[HN Gopher] "YouTube-dl" and "Pirate Bay" back on DDG ___________________________________________________________________ "YouTube-dl" and "Pirate Bay" back on DDG Author : ikt Score : 326 points Date : 2022-04-17 14:41 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (fosstodon.org) (TXT) w3m dump (fosstodon.org) | fortran77 wrote: | I wonder if it was unintentional. They rely on Bing's database | for their search engine; if these sites disappeared from their | data source, might it have disappeared from DDG without any | direct intention? | mlindner wrote: | Is there a search alternative that isn't just using Google or | Bing underneath? DDG is just Bing and all the recent filtering | and what not that Bing has been doing also applies to DDG. Many | things that used to show up on DDG no longer do. | freediver wrote: | There are plenty - Kagi, Brave, Mojeek, Yandex, Rightdao, | Gigablast... | mlindner wrote: | Doesn't Brave also use Bing underneath? | xigoi wrote: | If their about page isn't lying, about 90% of their results | are original. | sylware wrote: | I guess we need an up-to-date wikipedia page about all those | alternatives. | vvf1 wrote: | DanHulton wrote: | Been using Kagi for the last week and the search results have | been SURPRISINGLY good. Like, in the "I don't have to scroll | to find it" category of good, and no having to deal with spam | sites that just copy the actual answer but somehow rank | higher than the original, like currently plagues Google. | AndrewVos wrote: | This is probably because Kagi uses Google and Bing indexes. | ghostly_s wrote: | That revenue model is crazy, no way will they last. | AndrewVos wrote: | Kagi uses both Google and Bing index. | theandrewbailey wrote: | > Brave Search is built on top of a completely independent | index, and doesn't track users, their searches, or their | clicks. | | https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/ | Pigalowda wrote: | I had never used youtube-dl until the story happened. I | downloaded for windows and its speeds were throttled to around | 50kB/s. Posters on Stack recommended the ytdlp fork which i tried | and it was 5-10 MB/s. Just fyi | 77pt77 wrote: | I started getting systematic | | > Connection reset by peer | | in a script that I have that downloads podcasts and immediately | transcodes to low bitrate opus using ffmpeg. | | It's a real bummer... | burnte wrote: | I always find jwz's youtubedown works flawlessly for me. | https://www.jwz.org/hacks/youtubedown | Aissen wrote: | How often do you update it ? Because it seems to have seen | quite a few update from the beginning of 2022. | js2 wrote: | Do not direct link to jwz.org from HN. Here's a click-safe | link: | | https://dereferer.me/?https%3A//www.jwz.org/hacks/youtubedow. | .. | Aissen wrote: | Does not work either because apparently bit.ly's 301 | preserves the Referer. | js2 wrote: | Weird, I had tested it. I've updated to a de-referrer | site instead. | Aissen wrote: | Might be a browser difference (firefox here). Thanks for | the update, it works better. | bscphil wrote: | It genuinely shocks me that there are still people who | don't disable sending the referer header cross-origin in | the browser: I have not encountered a _single_ website that | breaks when setting `network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy` to | 1 in Firefox, and only 2 or 3 sites that break when setting | it all the way to 2. | | It not only completely prevents stuff like this, it | profoundly increases your privacy on the web by preventing | sites from tracking which domain you came from. There is no | good reason any site needs to know that. I am surprised | that Mozilla hasn't simply made this the default setting | for all users. | [deleted] | 77pt77 wrote: | > Do not direct link to jwz.org from HN | | Why? | psyc wrote: | Because the admin detects HN referer explicitly and | presents a joke page. | mnd999 wrote: | Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I find this kind of | subversion amusing. Like all good jokes, it's pretty | close to the mark. | psyc wrote: | I agree, so it's a safe bet you _are_ in the minority. | 77pt77 wrote: | I've since noticed... | | Just copy the link to not send any referrer information. | UberFly wrote: | FireDM (https://pypi.org/project/FireDM) is an awesome front | end for ytdlp for those interested. | belter wrote: | GitHub Links from the project page all get a 404. | | https://github.com/firedm/ shows no public repos and of | course https://github.com/firedm/FireDM gets a 404 | bspammer wrote: | Yeah youtube-dl is missing workarounds for throttling | implemented by google. youtube-dl is pretty much unmaintained | compared to yt-dlp: | | https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/graphs/commit-activit... | | https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/graphs/commit-activity | vmoore wrote: | And yt-dlp uses an 'Android API' to stop throttling | heavyset_go wrote: | I expect the ability to use APIs like this will be hindered | once remote attestation becomes the norm. | 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: | One has to execute functions from base.js^1 to modify the | "n" URL parameter and the "sig" parameter to get the | fastest download speeds. (One can still download videos | with the original n parameter, or without the n parameter, | but download speeds will be slower.) | | A website that forces users to run Javascript in order to | get faster download speeds. This is not a new idea. | | 1. https://www.youtube.com/s/player/{player_version}/player | _ias... | [deleted] | elcomet wrote: | This is why I come on HN, I always learn something useful. | AdmiralAsshat wrote: | I noticed this recently, too. I frequently scrape concerts from | YouTube by adding them to a private playlist and then running a | script on my HTPC to pull down everything from that playlist. | As recently as six months ago, pulling down a 2-3GB playlist | file (maybe a 30-40 minute concert at 720P) took ten to fifteen | minutes. The last time I tried it, it estimated several hours. | soheil wrote: | If you're downloading a playlist you could run it in parallel | to achieve your max network bandwidth speed: | function ytp() { youtube-dl --get-id "$1" | xargs -I '{}' -P | 200 youtube-dl -i --embed-thumbnail --add-metadata -f | 'bestaudio[ext=m4a]' -o '%(title)s.%(ext)s' | 'https://youtube.com/watch?v={}'; } | rane wrote: | FWIW, just recently wrote a go program that watches a Youtube | playlist and downloads new videos to a configurable path: | https://github.com/raine/ytdlwatch | | I use it to download videos into a Plex library. | mgdlbp wrote: | The workaround for vanilla youtube-dl is to use it with aria2, | with options like: --external-downloader aria2c | --external-downloader-args "--continue --max-concurrent- | downloads=3 --max-connection-per-server=3 --split 3 --min- | split-size 1M" | | (possibly in your config file) | | Also, neither --format best nor --format bestvideo chooses the | best encoding in all cases; they use bitrate as a heuristic for | quality, and a less efficient codec can have higher bitrate but | worse quality, resolution, or framerate. The workaround for | this is specifying --format with an enumeration of every | combination of codec, resolution, and framerate in preferred | order, which goes like this: --format "(bestvid | eo[vcodec^=av01][height>=4320][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=vp9.2] | [height>=4320] ... | | Here's a full example (hmm... they're using it with yt-dlp, | which I thought had fixed this?): | | https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate... | | I think there's a bit of variation in the exact order among the | config files found online. If you're goals are archival, | consider also retrieving metadata, thumbnail, and subtitles in | all languages; I also have in my config the options: | --verbose --download-archive ./ytdl-archive.txt | --cookies ./ytdl-cookies.txt --merge-output-format mkv | --add-metadata --all-subs --embed-subs | --write-info-json --write-thumbnail | --no-overwrites --continue | --force-ipv4 | | (the only remaining workaround for age-restricted videos is to | give it cookies extracted from a browser with a real Google | account logged in) | altcognito wrote: | Am I the only one totally chill with the throttling? Look, I'm | not sure if it's the best idea for their own resource | utilitization (there are probably peak times when more | throttline is better, and quiet internet times when throttling | doesn't make sense) As long as they are being gracious hosts | and allowing downloads, I'm good with being throttled I guess? | emteycz wrote: | 50 kB/s means you'll be downloading a 10min video like 10 | hours. | mdp2021 wrote: | > _50 kB /s means you'll be downloading a 10min video like | 10 hours_ | | Very misleading phrasing: you would download in 10 hours _a | ~10 hours long video_ , which (of course) could have been | downloaded in a fraction of the time. | | The throttling has the user download at a speed similar to | that required to viewing the video. | [deleted] | [deleted] | nomilk wrote: | Why does DDG de-list things in the first place; isn't it in the | interest of search engines to be as useful as possible to users, | and thus maximise the results provided? | | Also curious to know the extent to which Google de-lists things? | | Long term, perhaps a decentralised search engine could get around | de-listing and provide a more reliable and rigorous search | experience. | RedBeetDeadpool wrote: | DDG CEO is clearly biased. Its no longer a neutral platform: | | https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318?s=20&t=9... | | Before someone chimes in, yes I understand the humanitarian | perspective. That's not my point. My point is that DDG is not | neutral, and is politically biased. | RedBeetDeadpool wrote: | BTW, if you wanted a biased platform, just use Google, its | significantly better in every way. | | Ultimately what I'm getting at is: There's no market