I'd imagine there's good money in convincing people they have privacy because then they'll provide more interesting data.

Has the company ever been audited? Why should they be trusted to not compromise user privacy? Imo at least Google is honest: you know when you use their products as intended you have no privacy, and they don't try to hide this

Edit: since DDG isn't open source like searx, how do we know there is ANY truth to their marketing claims?

Edit: Just for accuracy, the browser extensions are open source. But as far as I know, the actual search engine isn't

Edit: They made over 100 million in 2020. They clearly can (and should) get an independent audit. It's shocking that they haven't had a single audit. Even startpage has

It doesn't matter.

Why? Because when going through the exercise of identifying risks in the system one can't assume the actors are benevolent and won't ever use the access+data they have for evil.

That's not at all to say all actors are evil and will always do the most harm possible. Many risks are never exploited in practice. But that doesn't mean the risk doesn't exist. It still does! And it might be exploited in the future (with companies, all it takes is a reorg that puts someone less ethical in charge).

Thus, when doing your threat modeling exercise, for the purposes of identifying risk, assume the various actors could do as much damage as they possibly could with the access they have.

So concretely, when I evaluate risk on google vs. DDG: I won't take into consideration any "privacy respecting" marketing, that's not important. What matters is how much damage can each party do, which one is less risky?

Both get my search queries which is inevitable for a search engine. So there's that risk but it's a wash.

But google has its tendrils woven into far more points from which they can and will correlate data. Google analytics, AMP, gmail/gsuite, chrome (for people using that), also most people have an active login session with google most of the time, etc.

DDG has a much smaller footprint on the internet from which to correlate data.

Therefore, even assuming both parties are equally evil, DDG presents a smaller risk.

Another syndication partner of Microsoft is far more transparent in their privacy policy than Duck: "Bing: IP address (obfuscated), user agent string, search term, and some settings like your country and language setting. We never communicate IP addresses along with search queries. We only send IP addresses to Microsoft in obfuscated form, meaning we remove parts of the IP address when we sent it."

> It doesn't matter.

> Why? Because when going through the exercise of identifying risks in the system one can't assume the actors are benevolent and won't ever use the access+data they have for evil.

Storing any data in database is just asking someone to either steal it or abuse it. So only solution is to not store it, if it's not critical for operation. And if it's critical, store privacy data in encrypted form(and keep decryption keys away from database, so database breach won't jeopardize keys, like in different business unit in corporation). One such example is logs, store some of the data encrypted, and if you need it(with a really good reason) ask it to be decrypted. Also you can encrypt various forms of data with different keys, and make accessing one type easier while more privacy critical data will be harder to get access to.

Better to just have 1 Google service you use and find someone else for the others. Their search index is a little better than DDG's I think, but the difference is pretty small compared to the risks you outline and the risk of Google going rogue and deciding I'm a Russian or committed some other similar crime & need to be booted from their services.

They literally do not care if it has a bad look, they just say "we don't collect your personal information." What??? They are literally admitting to collecting domains in the feed of the Github issue but then just copy and paste their manifesto and expect us to think it's fine. I seriously do not understand this.

[1] https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527

They’re not a perfectly secure E2E encrypted zero-trust system. They do require some measure of trust to use. This has always been true. Don’t use them if you don’t trust that they won’t misuse your data.

The explanation seems superficially plausible, until you realize many (all?) other browser seem to work fine without a remote server to fetch favicons.

Worst case, if you go back and forth between google search and DDG, a comparative analysis might be able to identify you or people like you from those logs, but it would require some work.

Better to elude to a nebulous definition of privacy rather than give specifics. Even as a privately traded, for-profit company based in the U.S. with zero accountability for its claims, DDG doesn't even have that much IP to lose (as a Bing reskin) should it ever fold under a class action lawsuit.

And unless Ecosia (where the quote seems to come from) is extremely shady, they are only sending two octets and not three.

> Hi all, CTO of DuckDuckGo here.

[... mucho explanation...]

> So, we went ahead today and implemented the change for both Android (#878) and iOS (duckduckgo/iOS#667) that will move this logic onto the client, and we will no longer be using the favicon service in our apps. These changes are currently in the release phase and are rolling out live now.

https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527#issuecommen...

You wouldn't know this even if it was open source. Open source does nothing here. Looking at the source code will not tell you their data retention policies or what is actually stored in their databases. It will also not guarantee the source that you see matches what is on their servers.

Google - it's a really good search engine, but obviously biased and doesn't care about your privacy. I use it on my work machine.

Brave Search - I'm not sure if another service (like Bing) powers their results, but it works pretty well for my personal use cases.

`yegg` can do whatever he want's, I just want no part of it.

> Return search results by randomly selecting an exact string match from the index.

It could potentially surface results that you could not have found otherwise. A random dump of links, each one's relevance you must determine on your own. Or another way to put it: you do the ranking. Not a very fun idea to most.

what type of content did they censor? Do you have a link with more info?

vs

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atass.com&tbs=qdr%3Am

Are they supposed to just let governments astroturf their way to the top with propaganda?

Any algorithm for which there is incentive to game, people will game. And legitimate sources often have no incentive to game the algorithms. There’s no one algorithm that will do everything perfectly. Eventually you’ll have some phishing scam, life-threatening suggestions, or illegal content popping up as a top result, and you’ll have to add manual exceptions.

Like prioritizing a legitimate website over a scam website isn't punishing the scam website because of a controversial opinion or the search engine operator didn't like the content, it's because the website is objectively a scam, it's easy to objectively identify it as such, and everyone agrees it's one.

