Slashdot Mirror

Yes, I know I can use Startpage and/or DuckDuckGo, but they're not as fast as hitting Google directly. Seriously, for simple searches, 99.9% of the time the JavaScript and crap (et al) on all these search pages (like Google and Bing) is a complete bullshit. Just my $0.02 anyway.

100% with you. I use Opera (older version) so I can turn javascript OFF. It's amazing how much faster pages load without it. I also use a bit of "content blocking", allow very few cookies, etc.

Try: https://duckduckgo.com/html/ it's much faster with the "html" suffix and javascript OFF.

it would be interesting to learn more about the people involved and their backgrounds

http://www.sourcewatch.org/wik...

There's also DuckDuckGo.com. Despite the name, it's actually quite decent, and the "related" non-boolean search lands on top.

The difference is, DuckDuckGo is headquartered in Paoli, Pennsylvania. You have to dig through their site a while to find that; try the Hiring section. That means they are subject to US fed/state data retention laws and government requests.

Ixquick is headquartered in The Netherlands and (understandably) boasts about not having provided one byte of data to the US government. They've won EU awards because those governments actually recognize the value of privacy. Please see this page for a reference.

Don't get me wrong, DuckDuckGo sounds good. Sounds like they certainly don't actively track you. But I don't see them bragging that they "keep no data to hand over in the first place" and I would be truly surprised if that is entirely an option for them. Certainly they can't tell the US government to piss up a flagpole if and when fishing expeditions come in.

There's also DuckDuckGo.com. Despite the name, it's actually quite decent, and the "related" non-boolean search lands on top.

Luckily nobody has ever been the victim of a drive-by stabbing

Actually, that happens all the time:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22d...

or a stray knife flying into their home.

Getting a brick through your window is more likely to harm you than the extremely rare stray bullet.

There were people seeing this "menace" back in the 1970s, and offering similar "solutions". http://duckduckgo.com/?s=the.t... (I'm seeing the upside of becoming an old fart. Perspective. Spotting patterns of alarmism.)

There will still be need for people to make lace and stockings and cloth, after the machines take over, Mr. Ludd. (Whoops! Wrong iteration.)

There will still be need for people to do whatever it is that machines can't, or can't do at an competitive price.

"Can't" is a bigger category than technological infeasibility. People still commission oil painting portraits, after over a century of photography. There are still restaurants, and not a proliferation of automats. ("Automats"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) One-off tasks -- organizing a conference, for instance -- could be automated to a degree, but ultimately someone is going to have to conceive of it, identify key participants, convince them to attend, obtain sponsors, etc.

"At a competitive price". It may be possible to design a robot that picks up cigarette butts and other minor debris in every possible location and situation, or to do gardening of every conceivable landscape, but to do it well enough might just be too damn expensive. Centralizing pre-made decisions has proven damnably hard to do well, at any cost. It won't be any different when they are in software and about litter or about aesthetics and locally-suitable horticulture.

Moore's Law would not have made Soviet Union workable, and isn't going to help in many situations in the future. Not help enough to matter. Even free computing and data gathering and data transmission won't do it People on the scene are flexible, and have knowledge distant theoreticians don't even know to acquire. (http://duckduckgo.com/?s=I.pencil+ferrule+graphite )

The real problem will be the pace. Personal adaptability allowed some blacksmiths to become auto-mobile mechanics, and the rest were able to get by during the transition, sticking with the horses. The important skill in the future will not be a specialization in any area or guessing what skills will not automate (people will always need shrinks or whores or physical therapists or tactful portraitists or wine stewards or ...), but the ability to make transitions over and over, as necessary.

Hardly an original thought. As I recall, skeptics were offering it back in the 1970s. (And, I bet, back in the 1770s.)

