepting a bitcoin payment and then fill in the other details from a fake name generator.

Was to overwhelm the NSA watch list with software engineers.

I'm reminded of a Usenet campaign in the mid-late 90s, adding hot terms to sigs.

Software engineers are already on the NSA exploit-their-hardware-so-we-can-insert-backdoors list.

Sad but true :(

But not, at least, on no-fly lists.

The name of the site is pretty clear.

Not really... I actually rather expected it to be an article like just about anything else here.

It was not labeled "Show HN" or anything, and apparently only required opening the link (I did not open it myself).

Edit: I guess I was misinformed about this last - micaeked says that you have to click a button on the page.

You do have to click a button after opening the url.

I opened the URL, but saw no button. And tcpdump showed nothing going to Google. So one of the add-ons I use must have blocked it.

It is, but seeing it on HN made me think it was "ruin" along the lines of "throw off Google interest-based ads" not "get you on a list".

I didn't follow the original link, but maybe the point was to get lots of people on a list to show how silly lists are?

Maybe, but it depends on whether the location of the query is taken into account. In that case, the majority of the people who clicked through (which is based in the USA/Europe) won't get picked up as opposed to the small percentage of people located in the MENA area.

I had to read until here in this very thread to get that

There is a small difference between ruining ones search history and being brought to the attention of whatever authority is watching[1]. It does seem like a https://xkcd.com/576/ situation applied to search.

1) I would bet our web filter would be sending me some reports

what part of "ruin" don't you understand ?

Ruining your search history not your livelihood.

"ruin" is completely vague, and you had no idea what it meant until you found out what it ended up meaning.

Funny would be googling fetish porn, not funny would be banning you from international travel.

I didn't click on it since I don't want a site to do anything whatsoever to me ever.

But it wasn't evident at all to me that it was a site that would do what it apparently did.

It seems like having a link like that on a major, moderated website like hn is a serious problem and failing.

Yes it is reckless endangerment

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