Microsoft Edge sets Yandex as default search engine in Moldova
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The list includes Ukraine! I've tested Edge with Ukraine as a Region on my MacOS, and it no longer appears to set it to Yandex.
But it still does for several other countries. Which includes Moldova. Moldova is a country that Russia has repeatedly threatened. While advanced users may try and remove Yandex as default, non-tech savvy users likely leave the defaults.
Meaning Microsoft Edge shares data with Russia by setting Yandex as a default search engine for their users, which is really bad.
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That they would still be participating in this deal is even worse.
For MSFT, this is a huge embarrassment, reminiscent of Google's infamous "project dragonfly".
And they deleted your inquiry on their forums for "violating the community guidelines"! Not exactly PR geniuses, are they?
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/moldova
Microsoft Edge is the default web browser on Windows 10, Windows 11. [2]
Meaning at a huge amount of population will see Yandex when they search for something at least for the first time. Unless they install another browser immediately or change the default search engine.
And yes, I wasn't expecting to see my inquiry deleted on their forum. I'm posting again without the screenshot. In case they didn't like what Yandex returns as results (which is weird, as it is their "business partner").
I'm also very humbled by the support of the hacker news community. As a long time lurker, it warms my heart a lot to see so much support. I hope it reaches Microsoft.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/d...
For the decade that Internet Explorer sucked basically all computer users got programmed to treat it like a Chrome/Firefox downloader. Most users don't know that Edge is Microsoft flavored Chrome now, so they continue to use Edge to download other browsers and move on with their lives.
This is an unpopular opinion, but IE4 and especially IE5 were significantly better than what Mozilla/Netscape were putting out at the time. This is what grew their marketshare more than the bundling that everyone focused on. Then Microsoft sat on IE6 for years and let it fall way behind everyone else. IE7 was basically IE6 with tabs. By the time they began investing in their own browser again it was largely too late.
It's <5% (and decreasing, still pretty quickly).
How many tens of millions of irrelevant users does that represent?
If you start with a gigantic number - even 0.1% of is going to still be gigantic.
It doesn't make it really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Are you aware of Bing doing anything like this? (I think it's bad enough that they take part in censorship, don't get me wrong.)
https://ain.capital/2023/01/27/yandex-developers-used-racist...
> "As founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation and is responsible for supporting actions or policies which undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine," the EU's listing states.
> The document also accuses Yandex of "promoting State media and narratives in its search results, and deranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin, such as content related to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine."
from: https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/06/yandex_ceo_arkady_vol...
Yeah and they are going to change the formals too - Yandex NV(based in Netherlands) is considering turning the main part of the business into a separate Russian group https://newsunrolled.com/economy/132317.html
Yandex has been banned in Ukraine for some time now, so no point for MS to still have it as default search.
Between integrating predatory BNPL, the microsoft-edge: overriding default browser nonsense, injecting ads on the Chrome site, and now this ... one has to wonder, is this all some joke?
Either Satya and friends are asleep at the broser wheel, or the whole subject is too annoying/toxic for them to address directly.
For me, having moved from the US to eastern Europe has been eye opening in this regard. Based on somewhat shallow sampling of parents of our kids classmates in $$$ IB school, everyone but one seem to be vocal about the fact that everything in the west is from the 'ass'. I admit that it has crossed my mind more than once that if you really feel so strongly this way, or are upset that people don't want to speak russian with you, then why are you still here and not on your way back already?
The Western media pushing divisive narratives is a major problem, that is already starting to tear apart the social fabric of Western society. I don't know what the solution is, but it sure isn't "herr durr, move to Russia!"
You understand that a cartel of traditional and social media companies worked with the FBI and intelligence agencies to push a false narrative (the fake Steele dossier, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign) and to suppress a major story about corruption by a Presidential candidate (Hunter Biden's laptop), both of which are straight up election interference. Even if you're a Democrat or a never-Trumper this should outrage you.