When it comes to Ukraine vs. Russia and propaganda, it is entirely impossible to have objectivity. As angry as this will make some people, opinions on the war in Ukraine are subjective. Russian outlets shouldn't be ranked lower than Ukrainian ones solely because a lot of people are on the side of Ukraine.

I'm sure some Russian outlets are spreading objective falsehoods, and some Ukrainian outlets are spreading objective falsehoods. These individual outlets should be punished in search rankings, but to classify all Russian outlets as spreading misinformation and all Ukrainian outlets as objective truth completely demolishes the objectivity a lot of people want their search engines to have.

It's a difficult topic, I feel like I talked in circles writing this comment.

I'm not convinced that DDG isn't downranking all junk. Russian disinfo spreaders and consumers just scream the hardest when their garbage is rightfully pushed aside. Same as the Q-worshipping crowd.

Is it actually easy to identify all scam content? Then why is it possible to find scams in search results?

> When it comes to Ukraine vs. Russia and propaganda, it is entirely impossible to have objectivity.

So should they treat every news outlet as equally ranked? Because I'm struggling to think of any news reporting that could be said to be free of bias or could be said to be completely objective.

> ...to classify all Russian outlets as spreading misinformation and all Ukrainian outlets as objective truth

Is that what they did? Because what I read was that they would "down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation." So you have to dig a few pages deeper to get to 'Russian disinformation', and I don't see any anything indicating that 'Russian disinformation' means everything published by a Russian News outlet (re: the invasion).

I don't think something being a top search results implies that it is an objective truth either, especially with ongoing news reports.

I think to a knowledgable observer and moderator, sure. Algorithmically it's probably more difficult, which is why you still see it in some search results. These scams are less prone to subjectivity, which is why you rarely see Twitter uproars about a bitcoin pyramid scheme being booted off a search engine.

>So should they treat every news outlet as equally ranked?

Yes....

>Because I'm struggling to think of any news reporting that could be said to be free of bias or could be said to be completely objective.

....and that is the reason for why they should be equally ranked. You can see on the initial page load the full spectrum of reporting from MSNBC to Fox News. Of course one of them has to be ranked above the other in the UI (it's a list of items) but that should relate to objective things like what words from the search query appear, etc.

>Is that what they did?

I think what people take issue with is that we're trusting these sites to determine what disinformation is. How is DDG deciding what is and isn't misinformation? Without a clearly defined process for misinformation, this becomes subjective.

>> "Weinberg didn’t elaborate on the decision, or how the down-ranking will work."

But other sites are simply doing a blanket ban:

>> "Since then, the internet industry has responded by blocking access to Russian state-sponsored media outlets such as RT and Sputnik News for users in the EU. In addition, Twitter has placed warning labels on tweets linking to Russian state media. (Google News decided to de-rank RT and Sputnik News back in 2017 for allegedly circulating propaganda.)"

>I don't think something being a top search results implies that it is an objective truth either, especially with ongoing news reports.

Not right now, no, and that's the issue. Most people assume it to be though.

>Yes....

>>Because I'm struggling to think of any news reporting that could be said to be free of bias or could be said to be completely objective.

>....and that is the reason for why they should be equally ranked.

Just because you can find a fault with a source does not mean that all faults are equal. For instance, the AP should probably be ranked above the National Enquirer.

> I think what people take issue with is that we're trusting these sites to determine what disinformation is. How is DDG deciding what is and isn't misinformation? Without a clearly defined process for misinformation, this becomes subjective.

It is an inherently subjective process and always will be. There are organizations that have attempted to make the process objective (i.e. fact checking organizations) but they can all be criticized as subjective as well. Pure objectivity simply isn’t possible.

Russia is discrediting truth as a concept entirely, the narrative being "we are obviously lying, but so is anyone else". That others might not be lying as much seems to be harder and harder to understand by the targets of these campaigns (based on firsthand witnessing). With objective facts / reporting discredited what's left is opinions. Opinions generated by a carefully managed army of influencers promoting whatever cause is deemed useful (from bloggers to friendly/financed foreign government officials). And this _is_ done with the secrecy and subtlety you'd expect.

It might not be possible to have complete objectivity regarding the invasion of Ukraine, but imho a blanket ban of any media with Russian ties would be a heck of a lot better than to let Russia continue to destroy objective reporting, one of the foundations of our modern society.

If Russia sends armies of trolls to clandestinely influence social media consumers as part of their information warfare operation then we should try to stop that.

But if Russia officially publishes its own position under the name of its own news agency or in their government media then we should not censor it and we should not keep it off western platforms where it can be clearly marked and disputed.

I want to know how Russia justifies its brutal war of aggression against a neighbour. I fully expect that their justification is full of lies and distortions. But it's truth in the sense that it is in fact how Russia justifies the war. I want to know that truth.

When I was growing up, certainly before even RT existed, it was common knowledge that journalist will cover the events according to their own (or bosses) interests. IME (not russian, but also not american), the idea of objective reporting is the anomaly.

A search engine is largely two things:

(1) crawling and discovering all available resources (2) parsing a user’s request for a resource of some kind and providing the user with a means of accessing “best matches”

This process is inherently, unequivocally and fundamentally biased. It HAS TO be. There is no abject, absolute, canonical result for a search engine query. Ddg/google “censor” () all kinds of results constantly. Malware sites, sites that just mirror content from stackoverflow, sites that may cause public harm, etc. That’s the whole point.

Another note: they may be downranking those results because users are unsatisfied with their quality. DDGs job is to help the user find what they are looking for, and if the user finds a bunch of Russian propaganda that is blatantly not what they wanted when they search for something (perhaps because Russia is exploiting SEO or using other techniques to inflate their position), why wouldn’t they tweak their product?

