It's not just Bing.
"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot, and others."[1]
18,986 karma · joined August 17, 2009
"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot, and others."[1]
The main thing I'm really annoyed with DDG about is that they don't (no longer?) treat double-quoted search terms as literal. I'll often get results that are close to but not exactly what I asked for.
This is really frustrating, as my entire intention in double quoting search terms is to ask for exactly those search terms and nothing else.
As far as DDG's privacy boasts go, I'd love to see them confirmed by frequent audits from a trusted and respected entity like the EFF. For all we know, DDG might be lying (or being forced to lie) about not tracking or spying on its users and not handing over the data it collects on us to others.
My motto is: trust but verify. So far, there's no way to do that in the case of DDG. Still, I'd much rather use a service that at least pays (pretty convincing) lip service to respecting its users' privacy than services where there's clear evidence of abuse and contempt for its users' privacy, such as Google or Facebook.
Having a web browser fully integrated in to a powerful editor like that is fantastic. It's far more powerful than what you'd get from the Pentadactyl/Firefox combination, with the disadvantage that w3m can't handle Javascript.[1]
w3m's also far faster and a lot less bloated than Firefox. For sites that work without Javascript and where I only care about getting information in text format (which is probalby 99% of the sites I use), it's just about perfect for me. For the rest, I have Firefox, Opera, and Chromium as backups.
[1] This is not a big loss on most sites, as they can usually be used just fine without it. In fact, it's often good to have Javascript turned off so as to avoid Javascript exploits, tracking and advertising.
Here[1] is an interesting video on how the Dutch got their bicycle paths.
From the intro:
"The Netherlands has the world's largest number of cyclists, but it is also the safest place in the world to cycle. That is largely because of the perfect cycling infrastructure that can be found throughout the country. How did the Dutch get this network of high quality cycle paths?"
Part 1 - http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com.nyud.net/technical/chri...
Part 2 - http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com.nyud.net/technical/chri...
Part 3 - http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com.nyud.net/technical/chri...
Technical information about the shot-in-the-corner patch - http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com.nyud.net/technical/chri...
Photo album - http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com.nyud.net/technical/chri...
Effective steganography could hide the fact that you're using encryption at all, and could make traffic analysis[2] more difficult. Widespread use of effective steganography could make wholesale digital spying a lot more difficult.
The use of anonymous remailers[3] also needs to become much more popular; in particular, the mixminion[4] remailer, which was designed to address many weaknesses in earlier remailers.
Traditionally much more difficult, but as or even more important than the technological solutions mentioned above, is educating the general public about the need for and value of privacy enhancing technologies. Fortunately, the massive publicity around the recent spying scandals is doing a lot of the hard work for us in this area.
Finally, there's a great need for educating the general public on how to use these privacy enhancing technologies properly, and making them easier to use. There's still a lot to be done on this front, but the challenges are not insurmountable, and they are getting easier as the general public becomes more computer literate and more privacy- and security-conscious.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis
It would be enlightening to see the defenders of Google disclosing whether they have any financial or other interest in Google.
To complement that disclosure, any attackers of Google should likewise disclose whether they have any financial or other interests in Google's competitors.
If even the most progressive members of Congress are openly advocating a decrease in government accountability and trying to weaken the powers of citizen opposition to a totalitarian surveillance state, then any hope that Congress will try to stop the slide towards totalitarianism is misplaced.
The Executive branch is obviously leading the charge in favor of totalitarianism, and the Judicial branch has mostly condoned or defended increased government power at the expense of human rights and civil liberties, with a few notable slaps on the wrist here and there. Mostly, however, the Supreme Court has tended to simply deny lawsuits seeking to challenge torture, infinite imprisonment, spying, and war (or to just say the plaintifs don't have standing to sue in the first place).
So the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches are lost. They are not likely to change for the better any time soon. If anything, there will likely be a move towards even more extreme concentrations of power and abuses of human rights and an increase in surveillance as the Republicans take back Congress and the Presidency -- especially if there's another major terrorist attack.
What can be done?