for DDG. | Use Google for biased searches, and use other search engines | that are not biased(which excludes DDG) for unbiased | searches. | | What are the use cases for DDG? | pmoriarty wrote: | DDG respects privacy, or at least claims to. Google has | nothing but contempt for it, and thrives on spying on you. | notriddle wrote: | > Why does DDG de-list things in the first place | | I don't think anyone wants to use a search engine that never | delists anything. Ransomeware, Markov chain junk, plagiarism. A | search engine that never delists anything is useless. | | The problem is when delisting is used _against_ the end-user's | interests. | notatoad wrote: | DDG uses the Bing index. If Bing de-lists something, then it | disappears from DDG. | | Microsoft (and any other big company) has many competing | interests other than just being helpful to users. | nomilk wrote: | > [big companies have] many competing interests | | Are the main ones i) reducing competition and ii) managing | their reputation? | | If so, the case for a decentralised search engine got | stronger. | [deleted] | jbay808 wrote: | I wonder how a decentralized search engine would fight its | inevitable SEO war, should it become successful. | | I'd expect that all sites wanting to draw traffic would attempt | to grab the reins of the search engine to point toward | themselves, and the result would be search results ordered by | rein-grabbing power. | | Not that centralized search engines are immune to this; they're | almost as vulnerable (seeing as sponsored search results exist) | but the maintainer at least has to balance that with the | utility of the search engine overall, to prevent the search | engine from falling out of favour. | | With a decentralized engine, parties that have deeply invested | in manipulating the results will still want the engine to be | popular too, but I'm not sure how you resolve the prisoners | dilemma there as a whole. | forgotmypw17 wrote: | > I wonder how a decentralized search engine would fight its | inevitable SEO war, should it become successful. | | > I'd expect that all sites wanting to draw traffic would | attempt to grab the reins of the search engine to point | toward themselves, and the result would be search results | ordered by rein-grabbing power. | | I would venture to say that a combination of allow-lists and | block-lists from trusted parties, ranked using some kind of | distributed web-of-trust system would work reasonably well. | KMag wrote: | Ages ago, I was a professional P2P developer, and I vaguely | remember some of the research papers on P2P censorship- | resistant reputation systems. Generally, you have public | signing keys that sign ratings (say, -1.0 to 1.0) for both | content and other raters. These signed ratings collections | are then pushed into a distributed hash table. | | The basic idea is when you rate something, your client also | looks up in the DHT other people who have rated the same | content with similar ratings. Your client then pulls the | latest ratings collections from those people, and computes | the cosign distance between your ratings and their ratings | (over the intersection of content that both of you have | rated). Periodically, your client signs and publishes an | updated ratings document, where the rating for other raters | is the cosign distance. The cosign distance, the size of | the ratings intersection set, and maybe some other factors | go into deciding which raters get published out in your | ratings update. | | When you query for the rating for a given piece of content, | your client grabs the list of ratings for that content from | the DHT. It then pulls the latest ratings published by | those raters, computes cosign distance, and then does | something similar to Djikstra's shortest-path algorithm to | recursively search the DHT using these cosign distances as | weights. In general, the DHT wouldn't have many signatures | stored under the content's hash, but by recursively | following the graph of other raters, your client hopefully | finds other raters that rate things similarly to you and | have rated this content. The path weight to a given rater | is the product of cosign distances, and so by using a | priority queue for querying, you get something close to a | breadth-first search of the ratings graph. Once your client | has accumulated enough weight of ratings for the given | content, it stops and shows you the weighted average of the | ratings (and maybe the weighted std. dev. is displayed as a | confidence score to power users who have enabled it). | | Presumably, the UI for the ratings system maps 0 to 5 stars | to 0.0 to 1.0 (probably not linearly, more likely the | client locally keeps a histogram of the user's ratings and | then maps the star rating back to a percentile rating), and | the "spam" button rates the content as -1.0. | | The tricks come down to the metrics used for how the DHT | decides priorities for cache eviction of the per-content | ratings and also the per-rater