Unfortunately it seems that in 90%+ of cases "willful misinformation" is just anything that contradicts the political views of the democrat-leaning Google management.

DDG makes revenue from serving ads and participating in affiliates networks.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/ad...

At the same time, as far as I know there has been no independent audit. Considering they made over 100 million in 2020, they clearly have the finances to fund an independent audit. It would also improve their reputation and clear up some of the uncertainty about their collection of user data in practice

Even better (but more unlikely): they could open source the search engine so we all can audit them.

Suspicious of most of the rotten-meat smells on the net as I am, I use DDG for everything. Compare the person(s) who said "Don't be evil" (then...) to picking the name DuckDuckGo.

I also think that it is unlikely but, let's not forget that some unlikely things are regularly found to be true.

In 2019 many thought that a global pandemic was unlikely, in 2007 they thought that a housing market crash was unlikely, and so on.

Personally, I think an independent audit would go a long way in clearing up my doubts.

[1] https://lemmy.ml/post/31321

Being a paid service means Kagi's incentives are different. Instead of selling your data or profiting from feeding into ad-tech food chain, we are interested in selling you a subscription.

We do not associate queries with an account, as a matter of fact we do not save queries at all. You are right that this can not be verified, the question you need to ask yourself is what kind of incentive we have for misusing user data in any way.

Unless users want us to do start using their search history to improve quality of searches (something we may introduce as an option in the future as we've been asked to), we have no reason to do so.

Until your growth slows down and you realize you can get away with doing both.

There are so multiple industries (TVs, Games, Streaming) where paid users are still being monetized to the maximum extend possible by showing them ads, selling their data, etc. that this argument is just dishonest now.

That link you provided makes a good case for why DDG is not the ally we need in the privacy war.

Currently, whenever DDG doesn't cut it, I add the !sp bang and get Google results through StartPage. I know that SP is owned by an advertising company but I still prefer them to straight up Google. I tried using searX to get proxied Google results but it required a few extra steps so I don't usually go for it.

I am very interested in seeing you explain which ones have been proven true and your citing of sources.

Example A: You showed it isn't true. Example B: not present on list(1) Example C: not present on list(1) Example D: not present on list(1)

(1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conspiracy_theories

Well done.

So what are you stating with the comment? All conspiracy theories are false or did not originate on some less outrageous event?

It'd take a whistleblower for anyone to ever find out. What are the odds of that happening? I don't think we can count on someone who is being paid by a company to tell us about their actions when their livelihood/gravy train depends on it and they may be opening themselves up to legal problems for coming forward.

Not may people have the sort of integrity that folks like Snowden, Klein, or Tice demonstrated and even those that do can be pressured into keeping silent.

No it won't. If you have a hypothesis you can just test it out. Go submit some fake personal data and then see if it shows up anywhere else. This trick is as old as using a honeypot name or email address to test if a service signs you up for junk mail.

this is not a valid test, for a whole lot of reasons. especially not in terms of internet search engines.

One reason for this, is that the specific things you search aren't what's actually valuable. Companies use that data to make guesses about you. It's those guesses, not your specific search terms, that are used to profile you.

So why not just try to get yourself profiled a certain way? Search a bunch of stuff about a specific disease and click a bunch of the links and see if you start getting targeted ads about those diseases? Well, who is to say who sold that data? Was it the search engine, or the websites you clicked on?

Not all the data collected on you is used for targeted ads, and of course even when it is used for ads not all of those targeted ads demonstrate a proven link back to your search teams. If you see an ad for cheap airline tickets maybe it's because you've been searching for stuff about another country, or maybe some algorithm thinks your bipolar and entering a manic phase since they are more likely to buy tickets. Maybe it's just an ad for cheap airline tickets because the airline wants more people to fly right while weather warms. You can't know.

Better ways to test what DDG is doing behind the scenes might be things like get hired there in a central role. Have the government or an independent auditor review their data collection practices.

Then come up with a better test. I'm sure you can think of something that answers those questions to a reasonable level of confidence and can be targeted at any data broker. This is literally what a lot of independent auditing actually is. The reality is, you can't go and work on the inside at every data broker and that defeats the purpose of an independent audit anyways. So you have to come up with something else.

> The reality is, you can't go and work on the inside at every data broker and that defeats the purpose of an independent audit anyways. So you have to come up with something else.

It's true that it's unreasonable for people get a job at every company they have to work with. The real solution is regulation and oversight to protect our data from being collected, sold, and used against us. Experts all agree we need it and they've been saying so for a very very long time, but so far there's not been much effort from congress.

Or is the simplest explanation that they're not lying and they do what they say they do?

So I guess you're going with interpreting the scripture as "render unto Caesar that [data] which belongs to Caesar"?

Anyway, I'm a happy DDG user (on devices where typing "!g" isn't a pain).

Their use of cookies is fairly easy to inspect, although that doesn't prove they aren't doing fingerprinting or ip tracking.

`! mdn window.postMessage` .. so easy!

This isn't true. Google's privacy policy is not lax as you suggest it is.

It’s like a dark pattern that an advertiser would use, not a privacy-focused search engine.

Duckduckgo could easily be fully owned and operated by some three letter agency. The NSA is already able to go onsite and tap into the data that passes through corporations and they've been doing exactly that for decades (see Room 641A) and they can force corporations to keep silent about it using national security letters. You should already assume that every US based company is sending every scrap of data you give them to the state.

With no way to avoid your data from going to the state, what are you left with? Worries over companies collecting, selling, and using your data against you. That's a very real and perfectly valid concern.

