Indonesia bans search engine DuckDuckGo on gambling, pornography concerns | Hacker News Reader

Indonesia bans search engine DuckDuckGo on gambling, pornography concerns

reuters.com

55 pointsgsky35 comments

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As an Indonesian resident and a long time DDG user this is immensely frustrating.

It seems to me that internet censorship is becoming more and more pervasive globally and whilst there can be legitimate reasons (eg: CSAM) blocking a search engine like DDG is a massive over-reach. Unfortunately, most Indonesians won't notice as they happily let Google, Meta et al track everything and everyone and are unlikely to be using DDG.

This is one reason among many that I have vpn/vps/etc.

At least duckduckgo is only blocked at the dns level!

My question would then be whether this easily avoidable type of blocking is a form of protest from those mandated to implement blocking.

As is often done in Indonesia, most would probably opt to leave that unmentioned.

Curiously, this is both one of the best possible ads for DuckDuckGo, and one of the best possible ads for Indonesia's gambling ban (1.5% of GDP is bonkers.)

One could argue that if they had more access to pornography, maybe they wouldn't gamble so much...

DuckDuckGo should be banned globally for all I care.

Never allowed anyone to inspect their premisses, hardware/software and yet claim privacy. I understand many people here will not know any better and still a slightly better approach than using google or yandex, still a quite sus option for the casual informed user in Europe.

3/10, would not recommend nor care.

What would you recommend instead?

SearX

You can install/run from your own server, or just use a public version like this one here: https://metasearx.com/

Source code is available for verification. You can host yourself or choose from multiple domains to access.

How do you confirm the public instances are running the blessed version of the source code?

You don't.

For that scenario you 1) download the code, 2) verify yourself what is inside and then 3) compile. (optional 4) Subsequent versions check on the delta of changes.

There is a cost to your time/effort in performing this type of action that is proportional to the criticality of your context and the level of trust you place on the providers.

TLDR: The less you trust, the more you verify

To deploy it I think you mean on a vps. Now all your searches by Searx will be routed to other engines with the IP of your vps. So unless you deploy it with something like gluten to provide VPN access for searx. You will let those engines build profile about you. If you use the public instances so that more people are using it you don't know if they are running the unmodified source code.

Id you go with the route of VPN with sear then you probably use VPN with search engines like DDG directly. And don't save cookies on the browser.

That comment is simply ludicrous.

You display enough technical pro-efficiency on the topic but then you try to compare as equivalent the usage of SearX or DDG, ignoring that only one of them has the source code available for review. If you are affiliated to DDG, please disclose openly.

If you honestly are _THAT_ worried about IP tracking on the server level, then you would run SearX inside your local machine with Tor or any VPN of your choice. Simple.

Otherwise you'd just pick an online instance from https://searx.space/

But I wonder if we are having a non-affiliated conversation.

>pro-efficiency

proficiency?

> SearX

it uses combination of search results from other public services. if you self-host, your instance helps make these services single out the searcher (if not used by lots of unrelated people).

did not go through the code but if you use a public instance, it might be possible to do similar level of logging at instance-level what we accuse the search giants for. might be through some opt-out debugging feature or what have you.

at the end you place trust on a third party directly or not.

startpage.com is good, but light on features. brave search offers the best features, however its independent index has its limits.

I sometimes use Startpage if I need a proxy for something or to get around paywalls, as it has an 'anonymous view' for all links.

For online gambling, why not just tax the stuff?

India pulls in 30% of any player's winnings as tax, for example. The gaming companies also have to pay 28% of their revenue (yes, revenue, not income).

The laws are to enforce the ruling group's religious morals.

Perhaps, it could also be protecting the masses from exploitation of gambling companies. The odds are never in a gambler's favor.

Both. Most religions consider gambling immoral because it leads to social harm. You need to favor personal freedoms and personal responsibility more to justify taxing gambling rather than banning it. Or acknowledging that prohibition may cause more social harm than not. But only more secular governments get to allow harmful vices for the greater good.

“Only more secular governments get to allow harmful vices for the greater good.” I hadn’t really thought about it before, but yeah, that’s naturally the way it goes.

I think a wise secularist may see greater good in less gambling. Not every secularist is a libertarian in their tradeoffs of "what is good" for people. There is usually some reason vices are squashed that is not religious in nature; take the China society's approach to various vices for example.

Taxation won't even slow paperclip maximizers... 30% is same as Apple in-app fee. See how that negatively affected mobile lootbox genre and helped Apple escape from becoming slowly but increasingly dependent on that industry.

Because some of them are backed up by powerful people. Most of the time this kind of action is just posturing, and not really fixing the problem

1.5 percent of GDP in online gambling is crazy right? is it really that bad?

Could be a way to launder money into other countries?

Laundering by definition requires spending to look legal. So no.

Laundering requires earnings to look legal.

is it counting cryptocurrency?

Yes. Mostly done by people who don't have the money to spend in the first place.

Weird. In the UAE DDG has stopped returning international results for those kinds of queries.

I checked out a WiFi hotspot from a library recently and was surprised to find that they blocked DDG. (Was less surprised to see they blocked Reddit.)

Isn’t it just using the Bing API?

It also proxies images, which I think is the actual reason (sic). So there is no way from a network point of view to disallow pornographic material on public access terminals. Though, I have not recently looked at how the other search engines do it.

As a long time DDG user, the image filter isn't perfect and occasionally I'll see NSFW images even when I have safe search on.

I noticed on my city's public network Google Safe Search, and the DDG equivalent, is enabled by force.

Apparently for Google it's done by aliasing www.google.* to forcesafesearch.google.com [1], or for DDG: safe.duckduckgo.com [2]

[1] https://www.draytek.co.uk/support/guides/kb-dns-safesearch [2] https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/features/safe-s...

Man, I wouldn't even stop to think that they blocked a search engine, I'd just think that their hotspot was broken.

Well, I guess by my standards, it IS broken.

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