Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index

As a side note, I wonder if many people pay attention to reviews outside of extremely low rated places.

(It's going to be the Booking.com ones.)

The last couple of flights I booked with Star Alliance were the same price on Lufthansa.com etc., but I got free checked luggage on booking.com/expedia and just hand luggage on lh.com.

Lifetime Platinum Marriott member here.

The special treatment is OK. It is nice to get room upgrades and freebies, but that's little stuff. It doesn't get you a room magically when they are sold out, and you don't magically get a better rate when prices are high.

The biggest benefit if you're traveling a lot is your points accrual rate is higher with status, which lets you more rapidly exchange points for things. The only sane way to spend points of course, is more hotel stays. Nothing else comes close value-wise. I recall running the numbers on that (points/dollar ratio), and you'd be a brazen fool to spend points on merchandise - when you compare the ratio of hotel stays to merchandise point cost, you realize that they have a 3-4x markup on the merchandise.

I've assumed they do this as a combination of lazy tax plus they don't want to undercut aggregators as these might stop showing them if they know people will go direct to the hotel after searching.

On the other hand, that always includes free wifi and breakfast.

But I fear they're going to have to get their prices (and relatedly, cost per search) down considerably before I can recommend them to anyone again.

I was fortunate enough to be grandfathered into an unlimited plan until March, but I don't think I know any professionals, e.g. people using a search engine to get work done, which search less than 24 times per day.

Doesn't the very act of installing something on your devices increase their technical ability to collect information about you and your devices? That doesn't sound very privacy-oriented.

I think in the first case, they gave me a refund and I rebooked another through hotwire last minute. In the other case, the area was very booked up and I had to pay double to get a comparable room. So I had to send hotwire the invoice and they refunded the rate plus enough to cover the more expensive option. Both times was a huge inconvenience but that is sort of the price you pay for cheap 3rd party bookings.

On the receiving side, this is not pleasant, but not the end of the world. On a business trip I can get a human travel agent on the phone who can find an available room and if it means a $100 taxi bill each way to get to a nearby town, so be it.

And booking.com? Heaven’s sake! Where do you even want me to start! First of all I can’t contact them right then. Nope I can’t! And if I do they fucking stonewall me and more than once just waved the T&C in my face. Once they fucking refused to refund because they said “I should take it with the hotel”

I mean the experience has been so shitty with TPAs that I don’t even want to look for deals now. I just call the hotel and book. They confirm and they double confirm and if anything goes wrong there’s literally a desk with more than one people 24x7. It’s just so much worth it.

I spent the next hour on the phone or on hold with a booking.com rep. They claimed the hotel had made a mistake and should be the one to fix it. They attempted to contact the appropriate person at the hotel but were unable to.

About four hours later somebody appropriate from the hotel responded to the booking.com rep and "found" the "lost" booking.

I brought up the policy you mentioned, and the booking.com rep told me that they hotel gets a chance to fix it first. They seemed quite surprised the hotel ghosted them for four hours, and told me that eventually at some point at night they would book me some other room.

So I'd say the booking.com policy you mentioned isn't quite as valuable as you might think at first.

Freud ;-)

You might have typoed booking.con but it is spot on.

That's quite broad. How about some specific examples.

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

To call what DDG is doing (or what a newspaper does when it chooses not to print your foaming, incoherent editor to the letter -- as is, you know, its right) "censorship" is just silly.

Or in other words: "editorial guidance" is pretty much the entirety of a search engine's job: you give it a large set of documents (the internet), some user input (what you typed in the search box), and it ranks – or "editorializes" – the set of documents to something useful for you.

And at the same time you also have to account for SEO haxx0rs and outright malicious actors who will try to phish your CC details.

Do you want some crackpot website if you search for "Barrack Obama" which claims that he is literally the anti-Christ to be at #1? Or even on the first page at all? Or rolexxxx.com if you search for "buy rolex"? Or bank-of-amerrrica.ru if you search for "Bank of America"? Probably not. A naïve ranking algorithm will end up with that.

There is no perfect way to do this; it's a hard problem. Platitudes like this make it sound easy, but it's not.

Sorry, but that's not what the word means. By definition, it refers to the interception of communications between others. That's now what's happening here.

https://philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html

It was a good time indeed.

This is the critical piece of information that I think gets fumbled (and usually on purpose by the media). The word "censor" is being supercharged and abused to apply in cases I don't think it should, and also in absurd cases where no censorship is happening.

"Cases where no censorship is happening": a comedian, to a crowd of thousands, on a Netflix special getting front page treatment, complaining about their jokes being censored for being too edgy.

Cases I don't think it should include instances of websites like Twitter banning hate speech, because the consequence of Twitter banning hate speech is that a user doesn't get to use Twitter anymore. They can still do hate speech in other places, to anyone they want. Whereas the consequences of the ruling communist party banning hate speech is that you well and truly can't do it anywhere, for many reasons.

First reason, every institution will follow the policy of the ruling party the instant it's created. This isn't the case in a country like the usa: despite whining about cancellation, you can get on voat or 4chan and drop the n word all day.

Second reason, there are legislated consequences to violating the censorship of a ruling party ban. In countries like the PRC that probably means some kind of violence such as being jailed, reeducated, or possibly even tortured or shot.