Google built the tools to filter their searches when China demanded it, once in place, do you really think it isn't used in the US but in a less open manner?
Anyway, the results are already filtered based on what Google knows about you. If you want unfiltered search you should use one of the aggregators like duckduckgo or startpage

Borrowed ladder

:)

The usual term for such bikes is 'bicycle-shaped object'

Or use http://duckduckgo.com/ and stop using Google?

https://duckduckgo.com/html/

That's certainly an interesting opinion.

I'm not sure how it squares with the observation that the Socialist Party platform (of 1928, I believe) has been pretty much enacted by the Democrats and Republicans in the decades since.

It might be fun to watch someone try. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=socia...

If that's what you're concerned about, try DuckDuckGo.

I don't know about Bing. But duckduckgo is very anonymous.

https://duckduckgo.com/

If you follow the links on the right side of the screen, they'll show you the many ways in which Google breach your privacy and they don't.

I am shocked, shocked to learn that regulatory capture continues to exist, even after I learned the name for it.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=regul...

Who creates money?

Government does. Notice that every major currency in the world is backed by a government or in the case of the Euro, a group of governments. You have to go pretty far down in scale before you find currencies that aren't government-backed, such as BitCoin or currencies in MMOs.

Wrong.

Look into Federal Reserve system. It is not Federal. It does not maintain a reserve. It is a consortium of privately owned and undisclosed banks.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how%20the%20federal%20reserve%20creates%20money

In modern, neo-Liberal economic societies Government borrows money from private, central banks. This money is called into creation as debt. The creation of the money is an act of the bank - an accounting phantom - entering new assets as black ink on their ledgers.

Government no more "creates money" under this scenario, that you do, by using a credit card.

If "governments" backed the money, they wouldn't declare "austerity" programs on their own constituency - but instead issue jubilee forgiveness, with full restoration of productive capacity, etc. Instead, the EU and US BOTH "bail out" creditor institutions, ceding all right to their own resources and productive capacity to ownership by the bank.

When I looked at it, it had that post. Time stamp was 3 hours ago.

DuckDuckGo shows it too. What's better about Google — their privacy policy? PRISM participation? Timestamps?

The phenomenon where high-minded do-gooders want what the low-minded black market purveyors also want is called "the Baptist and the Bootlegger". http://duckduckgo.com/?q=bapti...

The effects of laws don't depend in the slightest on the intentions of their advocates.

That's why apartheid-era racists in South Africa wanted a certain type of law that today's American liberals also want, but for quite opposite reasons. (It's depressing to realize the South African racists had a better understanding of the social phenomena involved about a century ago than American liberals do today. Go figure.)

That's as bullshitty a term as it is in your supermarket. There *are* no "organic" results when they're calculated based on your tracking history, ad clicks and social connections.

Friends don't let friends get tracked. Use the quack that doesn't track!

I use startpage.com myself. I like the idea of getting actual Google search results without any sort of Google tracking. They don't even log your IP address and they're outside of US jurisdiction.

By the way I hope our federal legislators appreciate that. I hope they are proud that now, "outside of US jurisdiction" has become a selling point.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dieg...

That's as bullshitty a term as it is in your supermarket. There *are* no "organic" results when they're calculated based on your tracking history, ad clicks and social connections.

Friends don't let friends get tracked. Use the quack that doesn't track!

What state do you live in? I want to make certain never to drive there.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=shou...

Seriously, you have some evidence for that statement?

Guess which kind of person wrote this article?

Obviously, someone who never read the Halloween Documents.

You could call it DuckDuckGo.

I found a copy of the video on Vimeo. There's download links too.
I wont bother linking to it since it's prolly taken down soon anyways. Point is the video is out there,
all we need to do is look for it,

Search
  or
Search

The bubble is extraordinarily pervasive and it is VERY difficult to break out of without a geographic change(Proxy/VPN).