> "a cartel of traditional and social media companies worked with the FBI and intelligence agencies to push a false narrative (the fake Steele dossier, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign)"
- while there are differing opinions on the veracity of this claim, it's important to consider the potential implications if it were true. If it were true, it would suggest that the President was compromised and had a conflict of interest between his personal vs the national interest, which is a serious concern.
- Additionally, there are many other instances where the President's conflicts of interest have been on display, such as his actions in Helsinki and his use of the presidency to enrich himself and his associates.
> "and to suppress a major story about corruption by a Presidential candidate (Hunter Biden's laptop)"
- It's worth noting that this claim was heavily promoted by the Trump campaign and lacked substantial evidence.
- And even if the worst version of these claims were true, they would be minor in comparison to other serious allegations against the former President, such as the Zelensky quid pro quo and the use of taxpayer dollars to benefit his businesses.
-- (I'd also add to the broader discussion that)
- While it's true that Western media has made mistakes and increased the spread of divisive content, the narratives about China and Russia are often rooted in solid ideological (or at least mostly self-consistent) principles, such as anti-authoritarianism and free speech.
- The real issue with our media, in my opinion, is its role in amplifying domestic right vs. left divisiveness, which weakens the United States in the world, and is tearing our society apart.
Please. It's rooted in competition and antipathy, us vs. them. Let's not kid ourselves.
The Dossier is a fake, and it was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. The FBI also reached an agreement to pay Cristopher Steele $1 million to continue work on the dossier. Apparently this deal was scrapped and the payment never went through, but again, this is pretty disturbing that it went that far.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/us/politics/steele-dossie...
Also, the Hunter Biden laptop has been confirmed to be authentic and not Russian disinformation. The story was originally broken by the NY Post, but it was heavily suppressed by other media outlets and the NY Post’s social media accounts were blocked, as were those of pretty much anyone that attempted to share the story. The Intelligence community worked pretty much in lockstep to discredit the laptop as Russian disinformation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
(Yes, I know Wikipedia, but the only sources that really reported on it are Conservative-leaning media outlets like NY Post, Fox News, and Daily Wire, so I thought Wikipedia would be considered a bit more neutral.)
what you stated were your conclusions (which may or may not be true):
- that the dossier was paid opposition research is not disputed, what is disputed is the veracity of its contents. Nothing in the link you shared suggests it was confirmed fake. In fact, many of the claims made in the dossier have been corroborated by subsequent investigations.
- On the other hand, while the the Hunter Biden laptop (also opposition research) has been authenticated, the veracity of the claims made about it are still in question, and many media outlets declined to run the story due to a lack of supporting evidence.
- Another difference to highlight is that Christopher Steele was an experienced professional who followed standard journalistic practices to protect his sources, etc., whereas Rudy Giuliani's handling of the Hunter Biden laptop (to put it very lightly) has been criticized as unprofessional and lacking in evidence.
- I'm not saying that bias in media coverage doesn't exist, but news organizations have a responsibility to verify stories with evidence before publishing them. It's also worth noting that the burden of proof is higher for claims that are "difficult to verify, yet easy to fake" (So it's not surprising that some stories are given more attention than others depending on the strength of the evidence supporting them)
OTOH, their image search is way better than google's.
Living in Ukraine, I would love for the world to never see Putin again.
OTOH, I have nothing but tremendous respect for the engineers of the original Yandex. It's hard to overestimate how much they did for the russian-speaking world. I mean, they have basically invented practical stemming for Russian, Ukrainian and other close languages.
Living in Ukraine does not make you less factually wrong. They stood on the shoulders of Sergei Starostin and Andrey Zaliznyak. The whole field of Russian Computational Linguistics owes to these two people and their faceless students. Not just Yandex Search.
Yandex search (more specifically: mystem and Yandex.site) was the first practical implementation of their work.
In any case, the problem is that anything else is also censored. DuckDuckGo stopped indexing RuNet altogether and Google is... Google.
It is not the gotcha you think it is.