Is this really true? My impression was that UTF-32 is a fixed-length encoding which uses 32 bits to encode all of Unicode. It seems that this means that Unicode can never have more code points than could fit in 32 bits. Right?
The US government has a tremendous credibility problem.
Its representatives make many claims, trying to spin the narrative in their favor. Some people seem to buy much of this narrative. They apparently believe the stories that governments, spy agencies, police, torturers, and PR hacks spin.
It is impossible to know whether such a position of credulity is genuine or merely apologetic. But it should be noted that many others in the world don't believe the spin. They've witnessed the government, spy agencies, police, torturers, and PR hacks caught in too many self-serving lies.
Some people apparently choose to believe alleged testimony given by helpless people who've been tortured in a prison they may never leave, or testimony given by secret sources before a kangaroo court, or the testimony of spies who are essentially professional liars. These people have zero credibility for the rest of us. Yet their narrative is swallowed by others and then presented as uncontrovertable fact: "Many of them were in fact armed combatants" Oh yeah? Says who? Says who who has a shred of credibilty? Prove it. Prove it without resorting to a witch trial before a rubber-stamping kangaroo court that brings shame to the United States and the world.
While NPR is nothing if not mainstream.
A great example is the weekly radio show CounterSpin[1], from the media watchdog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting).
You have heard of open source software that doesn't need a browser to run, haven't you?
Not voting is also a good way to avoid being tracked and pigeonholed.
It's true that if everybody did that, this site would be a lot less useful. However, I'm not convinced that some sort of anonymous yet secure and transparent voting system can't be implemented.
But, while voting requires enabling technolgy that will help others track and pigeonhole me, as well as make my system less secure, I'm going to avoid it.
Fortunately, HN is still readable without Javascript (even though it annoyingly doesn't indent threaded comments properly without it -- something that Slashdot manages to do just fine without requiring JS).
There are a million youtube downloading apps out there that don't require me to even use a web browser to download videos from youtube. And, after they're downloaded (or even during the download), I can use any number of (non-browser-based) video players to watch them.
Youtube could make it even easier to download their videos by simply providing a direct link to the video in mp4 format. No Javascript, Flash, or HTML 5 required!
I said: "I'd gladly sacrifice that feature for a standalone mapping app on my own machine, so I don't have to worry about Google spying on me whenever I decide to go somewhere!"
What I was trying to say was that I would prefer a standalone mapping application (ie. one that ran on my own machine and did not contact Google or any other site to work).
It just so happens that since I do not have such a standalone mapping application, I do resort to using Google Maps. And when I do, they do happen to have an actual useful use for Javascript, which is to allow the user to scroll the map with the mouse. But I'd gladly sacrifice that feature for a standalone (ie. not browser-based) mapping application that does not phone home to some spyware company like Google in order to work.
Unfortunately, its main weakness is that (as far as I know) it's not integrated in to emacs as w3m is. If it was, I'd probably look to it as a serious contender. But since it's not, I'm afraid I'm stuck with w3m -- for better or for worse. (Right now, it's for better, as I'm quite satisfied with w3m -- except for my occasional Javascript needs, for which I fall back to Firefox, Opera, or Chromium).
Honestly, the only website that I can think of where using Javascript actually does something useful that I'd have a hard time doing better on a standalone app on my own machine is Google Maps, where it's nice to be able to scroll around by dragging the map with the mouse.
But even there, I'd gladly sacrifice that feature for a standalone mapping app on my own machine, so I don't have to worry about Google spying on me whenever I decide to go somewhere!
Geez. The web has become a gigantic spyware advertising network, and Javascript, Flash, and related garbage are some of the main enablers of it.
</rant>
w3m is not capable of handling Javascript at all. And you know what, for 90% of the websites I visit, it doesn't matter. They function fine and look fine without Javascript. And if w3m could manage to make most websites look fine without Javascript, so could Firefox -- if its developers cared.
As for non-technical users -- they're probably not going to be opening Firefox's Preferences dialog in the first place. And if they do, they probably aren't going to start randomly checking and unchecking stuff to see what it does. That's something an adventurous geek might try, but certainly not your typical non-technical user.