Try your search with the following URLs and see what you get:
www.google.com
www.google.co.uk
www.bing.com
www.duckduckgo.com

I never log in to Google, always clear cookies and cache and generally try to avoid being tracked. I know that it's pointless because they still use geolocation, IP address, and browser signatures to track me. But I still try to avoid the bubble. Searching for BP gives me company/stock/investment information only! On all of the above search engines. But, searching BP from my hippie sister-in-law's house(on my own device) gives me a first page full of oil spill links.

It's REALLY startling when I travel overseas. Working remotely, I try searching for my "usual stuff", that's always right there at the top of the page. But, at the Caribbean resort, all I get is links to Philippine and Malay centric stuff and not at all what I'm looking for. It has been literally impossible for me to Google certain things that I normally do back home, even with very explicit search terms including location. It's been very annoying sometimes, but it drives home that I'm inside a bubble. It is not at all unlike being inside the Matrix and unable to wake up. You're not even aware that you're inside the bubble/Matrix.

Your revolutionary war, a cheap imitation of the French Revolution

Um... the French one happened after the American one.

If you want to be pejorative, there are more accurate ways to do it. For example...

The American revolution LED to the French one (one reason the French were starving and hating their government was because it spent a lot of money helping the Americans and fighting the British). What you can do is portray the French Revolution as horrible (Reign of Terror, led to Napoleon, etc)

You can also to describe the American Revolution as a leftist, liberal, progressive, socialist rebellion (I bet many Founding Fathers, along with Lincoln Republicans, would be considered leftists if they were alive today). This compliments the last paragraph. Socialism is characterized in how they spend other people's money, benefiting only a few while making things worse for everyone else. That is exactly what happened. The US spent the French's money, enriching America (and mostly the rich white males in America) while pushing all the problems to Europe

At first, many Europeans fled the suffering and immigrated to America. Pro-America, US-centric narrative would say that this is because America is a great free not-socialist country. Here in our pejorative narrative, we can say that people came to America because it is a socialist country. People came for the socialist pork. Pork like how the US government would totally discriminate colored people to help the European folk. The prosperity of 19th century Gilded Age was simply the period before they have "ran out of other people's money" and before the oppressed said enough is enough.

But eventually the money ran out, and Europe's problems become America's problems, consistent with the narrative that socialism push problems to other people, but eventually those problems come back to haunt you. And as any socialist country would, the US keeps itself going be being more brazen about its socialist policies, spend more money being world police, and roll back on all the freedoms it had in the past, which brings us to today, completing the narrative.

https://duckduckgo.com/

See how their ads work here: https://dukgo.com/help/en_US/company/advertising-and-affiliates
(To summarize, they are usually fine - usually 0-1 clearly marked sponsored results per page)

I will be doing my searches through duckduckgo, some third party anonymizer that strips the ads or god forbid.

Not my post, but dial-a-bus services existed in the 1980s. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dial-a-bus

Have you looked at DuckDuckGo for search? Their main focus is on providing good search results with user privacy: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

https://duckduckgo.com/
https://ddg.gg/ (shorter URL)

I switched to them as my primary search engine about two years ago, and have been very pleased. They use the Bing engine and their results are pretty good, but I find I still have to fall back to Google search occasionally. I have noted that my usage of Google has gone down over time.

Have you looked at DuckDuckGo for search? Their main focus is on providing good search results with user privacy: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

https://duckduckgo.com/
https://ddg.gg/ (shorter URL)

I switched to them as my primary search engine about two years ago, and have been very pleased. They use the Bing engine and their results are pretty good, but I find I still have to fall back to Google search occasionally. I have noted that my usage of Google has gone down over time.

Gibbertbot offers OTR XMPP chat for Android, as does ChatSecure for iOS. The DuckDuckGo app for Androind/iOS offers untracked search over HTTPS. There are a number of PGP/GPG email readers/writers for Android and iOS.

All of this can be precluded by the NSA having a backdoor at the graces of the manufacturer, but we still don't know the extent of that. The article states that their iPhone surveillance required them to hack into the host iTunes computer, which can be prevented with a good firewall.