I am telling you that the word “alias” is not some gotcha that absolves Yandex of their actions like you imply.
https://twitter.com/romankulish/status/1620227618435125248/p... https://meduza.io/feature/2023/01/30/yandeks-blokiroval-izob...
The horror!
I know US media, like Voice of America, would never do something like that.
/s — the pearl clutching about things the US does because Russians is bigotry; the world isn’t a better place due to hating a certain ethnicity
Literally "don't dismiss my non-relevant hypocrisy".
Cheap rhetorical tricks aren't really a great look either.
A. It’s ok because war
B. Voice of America does it so it’s ok
That is, quite plainly, whataboutism. There is no substance in the comment beyond “others do it too so it’s ok for Russians to as well and if you think otherwise, well look at these others”
I know it’s hard for you to see whataboutism when your comeback to Yandex being censored was “In any case, the problem is that anything else is also censored.” but try harder.
Either it's an outrage for MSFT to do business with warmongering countries, or it isn't. Saying we only care about Russian aggressions while ignoring our own is just jingoism.
If anything, both should be individually evaluated. But blankly dismissing one as “it’s ok Voice of America does it too” is adding nothing to the discussion but shitty logical fallacies.
Having said that, I always chuckle at Americans who are so suspicious of RT given that they platform people like Cornell West and Chris Hedges who are absolutely blacklisted in western media.
I have no idea what the point of this comment is, other than everything sucks. :sigh:
Virtually everyone with any remotely anti-war view is completely blacklisted from corporate Western media, which is basically the propaganda arm of the DC blob. This is not an endorsement of RT or non-Western media (which is riddled with their own biases), simply a statement of objective fact. The purpose is always the same, to form a consensus view that if you are not gung ho for attacking (insert current foreign bad guy here), then you are either secretly sympathetic to (current foreign bad guy) or somehow a disloyal American. It is quite an effective propaganda strategy. If you are an older person, like myself, and against all foreign wars regardless of the rationale offered by the war machine, you were first "Pro Saddam" in the early 90s. Then you were "Pro Milosevic" a few years later. You then became "Pro Saddam" again in the early 2000s before becoming "Pro Gaddafi" and "Pro Assad" a decade later. You are now "Pro Putin". Because you cannot simply be "anti-war" - it is a position that the people in power simply cannot afford to let become legitimate, as it obstructs the primary of agenda of the DC war machine.
Yep, RT is aimed primarily at the "traditional" West (ie the US and Western Europe). Russia has other propaganda organs aimed more squarely at the former Eastern Bloc.
Specifically Russian disinformation. 'Rus' is a much more neutral term which refers to the shared heritage of the Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian people.
Not sure if that's what you mean, but Yandex is great for piracy and otherwise illegal content.
A simple example would be a search for 'russia usa war'. It's the sort of search that's REALLY annoying using something like Google for because, predictably, it gave me nothing but results about Ukraine from large US media outlets. Yandex gave me this [1] pretty informative Wiki entry as the #1 result, and then three pages describing a hypothetical Russia USA war including this [2] interesting looking video (and channel) on YouTube.
Continuing on further down the results you get ever more interesting things like this [3] that suggests Russia was involved in the US Civil War, on the side of the Union! As is always the case for anything, just because it's published - doesn't mean its true. But in this case it does seem to be, which is something I had no clue of even as a history fan! So I just had a TIL in "my" domain, while spending 5 minutes writing this post (and another 30 exploring Russian involvement in the US Civil War). That's why it rocks. Basically it kind of makes the internet feel like the internet again. And that's nice.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_during_the_Russo...
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woD6RYptp58
[3] - https://www.stolenhistory.org/articles/1863-russian-involvem...
https://www.itpro.com/security/data-breaches/369966/yandex-d...
This is sadly probably a draw for a lot of 'Russian is the only country maintaining traditional western values' types.
https://meduza.io/news/2022/03/01/yandeks-segodnya-klyuchevo...
says who?