We know that other search engines are doing those things, so it's best not to use them if we can avoid it. Duckduckgo might be doing those things, which at least gives us a chance, and even if they are it'd be better to hand your data over to several different companies than to give them all to one source (like Google for example) because the more data points any one company has on you the more control they have over you.

The worst case scenario would be that Duckduckgo is actually secretly run by Google and the data being collecting from the service is being used to help fill your dossier at Google but if that's the case we're never going to know about it until a whistleblower comes forward.

As defeatist as this all sounds, I do believe in taking steps to try to protect your privacy where you can, and I take many steps that go far beyond what most people are willing to, but we also have to accept the reality of the situation we have where our laws and regulations do not protect us, and there is very little we can do to protect ourselves but depend on others to do what they say. That's why I use duckduckgo right now. not because it's trustworthy (we can't know that), but because they might be and that's (sadly) the best option we have at the moment.

It's meant to protect us from tracking by advertisers.

I don't think it makes any sense for a three-letter-agency to run it. They can just NSL duckduckgo. They obey the law, as this news item shows clearly.

The problem with this (and most other conspiratorial thinking) is that of course a whistleblower is going to come forward.

Are you thinking that every employee of DuckDuckGo that knows this (and many would have to), is paid so highly as to just be quiet? That not one of them thinks, "hey, it would be fun to be famous? It would be fun to expose this thing that is suddenly going to make me a hero to millions? I could write a book about it afterwards and make a ton of money..."

And of course, Google would consider this in the first place. Like "maybe this isn't a great idea, because secrets like that are hard to keep? And maybe this could destroy our company and that kind of risk isn't a great idea?"

edit: sometimes the arguments against "conspiracy theories" become arguments against the current existence and operation of intelligence agencies. As if all of those employees did nothing all day, and all of those billions are flushed down the toilet.

I'm not thinking that DDG is secretly being run by Google at all, but I'm forced to admit that there's nothing stopping Google from doing it, that they have the money and resources to do it, and that it would benefit them to do it, so however remote, it is a possibility that should be considered right along side the possibility that duckduckgo is exactly what they say they are and nothing more. We have no evidence of either being true after all and can only speculate. If we're asking ourselves that the risks of using DDG are, we have to at least consider what the worst case scenarios might be.

So while I consider the possibility that DDG is being run by google to be possible, but highly unlikely, just as a thought experiment, why would anyone but a very small number of Google employees working at DDG need to know it was run by google and sending data back home? Any other DDG employees don't need to be told. If google employees ran the servers, DDG employees would be free to work on the front end and day to day stuff entirely unaware.

> The problem with this (and most other conspiratorial thinking) is that of course a whistleblower is going to come forward.

This is not a guarantee at all. Edward Snowden came forward, but only after many many years and not one of his co-workers in the same role did. DuPont knowingly poisoned people for decades and not a single whistleblower ever came forward. Johnson & Johnson knew that their product (which we were covering infants with) caused cancer but there was no whistleblower to break the story to the public.

Over and over and over again we only learn about horrific acts committed against the public by corporations after decades of gathering scientific data and court actions specifically because people were "paid so highly as to just be quiet". It's a fact that whistleblowers are the rare exception and not the rule.

The idea that companies are so afraid of whistleblowers or their reputation that they wouldn't do evil things is demonstrably false as we've seen example after example of companies who knowingly put profit over human life time and time again and even when there were whistleblowers the companies often faced zero meaningful consequences beyond paying back a small percentage of the profits they made while building a body count.

Whistleblowers are awesome, and they remain a very import check against bad actors, but do not count on them always being there to save you and don't expect that fear of them will prevent a company from committing acts far far worse than logging your internet searches.

If someone is worried about DDG, I can't blame them. They have every reason to worry, because we have no protections. Personally, while I sadly can't discount the possibility, I'm pretty sure DDG isn't run by google or the NSA, and they've been my search engine of choice for a very long time.

They can put enormous pressure on even the wealthiest and most powerful companies to act as copyright police on their behalf. Even Google is afraid of them. ISPs are forced to spend huge amounts of time and money working for them. Now duckduckgo is being strong armed into doing a bunch of free work for them too? Maintaining lists of websites and domains to block and removing links to even non-infringing material like youtube-dl just to keep from being sued into the ground.

I don't know what it'll take to rein in these guys, but I doubt the courts will be the ones to do it. So far courts seem fine with the idea that ISPs must permanently ban users from their service over nothing but repeated unsubstantiated claims of infringements which is an insane amount of power to give any industry.

Has any US politician ever run on a platform that includes copyright reform?

That to me is the worst thing about repeated phrasing of this as some kind of evil special interest groups against everyone else. The "special interests" here are the people who produce the copyright material you want to access. You have to play ball with them or they will simply not be able to produce those things anymore.

Plenty of those same people are fed up with copyright law in the US too. There are people releasing their works under more permissive licenses, publishing directly to torrent sites, etc. The fact is that most of the time copyright enforcement doesn't do a damn thing for the creators anyway. They rarely keep the copyright of what they produce. It does however often hinder their ability to work on things they'd like to, and it opens them up to legal risks from others who might claim their works are too close to their own. There's a very real chilling effect where creators may never even publish works out of fear that they'll be dragged into court against a team of industry lawyers. Our excessive copyright and patent system actually hinders more than it encourages new works.

Copyright reform is not “defunding copyright.” It’s a reform. It wouldn’t hurt individuals, unless they are super successful, and even then, not that much. And it helps everyone have higher quality, cheaper content and political freedom.