+1

Yes, google beat altavista by using "Page Rank" (i.e. analyzing the graph of the way pages were linked together, to estimate popularity). It was pretty remarkable, altavista was clearly more flexible (like other people here, I remember the "NEAR" keyword fondly), but you had to read through a page or two of links to find what you wanted, and google had a knack for putting it up top in the first few links (hence the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, for when you were pretty sure you wanted just the top link).

(Why do we need to explain things like this? Is everyone on slashdot these days really this young, or do you guys have no memory at all?)

What was interesting about this is the moment google became really successful, it choked off the behavior that Page Rank relied on: why bother linking to relevent stuff when you knew everyone could just google it up if they felt like it? (And it doesn't help that wikipedia opted-out of this to discourage spam links). And so, ever since then, google has had to keep dancing to different ranking techniques (e.g. relying on user click data) to try to stay ahead of the SEO scum. So yeah, google no longer seems quite so wonderful (and myself, I'm more inclined to use blekko.com or duckduckgo.com

And now we're stuck in a world where you always get shown the popular stuff that you're expected to want to see, so the popular stays popular, and struggling upstarts have to struggle even harder...

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ous&q=fortune+500+average+tax+paid

Overall the top 500 paid an average of half the 35% rate. The GAO report is a good place to start if you really want to know, or one of the news story summaries. Roughly half the entries on a screen and a half of search results were for articles on companies paying zero or less federal tax.

Without Google search I am stuck only using the websites that I use everyday, facebook/slachdot.

Am I limited when Google goes down? Fuck fuck no. All I really lose is YouTube.

Didn't notice as, I guess, many of us since we use DuckDuckGo or other sites and don't use Google evil tracking apps either.

IMHO, the author's conclusion is a bit overly dramatic. I think a more realistic conclusion is a gradual fade out of cloud computing and cloud storage. Business and people will be more inclined to keep their private data on local, closed systems now because they no longer trust the government not to stick their nose in where it doesn't belong. How long will it be before the same effect happens to socialized medicine? Would you trust the government not to use your medical status against you?

Bad example on the "socialized medicine" angle.

It's the private insurers that one needs to worry about: they'll use your health status to refuse you because they have a profit motive. At least with socialized medicine that doesn't happen.

http://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-i-have-a-pre-existing-health-condition/

Starting in 2014, health insurance plans can't refuse to cover you or charge you more just because you have a pre-existing health condition. Being sick doesn't keep you from getting coverage

Further interesting examples seen via something like this:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hmo+pre-existing+condition+refuse+coverage

https://duckduckgo.com/

ooh, the nutorious APK spammer, this time spamming us about anti-spam. hi. would you like me to rip you to shreds?

• 1. This would need to be run on your MX record (which likely isn't Windows ...)
• 2. SMTP does not use DNS. You get a connection from a spammer, it dumps email content to you.
• 3. DNS lookups used by anti-spam don't actually resolve domains in links, they use third-party URIBLs.
• 4. If you're suggesting that some anti-spam engineer (hi) design a mechanism to use your hosts file as a URIBL, you're suddently competing with far larger indices that update every few seconds. Your flat hosts file updates ... sorry, I don't see any updating capability on your ad site. The last engine update was 44 days ago.
• 5. Even URIBLs only have visibility into domains that have already been spammed, not new ones.
• 6. There is such a thing as a hosts file that is too big, making me dubious of how scalable APK really is at doing the next-to-nothing that it does.
• 7. You are proud of a program that merely manages a text file that consumes 37MB of memory? Why does your program even need to run after installation? It doesn't appear to get updates.
• 8. You spammed us to advertise your software. Great strategy.

After using both DuckDuckGo and StartPage (Ixquick) for months, I switched to PrivateLee a year ago. It provides the most relevant results of the three and includes an image search. The main thing I'm missing are the convenient conversions between measurement units and currencies, but I'm willing to take an extra step for those as long as the vast majority of my searches provide relevant results and respect my privacy.