If Firefox developers wanted to additionally protect the average user from this dangerous button, they could have simply stuck it in the Advanced tab of the Preferences dialog, or added a scary warning about being doubly sure that the user knows what he's doing (like they do with about:config).
That said, I'm happy to use NoScript for this functionality anyway, as it's far more flexible than a blanket "turn off Javascript everywhere with no exceptions" button.
This is really the core technological issue that has enabled much of the recent mass spying: the Internet really was not designed with security, privacy, or anonymity in mind.
Remember that it started as a research network that was used primarily among academics. Academia is generally a very open and trusting environment. The last thing the inventors of the Internet though of was trying to protect their computers, data, or privacy. We are living with the consequences of that mistake.
The second major cause of this mess is the computer illiteracy and historical ignorance of much of the world's population. They don't understand how they are making themselves vulnerable by sharing so much information about themselves and trusting corporations that provide "free" web services to them. This is slowly changing for the better, as people become more technologically savvy and stories like the current spying scandals and various security breaches hit the news.
As for the technological and security minded among us, particularly those who are just now starting to think about running their own mail servers, what took you all so long? None of the recent revelations should have been unexpected.
The Internet needs a major privacy, security, and anonymity overhaul. If it's not rebuilt with those concerns at the core, they will all remain mostly illusory to the overwhelming majority of Internet users.
First, typing that in the shell gives me an error:
zsh: no matches found: /(.*)/
cpan upgrade '/(.*)/'
Warning: Cannot install upgrade, don't know what it is.
Try the command
i /upgrade/
to find objects with matching identifiers.
Sorry, install with a regular expression is only supported when unambiguous.
Rejecting argument '/(.*)/'
cpan
upgrade
Could you elaborate on why you think this?
And sooner or later, news that this has happened will leak to the media, and there will be widespread fear and outrage among the powerful.
Then, and only then, can we expect anything meaningful to get done.
Until that point, expect a lot of talk, but no walk.
Some years back, it was revealed that the US had bugged the offices of foreign dignitaries at the United Nations. It was just just a blip in the news. Sure, there was some grumbling, but nothing was done. And now we can see that the practice continues.
Besides, all these countries spy on each other. What do you think their spy agencies are for? Do you really think that their spying is only reserved for their "enemies"? Do you think they can resist using their sophisticated spying technologies to spy on their allies? Is anyone really suprised?
I personally would be surprised if they didn't spy on their allies -- just as I would be if the US suddenly started using swords on the battlefield because they were more honorable weapons than guns which kill from a safe distance.
Welcome to the world of Machiavelli and realpolitik. We don't live in Disneyland.
In fact, I don't expect them to.
Most users are ignorant, technologically illiterate, blind to security issues, and lacking of any concern for their online privacy. Most developers aren't much better, and aim for the low-hanging fruit, without many scruples as far as respecting the privacy of their users goes.
No. Most of them aren't going to change. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to suddenly give in and start using Javascript myself. And though I be a lone voice crying in the wilderness, I'm going to stand up for what I know is right.
This game was billed as a "minimalist text-based game", for which any of the standard Interactive Fiction interpreters would have been more than adequate.
Incidentally, many of these IF interpreters are able to display graphics, and sometimes even sound -- though the usefulness or appropriateness of those features in the context of IF is debatable.
It's possible that your security has been compromised and you are simply unaware of it. It's great that you monitor your network and take other security precautions. It would probably be even better if you also avoided running Javascript apps written by people you don't trust. Wouldn't you agree?
Well, I'm annoyed by these other people's announcements of their minor decisions to play this game despite it being a threat to their security and privacy.
So, I don't agree with the mouthbreathing masses. It won't be the first nor the last time.
You know these same people would probably be exploited by some dancing baby app, punch the monkey game, or porn app which they fell all over themselves to install, and then announced to the world how great it is!
Yeah, I don't want to be hacked or tracked like the rest of these morons are. Sue me.