The problem is simply that the media is once again suppressing the lower/middle class for the one percent, and spreading FUD.

They should stop, and we can freely share what's left. Their bullshit crowds out everything else anyway.

How many examples of companies and people working on free software do you need? Or authors that started out writing as a side-gig?

It's simply not true that copyright reform would lead to death of creative works. Most likely the opposite: we would certainly see a reduction in the quantity of works, but those remaining would be working out of pure interest, which would lead me to believe that the average quality would be substantially better.

Free and open source software is completely dependent on copyright to work, so that's a terrible example.

You can advocate for copyright reform all you want but you misunderstand who you have to please when you do that. It's all those lobbying groups. There's no other groups who would be invested in reforming copyright law. The "quality" you're advocating for here is completely subjective and not up to you or me to decide, even moreso when you try to dismiss all these things that millions of people actually like as "cultural garbage".

Or we can simply acknowledge that the whole system is rigged and continue to ignore the laws and get as many people to understand that piracy is the only reasonably moral alternative?

You say that like it's a bad thing. I wish it was that easy to get them to stop producing all that crap, but it seems that the easier it gets to pirate things, the more cultural garbage they produce.

I believe there is a kind of artists dilemma where, one way to put it, we differentiate "commercial art" from "fine art". We put a higher value on the starving artist whose passion for creativity is so consuming, and vision so singular that they will follow their muse irregardless of any financial success.

I exaggerate to make clear the point.

Put another way, if there were no more blockbuster films, indie films would nonetheless still get made. Some people (maybe myself?) would be okay with that.

Are you getting paid to produce cultural pollution?

I'm sure back in the day, Salzburg people were also rolling their eye about yet another Requiem.

"collateral damage" just means...why can't I just consume everything for free, as if it's some human right?

I for one wouldn't mind to lose Hollywood as an industry, or Broadway, or Silicon Valley...

All of these industries are way too big and over-influential in all aspects of our lives, and leave us without any chance of a more human-scale alternative to counteract.

I mean, how many TV networks are owned by Disney? Do you really think that all that lobbying is just to keep people away from watching copies of Mickey's Fantasia?

There's actually lots of good criticisms of Disney, but you didn't mention any of them.

Excuse me? What if I want to adapt some Hans Christian Andersen story over 150 years old and get a cease and desist from Disney? Even if their adaptations are older than many people alive today.

It's about all the other movies that don't get to be financed because of the 19th re-hash of Star Wars (or Marvel movie, or live-action remake of Lion King/Aladdin/Pocahontas/Dumbo/Bambi) that is going to be released and it's "guaranteed" to make another billion dollars in the box office.

It's about having two small kids who get bombarded with products from their franchises on every media outlet.

It's about them using their movies and works to promote whatever ideological propaganda that gets them in favor with government.

The rest of your comment is unrelated and somewhat unhinged, and appears to be going off into a general complaint about advertising, it has nothing to do with copyright.

Good for you! Now go ask the other 99% of the population what they watched this year?

> The rest of your comment (...) has nothing to do with copyright.

It has to do with concentration of power, of which copyright (and any kind of "intellectual property") is one of the favorite instruments from big corporations.

I also used to fall for this "people are free to choose" techno-libertarian bullshit. The problem is that it is not in the interest of all the corporations for you to choose responsibly. They make the game so complex and so energy consuming that eventually people break in one way or another.

"Copyright enforcement" only benefits the big players and the corporate world.

It means artists who never publish their works because they're afraid of being sued for being a little too close to what someone else did once a century ago.

It means creative projects that never get started because while the will is there, the rights needed are impossible to obtain.

It means non-infringing works like youtube-dl get silenced and hidden from the public because they are inconvenient to media giants

It means accepting internet censorship without oversight.

It means DRM crippled hardware that you but are never allowed to own.

It means DRM crippled software that can never be preserved and archived in a usable format.

It means your culture and your history being paywalled off or locked away

If you this this is an issue of "I just want free stuff" you clearly haven't been paying attention.

> It means people being forced off the internet because of nothing but unproven accusations because they only have one ISP in their area.

This is not related to copyright law at all. I agree ISP monopolies are a problem, for any number of reasons.

>It means artists who never publish their works because they're afraid of being sued for being a little too close to what someone else did once a century ago.

Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason, that doesn't mean they'll win the lawsuit. You could make a good argument here about how copyright law is too long, but that point is lost in the rest of the sentence.

>It means creative projects that never get started because while the will is there, the rights needed are impossible to obtain.

No, that doesn't make any sense. This is a blatant misunderstanding of copyright that I see so often. Copyright doesn't stop you from creating new projects. You don't need to get the rights if it's a fully original work. You could also make a good argument here about how licensing is too difficult to obtain sometimes but that point is also lost.

>It means non-infringing works like youtube-dl get silenced and hidden from the public because they are inconvenient to media giants

This never happened. Youtube-dl is still up, if I recall for the short period it was taken down there were like 20 forks that popped up immediately.

>It means accepting internet censorship without oversight.

This also never happened and is contradictory to everything else you said, your complaint actually seems to be that there's too much oversight.

>It means DRM crippled hardware that you but are never allowed to own.

This is not related to copyright law. DRM is a purely technical means, not a legal one.

>It means DRM crippled software that can never be preserved and archived in a usable format. It means your culture and your history being paywalled off or locked away

No, it's not your culture or your history, you're not the author. What everyone misses with these comments is that some authors many not want their works to be preserved or archived.

>If you this this is an issue of "I just want free stuff" you clearly haven't been paying attention.

There's no coherent issue anywhere else in your reply and there's nothing to pay attention to. I've tried to make these comments constructive so maybe that can guide you towards what your real issue is.