This is nothing like the system we have today. Now for the second part of my thought where I acknowledge some of the subtleties of societal pressure and side effects of what some today call "censorship," or being cancelled, and how despite us not having a ruling communist party, we do seem to have less freedom that one might assume naively above.

With your name attached, drop the n word on Twitter, get banned, no jail, no torture, sure... But you might get doxxed, and you might get banned from other platforms if you're semi famous enough to warrant some place like Facebook needing to purge you for being publicly too toxic to platform. So your actions on Twitter could result in being "censored" on all platforms whose existence depends on surviving in a traditional capitalist mode of production.

But, not just platforms, as we saw entire platforms themselves that try to host this kind of content can be themselves deplatformed by the very internet itself if cloudflare decides not to serve your hate platform.

So it seems in 2023 though nobody has to fear the bullet or the gulag, we've given various corporations so much power that their ability to "censor" is much more capable than ever in history, especially if they collude (which they often seemed forced to do). At least their collusion is much more predictable than the single communist party, whose legislation can drive the will of a single madman depending on their structure. The collusion of "big tech censorship" follows the predictable algorithm of capitalist profit seeking protection. You probably won't randomly get "censored" for criticizing a president's clothes or whatever in this environment.

So in the end though I think people are misusing the word "censor" in a way that diminishes what it means to be censored in the Soviet Union or the PRC, I do think there's a problem with how much power over what's able to be communicated publicly because of monopolization efforts and anti-interop and federalization efforts by large corporations. Don't mistake me for some kind of dude that wishes he could say the n word on Twitter though, my fears are justified by the punishment levied against people for posting pro-union rhetoric, or the doxxing to hostile governments of activists by platforms like Facebook or Twitter, or even just algorithms selectively choosing what people see, usually in favor of culture war rather than showing the reality of the world as a much more mundane place then tik tok would have you believe. This fear is similar to one I've always had about the ability to reach people on television being only available to multi billion dollar corporations.

> I miss "hackers" from the 90s with some actual backbone.

Same. It boggles my mind that I can find people who accept wrongthink as a legitimate concept here on Hacker News. I wonder if those hackers left this place and if so where they are at.

The Catholic Church does. The office of Censor is still part of the official legislation (Can. 830 CIC).

eg. to this day many people live under the impression that Kyle Rittenhouse shot three black people. If asked to estimate how many unarmed blacks get killed by police, Democrat voters give absolutely wild estimates when according to shooting databases the actual number is about 20 a year. According to a poll D voters thought you had a 50% chance of dying if you caught Covid, which is completely nuts even with the earlier, more dangerous strains.

Yet these people think they're well informed and follow the Science™.

If you run a community tech support forum and someone starts suggesting deletion of windows32 directory as a solution to other users issues, do you let them do that?

If some neighbor in your bbq party claims to be a doctor and goes on a rant about benefits of microdosing rat poison, do you invite them ever again?

Do you disable spam filter in your mail?

We now have malicious misinformation multiplied to internet scale by modern tech. Add LLMs in the mix and we will drown in it if no measures are taken.

You want to prevent politicians or corporations from abusing or even using censorship at all - good, implement corresponding barriers. Limit scope to clear factual misinfo and not e.g. opinions - yes, sure. Proper transparent process, recourse, rehabilitation, grace of application, oversight - absolutely, implement all of those things.

Make censorship good. Denying it is required makes no sense.

Ironically, what DDG is doing is exercise of its free speech rights - pure and simple.

I despise disinformation and war propaganda, but I decide for myself what content falls in those categories – I don't need my search engine to decide it for me.

To be blunt: for me, mainstream search engines Google and Bing very much feel like the things they replaced, Altavista and Yahoo, just with some fancy bolt ons like maps etc.

I understand some people like to be able to write sentences to their search engines, but as long as the results have worse quality than they had 15 - 20 years ago, that "understanding" is just another fancy bolt on feature.

The only things that exist today that could threaten Google quality is Kagi which has gone all in on quality and ChatGPT (and other similar solutions) which finally have produced a working "answer machine" instead of breaking perfect or at least working search engines.

BTW, thank you very much for offering this service, even though I don't use it often.

btw: it’s also possible to go to fullscreen mode, then go directly to the home screen so that the pop-over player is activated, then the video keeps playing while the screen is looked, with controls working from the lockscreen.

Having stopped Firefox users from browsing the net with infinite verification loops, Cloudflare finds their unbiased estimation of internet browser usage shows Firefox is in decline.

My recollection was that Microsoft had stopped innovating on IE6 almost entirely during that decade, right? Or at least for the few years that enabled Firefox to get a foothold.

> They still spin off massive amounts of cash -- they just piss it away on their foundation, and not improving the product.

Hard agree on this. So many side quests when the main quest is not done.

It sounds like your biggest priority in determining ethicality is legality: did anything illegal happen in the "cancellation" of the Brave founder? (I know nothing about this event, I'm just commenting within the context of this short conversation).

If not, how then are you determining one method being better than another?

By using Firefox you support Mozilla, so you support the CEO financing political campaigns you don’t agree with. The CEO is a special role that represents Mozilla.

It’s simple, the guy had to go.