The secret to PrivateLee's good search results is that they proxy the results from Google and Bing without letting either one know who is the end-user initiating the query.

That's another thing to like about DDG: The fact that all settings can be stored as URL parameters in your browser, instead of a cookie (meaning you can simply disable cookies for duckduckgo.com entirely).

And it's well-documented and easy to do:

1. Go to https://duckduckgo.com/settings, configure DDG as you please.
2. Click "Bookmarklet and settings data", then click on the prominent "https://duckduckgo.com/" URL.
3. Right click in the DDG search field, select "Create search" (Opera) / "Add keyword for this search" (Firefox) .

In other browsers, the process is more roundabout, but that's hardly DDG's fault.

I use duckduckgo's !bang feature https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

DDG is a reskinned Yandex with shortcuts to search particular sites. If you don't commonly use site: searches on Google, and you can't stand Yandex, you won't like DDG.

You missed the point, all those guys do is beg for money and produce no results, so go spend your 10$, maybe they will send a cardboard brick in your name to some clueless guy who is wondering where these damned cardboard bricks are coming from!

I'm not a member of the EFF, and I don't keep very close an eye on what they are (or aren't) doing, though I do make use of the quality tools and informational resources on their website.

I've been a member of the ACLU though since I turned eighteen though, and it is quite obvious to me that they produce results; they always in court — fighting for rights of everyone under US jurisdiction. It was ACLU's frequent appearance in mainstream news stories that led me to join in the first place, as it was obvious that they were doing something.

EFF is much smaller though, so of course they're not going to show up in the press or courts as frequently. Below are figures comparing ACLU and EFF for fiscal year ending 2011 — by the way, note where the dollar signs are positioned (i.e., to the left of the numeric values):

ACLU
  Total Revenue: $80,607,745
  Program Expenses: $60,521,983
  Working Capital: $232,519,493

EFF
  Total Revenue: $5,536,559
  Program Expenses: $2,805,604
  Working Capital: $7,693,463

It would be wonderful if my search queries were private, but I recognize that the businesses involved make their money by selling my data (such is the perils of demanding a service for free).

https://duckduckgo.com/

Now that we know about the lube, pray tell us, where you can get an inflatable sex goat...

I wouldn't type a query like that into Google, but privacy-respecting search engine DuckDuckGo reveals several sources for inflatable sex goats.

EFF Action: Demand Answers Now! [Direct e-mail form to contact POTUS and your senators+House rep]:
https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=9260
https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=9297 [Form for non-US citizens; directed at implicated corporations]

The links below are to resources of the personal-privacy type, as opposed to the those intended to help bring about change:

EFF Surveillance Self-Defense Project [Guide to surveillance-avoidance tools and techniques for individuals]:
https://ssd.eff.org/

EFF's HTTPS Everywhere [Chrome/FF plug-in enforces HTTPS on compatible sites using rule-list (hundreds included)]:
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

https-finder: Plug-in for HTTPS Everywhere users; auto-detects sites' HTTPS support and adds them to rule-list:
https://code.google.com/p/https-finder/

Privacy-oriented search engines:
https://duckduckgo.com/ [Only search engine on EFF's Organizational Member list]
https://ixquick.com/ [Provides HTTPS proxy through which search results may be accessed]

Privacy/security-oriented free web-mail providers:
https://www.safe-mail.net/
https://www.hushmail.com/

The fake Mt Gox sites are found on domains such as mtgox.org, mtgox.net. Existing customers and Bitcoin early adopters will likely not fall for this. This is likely targeting the non-tech-savvy followers who just heard through the media about a currency that can make you rich or a cool way to buy drugs. A search or two will unlikely lead a potential victim to one of these fake sites, so they are depending on the advertising. Details are scarce on how they are advertising.

Please Google: NASA secret space program

How am I supposed to monetize and strip the privacy from "NASA secret space program?"

Or, did you mean perform a web search for NASA secret space program?