The moment an author makes something public and it gains significant traction is the moment it starts to be part of global culture instead of just only the author's.

Either publish the work with everything that it entails, including archival and assimilation of that work into popular culture, or don't publish at all. If you don't want society to archive your works, then it shouldn't even know of their existence. There's no middle-ground.

It's a problem regardless. No industry should be allowed to force a 3rd party to cancel your service with them over mere accusations. The fact that there are countless examples of DMCA notices being sent in error, or intentionally sent inappropriately doesn't make the situation any better either. While I agree that ISPs should not be a monopoly and we should all have easy access to high speed connections at low prices from a large number of providers, that's not the reality we live in, it still wouldn't solve the problem since as long as there are finite amount of providers you'll still eventually be able to be kicked offline, and I shouldn't be forced from the provider of my choosing in the first place.

> Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason, that doesn't mean they'll win the lawsuit.

The people who decide not to publish aren't doing it because they fear random lawsuits from random people. Their fear is very specific. They decide not to create or publish their work out of fear of being sued under our overbroad and excessively punishing copyright laws.

Winning doesn't help if you're driven into debt and bankruptcy by the costs. While companies I've never heard of could randomly sue for any reason out of nowhere (a major problem on its own) the risk of that happening to me is very small. For people publishing music (even those within the traditional system) it's much much higher and it's already having an impact. (see: https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/music-copyright-la...)

I don't think this is unintentional. By increasing the risk of creating new works outside of relative safety of the RIAA's umbrella they can silence indie artists who don't want to sign their rights away.

> No, that doesn't make any sense. This is a blatant misunderstanding of copyright that I see so often. Copyright doesn't stop you from creating new projects.

See above - it does stop the creation of new works from people who either can't find the rights to do what they want, can't afford them, or fear the lawsuits they will face if they go ahead anyway. Sita Sings the Blues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_the_Blues) is a great example of a wonderful creative original work that almost didn't happen because of our insane copyright laws. In the end, the creator was only able to get the work out to the public by releasing it for free and she's still at risk of lawsuits. I recommend reading the copyright section of her FAQ here https://www.sitasingstheblues.com/faq.html

> This never happened.

Strange take in a discussion of Duckduckgo removing links to the project form their search engine and immediately followed by how even though it was wrongfully removed before other people had forks so somehow that didn't matter. It mattered then, just like it matters now that DDG is hiding that tool from the public.

> This also never happened and is contradictory to everything else you said, your complaint actually seems to be that there's too much oversight.

The censorship issue is concerning what ISPs, hosting services, and search engines are forced to remove. No company should have the power to remove content from the internet without due process and right now, that's not happening.

Youtube pulls content down all the time in response to DMCA notices that should never have been enforced and that content stays down unless the uploader invests significant amounts of time and effort getting it restored which is still not always the outcome.

So far, the US has resisted site blocking at the ISP level (something the MPA/RIAA has managed to force on ISPs in other countries) but they keep asking for that capability here as well.

Oversight doesn't come in the form of aggressive takedown demands or automated systems blindly taking down content whenever a DMCA notice gets fired off. It comes from careful evaluation of takedown notices before content is removed or sites are taken offline.

Just recently, lack of oversight caused youtube to take down people's videos after youtube got DMCA notices that were not legitimate and youtube's polices made it very hard for real copyright owner to get the issue resolved. (https://torrentfreak.com/bungie-files-lawsuit-to-punish-send...)

> This is not related to copyright law. DRM is a purely technical means, not a legal one.

If DRM was a purely technical problem, we'd be free to use purely technical means to get around it and you'd be right except that it's illegal to bypass DRM or to post tools that would allow that to happen. The law which makes it illegal is the DMCA. When youtube-dl was forced offline the action was defended under that very same __copyright__ law. Their argument was that the tool circumvented youtube's DRM. It doesn't, but that didn't stop them from trying to make that case.

> No, it's not your culture or your history, you're not the author. What everyone misses with these comments is that some authors many not want their works to be preserved or archived.

Yes. It is. It's our culture. We all share it. If an artist wants full control over their work they should keep it to themselves. Once they release it to public it becomes a shared experience that belongs to everyone involved. Do you really believe that Superman isn't a part of our culture? That Mario Bros. isn't a part of our culture?

Copyright law was put in place to give special rights to creators for a limited time to encourage new works. Not because naturally they have the right to keep us from our culture. They don't. They needed special rights to do it. The deal was we'd accept that for the sake of new works, we would temporarily give up our rights, and in exchange once that temporary period of special rights ended, works would enter the public domain. They broke that deal with perpetual copyrights and DRM. Copyright law is being abused to hinder the creation of new works. It's time to change the system.

> There's no coherent issue anywhere else in your reply and there's nothing to pay attention to.

I can't force you to understand, but I'm willing to help you as long as you're willing to listen.

>This is not related to copyright law at all. I agree ISP monopolies are a problem, for any number of reasons.

ISP monopolies aren't due to copyright law but these disconnections are a consequence of copyright law: it is the only reliable way you as a third party can get an ISP to disconnect someone based on unsubstantiated allegations. Send an ISP letters claiming that a subscriber is attacking your systems in violation of the CFAA and they'll likely ignore you, maybe they'll ask you to prove it or better yet go after the person doing the hacking. Send an ISP letters claiming that a subscriber is file sharing in violation of the Copyright Act, and if they don't meet your demands (which far exceed anything prescribed by the DMCA) they're liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement [1].

>Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason, that doesn't mean they'll win the lawsuit. You could make a good argument here about how copyright law is too long, but that point is lost in the rest of the sentence.

They can, but the relevant laws and legal precedent decide whether the plaintiff can get a decent lawyer to take their case and whether the suit will survive your first attempt to get it dismissed. The doctrines we have around copyright make it easy to bring claims against infringers and get a court to hear it out. But unintentionally they allow for abuses as "small time" as internet subscribers to be dragged into multiyear lawsuits for file sharing when it later emerges that the plaintiff has - literally - no evidence [2] or as "big time" as Katy Perry getting baselessly sued for using a fairly generic sequence of chords and needing an appeals court to overturn the jury verdict against her [3]. In both of these examples, legislation or new legal precedent could raise the standards for bringing certain types of cases without hurting righteous plaintiffs. On the other hand, in both examples the righteous party eventually won. But in others they lose, or pay a nuisance settlement because the court fight isn't worth it [4]. Frivolous lawsuits are a big problem and aren't at all limited to copyright, but clearly there are features of copyright law that make it attractive for people looking to abuse the legal system.

>No, that doesn't make any sense. This is a blatant misunderstanding of copyright that I see so often. Copyright doesn't stop you from creating new projects. You don't need to get the rights if it's a fully original work. You could also make a good argument here about how licensing is too difficult to obtain sometimes but that point is also lost.

I agree that there's a very common misconception here, but there are two real issues with copyright law that are also being referenced. Copyright law makes it unnecessarily difficult to create derivative works based on very old works that would have passed into the public domain if not for relentless lobbying for longer corporate copyright terms. It might also protect "abandoned" works and works where the corporate copyright holder is defunct too aggressively, there's a good argument for both sides of that issue. But it's an argument to be had over how the law can avoid causing real problems, not a "misunderstanding" of the law.

>This never happened. Youtube-dl is still up, if I recall for the short period it was taken down there were like 20 forks that popped up immediately.

The article this comment thread is under is about precisely the issue of copyright lawsuit threats being used to hide youtube-dl from search results.

>This also never happened and is contradictory to everything else you said, your complaint actually seems to be that there's too much oversight.

The "censorship without oversight" refers to the DMCA notice and takedown procedure. Outside of extremely rare court injunctions, there is no authority that can monitor or stop flagrant abusers of a system whose purpose is to legally compel the removal of content from online services, which might be called a form of censorship.

>This is not related to copyright law. DRM is a purely technical means, not a legal one.

Again, this is "first paragraph of the Wikipedia article" level DMCA. If DRM circumvention were not illegal, it would be purely a technical means, but courts have repeatedly ruled that DRM doesn't need to be any good technically speaking to have legal force.

>No, it's not your culture or your history, you're not the author. What everyone misses with these comments is that some authors many not want their works to be preserved or archived.

Those authors need something else because stopping annoying archivists is not in the scope of copyright law. The purpose of copyright is to give authors a limited monopoly on the making and selling of copies of their work. And before the second half of the 20th century, we had copyright law with the understanding that creative works outside of IP law were part of the "public property", "common property", or the newer term "public domain". Now, of course, there are ways of protecting works more effectively than copyright alone by never selling individuals copies of works, only licensing them, and using legally protected DRM to discourage breaking the license terms.

[1] https://variety.com/2019/music/news/cox-communications-music...

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2021/12/16/malibu-media-ordered-to-...

[3] https://variety.com/2022/music/news/katy-perry-appeal-dark-h...

[4] https://twitter.com/edsheeran/status/1511631955238047751

"If you could feed everyone on earth at the cost of baking one loaf and pressing a button, what would be the moral case for charging more for bread than some people could afford to pay? This represents the difficulty at which we find ourselves straining at the opening of the twenty-first century."

--- Eben Moglen, speech he gave in 2003 - refer: http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/maine-speech.htm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig_2016_president...

Which is broadly more important than copyright reform…and broadly Americans don’t seem to particularly care about either of them all that much.

Lessig, in particular, doesn't push for throwing out the electoral college all together (to avoid system shock) but rather to move towards proportional representation the state level.

That is, if your state has 10 electors and votes 60:40 R:D, then you should allocate 6 electors for R and 40 electors for D (rather than the current "winner take all" method we do). This kills off gerrymandering as a tool and makes it so that rather than appealing to swing states, presidential candidate would actually have to convince every state that they are the right choice (because you don't just automatically get California. The difference between a 55:45 cali and a 90:10 cali would completely change how you campaign).

Right now, Presidential candidates campaign to swing states which is why you get weird things like presidents talking solely about auto manufacturing or natural gas extraction.

It has led many to believe the party leaders don’t want his message out there

Also, _come on_; if someone gives up after one search term, which also includes advanced site-restricting syntax, there's no way they'd be able to operate youtube-dl anyway: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=youtube-dl&ia=web

You can still access it from the results via other sites, like github and wikipedia (which even makes the real website pop up in the info square, funnily enough), but the search results themselves do not contain any links to the main website.

This seems like an oversimplification of things you don't know.

That's pretty easy to check for yourself, usually whenever something does not show up on Bing it won't on DDG either. A good example of that was when the "tank man" picture disappeared from Bing and the exact same thing happened on DDG.

That relationship has reportedly been "paused":

https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/duckduckgo-yandex-ukraine

I keep most of those source sites in UNTRUSTED status (including some of the big names in search/ads/etc). But I've always had DDG in the TRUSTED category because I had only seen its javascript before on the main DDG website.

(Unfortunately NoScript has a limitation that you can't tell it to "only TRUST javascript from example.com when I'm visiting example.com").

