My experience is that we reached a point where if DuckDuckGo can’t find something, then neither can Google. For local search Google is still a little better, but they choosen to drown out actual results with ads.
Not my experience for dev related searches. I assume this is because Google has learned I always search for JS stuff and I've gotten used to that so I'm not specific enough in my searches on DDG.
Have been using DDG for years, needed to call to Google maybe once per month in a particularly tough queries, on those I get about 50% success ratio - sometimes Google helps, sometimes doesn't. For the vast majority of routine queries DDG is more than enough.
To spell it out: it takes an increasing amount of effort to avoid any of your interests being tracked, logged, and almost immediately used in ways that you already know will be destructive. This is also an IT professional and a programmer saying this, so they do not want your advice. The fact that they can use many, many countermeasures which require many, many rabbitholes of research, that as a programmer they are able to understand (although they will have to be continually updated) is not a way to fix that fear it's the manifestation of that fear.
After 9/11 and the Patriot Act, librarians fought the government to keep the reading habits of patrons private as a core duty like doctors pledge to do no harm. Now it's difficult to get people to understand why clicking through to an attractive hammock while browsing Amazon registering in 900 databases and manifesting in ads and cold calls selling tropical vacations and being flagged on some government system as 2% more likely to be a flight risk if let out on bond (who am I kidding, AI doesn't give percentages, it just gives conclusions, looking at a hammock might be that stray pixel that can turn an OCR "O" into a "Q") - difficult to get some people to understand why that would make you nervous.
The answer to that isn't "use TOR to get to a VPN to browse amazon, and pay for that with a burner debit card loaded with bitcoin" or whatever works this week. There isn't really a hammock.
edit: also Amazon has that figured out, some researcher there figured out that they can identify you based on your click patterns and timing. Right now you can choose between 1) an app that will just click on everything silently, or 2) another app by a professor at some midwestern university that will jerk around the timing and positioning of your clicks in a way that throws your fingerprint off. The first app has been banned by every store, and triggers 80 warnings and a waiver that has to be signed with two-factor even if you manage to root your phone and sideload it. You have to compile the second app yourself, with a weird toolchain, and it draws in 640Mb of npm libraries. It's already been updated three times in response to Amazon's countermeasures, and the professor just wrote a paper about the entire method probably being ultimately doomed.
> figured out that they can identify you based on your click patterns and timing.
This isn't restricted to just Amazon either; as I understand it, this is the core of the current reCaptcha version (and even more so, its evil twin, reCaptcha V3, which is seemingly so effective it can rely on those mouse events exclusively in most cases)
Women just love it when random internet dudes pull the "if I were a woman you couldn't point out how trite and pointless my complaint is, so let's just assume I am a woman and you shut up now" card. It's so cool for them to be the exemplars of the trite and the pointless.
I reccomend watching this interview with him - at least the parts where he talks about money. It's incredibly refreshing to hear someone at the top of their game in the tech sphere say they're not interested in money except as a tool to help them create.
I'm pretty sure it does - or maybe it's the e-privacy directive or something else, they all get called GDPR. But you have to make clicking no obvious, easy, and not degrade functionality.
Please provide a source for such a statement. Even the e-privacy directive has changed a lot lately. Your interpretation would render many business models illegal (e.g., Facebook, google).
Yeah it's frustrating. WA also requires this, in fairness. It's very annoying though. I want a messenger app that's not owned by Facebook and doesn't require that I'm constantly glued to my phone to use it.
I didn't have any issues witg Signal until they introduced this crypto BS recently. Now I'm suspicious of them. I don't know if that's unfounded or not, but I don't know much about crypto and I don't have any interest in spending my time researching this to see whether it's a problem for me or not.
Maybe I should take the time. But I guarantee I'm not the only person feeling this way, and most people will simply avoid Signal if they're doing suspicious stuff that they don't understand.
My understanding is that the coin stuff is still in beta and not available in the regular app.
Also when it lands on stable, it will be opt-in. So one need to deliberately switch it on to enable their cryptocurrency.
Their history tells us they go to great lengths to eliminate metadata. Court requests for signal data only get the account creation time and last access time. Please read about how they implemented their gif functionality in such a way as to preserve privacy. Also read about how they preserve your privacy in group chats. I think they are available in their blog. My understanding is that these things are unique to signal and apps like Element Matrix, WhatsApp, wire, telegram, threema, Conversations XMPP etc don't have it.
IMO it's a good idea to read Signal's blog. It can also be subscribed through RSS so you'll get notified about new articles.
I really don't want to read the blog of a messaging app. I don't care about messaging apps. I just want to be able to message people without worrying about my privacy.
I just recommend Telegram to people. I do like Signal for all the work they do, but their UX needs some work.
Yes, Telegram chats aren't E2E encrypted, but they Just Work. You can have the same chat history on your phone, tablet, laptop and desktop without any issues. With beautiful native clients too.
Mozilla has never made Firefox completely stop working for 2 days. Even if they did, it's still a false equivalence: if FF stops working for a few hours you'd just use Chrome pretty much seamlessly. With Signal you have to switch to a different messaging service (easy) AND persuade all your contacts to switch too (hard).
I wasn't talking about the downtime. The GP comment said that the thing that drove them away from Signal was the Mobilecoin debacle. I was drawing a parallel between that and Mozilla pushing Pocket (or any of their other missteps).
I totally get why the downtime turned a lot of people off, but that's not what GP identified as what drove them to be "fine with WhatsApp".
The downtime is what drove a lot of my contacts away. That was the most significant factor in the move back to Signal.
I have been using Signal for a long long time, right after they dropped their dual messenger approach. My trust was high in them where I used to bug my contacts to move to Signal.
For me hiding the server code ( parts are still hidden ), adding in mobilcoin, promising an AMA on reddit to explain and then cancelling it has broken trust, 2 day outage with zero explanation and more so I wasted so much tech influence to get people over, only to have them move back has made me meh about Signal. Facebook might have taken a few years to abuse its power, Signal took far less time while pretending to be high n mighty.
Oh and those recent 'facebook ads' scheme. At least be truthful that your account has not blocked because of the ads. If they are so shady about basic things, cant trust em with the big things.
Bananas are radioactive. The ground under your house is probably radioactive. Saying something is radioactive is meaningless without saying _how_ radioactive it is.
I live in a small city in Vietnam. There have been about four weeks of lockdown in the past year, besides that my life has been pretty much normal, dinner parties, festivals, hiking, island hopping. I've traveled a lot around Vietnam over the past year, there's so much to see here.
The only thing that's really changed is that there are no foreign tourists, but the local tourists seem to be making up for it.
Understatement of the millenium there.