But recently I started noticing some websites pulling javascript from DDG (I don't remember which sites).

So now I was wondering if DDG is getting into the tracking business, since they're now having their javascripts load from third party sites.

Obviously this is anecdotal. But does anyone know if they are indeed beginning to track?

uMatrix (which I'm using in desktop Firefox) works exactly like this. Plus it allows you to forbid/allow cookies, styles, images, scripts, media, XHR, and iframes separately (for each origin/domain).

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

I was under the impression that the custom option allowed this. Am I misunderstanding the point of this option?

But it doesn't offer the ability to say "apply these settings to the domain example.com only when I'm visiting example.com, and not when I'm visiting anotherexample.com which happens to load JS from example.com".

Edit: Correction - I do have NoScript 11; but don't see those options.

Edit: seeing your edit - the plot thickens. I'm on 11.4.4 - any difference there?

And you're right, according to their changelog [1], they added it in 11.3.

>> v 11.3rc1 + Contextual policies (different capabilities for the same origin, depending on the top-level domain) configurable in the CUSTOM panel (thanks NLnet for financial support)

Woohoo!

Thanks for following up and making me look, I now have a better setup!

[1] https://noscript.net/changelog/

I remember seeing 3 sites within an hour, and deciding to change the DDG setting to TEMP:TRUSTED afterwards.

Anecdotal of course, but I've been seeing more and more DDG billboards. Those things aren't cheap, and my trust in them has declined the more I see them advertise in the traditional market.

So far, it seems to be working really well for me! Results are pretty excellent, and they support the DDG bang queries (like `!g`) if you ever need it

[0] https://kagi.com/

Kagi is privately owned US corporation.

> And how do we know Kagi doesn't end up the same way as DDG?

Being a paid service means Kagi's incentives are very different. Instead of selling your data or profiting from feeding into ad-tech food chain, we are interested in selling you a subscription. This changes everything as the number one thing in Kagi's universe becomes what the users want, different to DDG, Google and other ad-supported search engines.

> How do we know these privacy claims are true?

Sadly I can not think of a way to verify them (let me know if you have one). But most plainly, we have no incentive or reason to do otherwise. Note that the only private information Kagi asks of the user is an email address, need to create an account, and those concerned can use whatever email they want.

> But most plainly, we have no incentive or reason to do otherwise.

One reason is: to improve your services. Other reasons could appear over time.

> Sadly I can not think of a way to verify them (let me know if you have one).

The privacy claims could be verified by recurring external audits.

Not in reality. Nothing prevents a bad player from misusing user data once an audit is done. External audit would only be a good cover.

Is it though? I think I've been on the wait list for a few months now.

duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion/

Running a hidden service is just so jolly gentlemanly. And it works in the total absence of JavaScript and no matter what utter lies I tell it about my randomised-per-request UA, and cookie black holes. The obvious dark side is that it's closely connected to Amazon.

beacons and pings fired upon activating a link, happen after the document change, so ublock associates them with the new document, even though they are initiated by the old document

Still super disappointing though, and yet another reason why trying to build a better search engine on top of someone else's tech is a non-starter.

If there's a market for alternative search engines out there, AWS is already serving so much of the web that Amazon should really provide crawling and basic indexing (for a fee, of course) so it's done once for everyone, with Amazon Lambda processing to allow search engines to customize their indexing. I'm not sure if it would make them much money, but it makes more sense to start up a search engine on AWS using Amazon's crawl and basic indexing vs. using a search engine competitor's crawl and indexing.

The crawling and initial indexing stages need a lot of scaling and performance tuning work, which is a core competency for the AWS engineers. Furthermore, essentially zero people say "I want to build a startup around my new crawl scheduling idea, but it's too time consuming and expensive to write the rest of the search engine." Many more people say "I have a new idea for ranking" or "I have a new idea for content extraction, but it's too expensive and time-consuming to write the rest of a search engine".

Google and Bing already expose "custom search engines" which are basically just filters on top of their search engines. I'm talking about something similar, but much deeper customization.

Also, I was at Goldman when Google Search Appliance was EoL'd. GS had plenty of internal content that needed to be indexed, absolutely needed to be kept private, and wasn't well indexed by any of the replacements GS evaluated. For companies that keep lots of documents in AWS storage, it would be good to open up the space for Google Search Appliance replacements. Amazon could write their own, but given that Google abandoned the space, the profit margins aren't great for a huge company. However, creating a search ecosystem within the AWS ecosystem makes the AWS ecosystem more attractive. Maybe forgoing the search profits and inviting in search providers would be a net win in selling more AWS compute and storage.

Awful for competition and whatnot.

As it stands, if you want to bootstrap your own search engine, you need to base your search engine on either Google or Bing's index, or perform the herculean task of making your own crawler+indexer+search engine. If Amazon can commoditize the back end, and let AWS-hosted search engines provide differentiators late in the indexing pipeline and on the search/serving side, I think we'd see more niche search engines spring up.

Amazon is a weirdly plausible competitor to Google. They have a surprisingly robust ad business, and obviously AWS.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/03/amazon-has-a-31-billion-a-ye...

Yeah, I guess that would probably be useful for something. Academic research into just how awful people are, perhaps. And, of course, as a blackhole list.

Just make sure you get a bulk discount on disk space. Such a list would be huge.

Yes, exactly, I want exactly whatever I search for, including that if that's what I search for.

If I search for something which exists, then I want the knowledge of that existence. The value judgement is no one else's business unless I search for "X but only where approved by any governments or companies with any political or financial interest in controlling what I know."

When it turns out that I would never choose to search for that, that is the proof that it's wrong to be doing it.