ratings. You don't want | spammers or other censors to be able to easily force cache | eviction. Getting cache eviction metrics right is the key | to having the system scale well while also preventing | spammers/censors from evicting the most useful sets of | ratings. | tdiff wrote: | Banning Russian news outlets from search results was generally | supported here on HN. | gscott wrote: | There is no war just a special operation. | tonguez wrote: | we must condemn russias unprovoked genocide of neo nazis | suction wrote: | Wait, did Russians start committing suicide? | ghostly_s wrote: | That's certainly not how I remember that thread going. | matheusmoreira wrote: | Copyright industry pressure. | mrtweetyhack wrote: | PaulKeeble wrote: | The youtube-dl homepage has returned to the listings as has | thepiratebay. However they still aren't indexing thepiratebay or | youtube-dl.org's contents so you can't search within the sites | you only get the homepage. The complaint the other day was about | the indexes too, so its only partially fixed. | yegg wrote: | That's not actually true. Our site search is having issues, so | better to just add the site name to the search, but note that | youtube-dl.org is just one page and for other sites (that are | essentially vertical search engines) you're better off going | directly to them since their index is going to be more up to | date. | ok123456 wrote: | I'm probably going to stop using DDG now. I don't want my results | filtered in anyway because of pearl clutching over 'piracy' or | whatever. | vvf1 wrote: | ok123456 wrote: | Getting a blank "Please reload the page, something went | wrong" page instead of rendering anything. | | Seems to have an uncaught exception trying to use the beacon | API (which I have disabled). | | You.com looks like junk. | mdp2021 wrote: | Discussed a few months ago at | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29165601 | mysterydip wrote: | What are you going to use instead? | ok123456 wrote: | yandex | CharlesW wrote: | Yandex is the worst alternative you could pick. | https://www.protocol.com/policy/yandex-gershenzon-qa | tonguez wrote: | "...tech giant Yandex has a handshake deal with | government authorities to limit what news outlets the | site will pull onto its homepage" | | wow that sounds so incredibly different from the | alternatives | ok123456 wrote: | Just don't get all your news from yandax?? | s__s wrote: | Brave has a new search engine. | rubyist5eva wrote: | Switched to Brave Search - not looking back. I don't even care if | the index sucks, it's been "good enough" and it has bangs. | vvf1 wrote: | yoyopa wrote: | if all you nerds stop talking about it maybe it will stay up | wyager wrote: | DDG has been de-listing a ton of stuff recently. They recently | de-listed rdrama, a reddit-trolling website that came up on HN | last year. What, exactly, do they think people use them for? If I | wanted "result curation" or whatever euphemism for censorship, I | would just use Google. | Firmwarrior wrote: | Man, that's interesting, they removed rdrama.net but left | KiwiFarms up, and now the main result for "rdrama" is the | KiwiFarms thread about it | Marsey wrote: | Luckily searching "Marsey the Cat" on Bing still yields the | correct knowyourmeme and Twitter pages. | scarburato wrote: | Bing delisted rdrama too. I think it is related somehow (?) | BurdensomeCount wrote: | Yep, I think the delisting comes from Bing, not DDG since DDG | just pulls all their results from Bing since they stopped | also using Yandex. | mgdlbp wrote: | I noticed some time ago that Google refuses to offer up | Encyclopedia Dramatica unless you use the site: operator. | | There was some drama in 2010 over ED being censored in | Australia, but it looks like Google has since quietly | delisted it completely. | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | They've removed Yandex and are now at the mercy of Bing's | censorship. | BurdensomeCount wrote: | Amazing that nowadays if you want the best "uncensored" | results you have to go to the Russian Yandex (at least on all | topics unrelated to Russia). How did our society get to such | a point... | markdown wrote: | If that isn't a rhetorical question... capitalism. | mpalczewski wrote: | > capitalism | | If capitalism caused censorship you would expect the | least capitalist places to have the least censorship but | the opposite is true. | kenoph wrote: | If capitalism causes censorship, that doesn't mean it's | necessarily the worst at causing censorship. | | Additionally, we don't live in a stationary society, so, | whatever capitalism did or did not cause in the past | might not apply as-is today. | stjohnswarts wrote: | Capitalism (as practiced by democracies) allows you to | start an alternative site that doesn't censor results as | well. Totalitarianism (Communism) would not have. Choose | your poison from amongst the various governments that | have succeeded (for a while) in the past as I don't think | Utopia is a possibility with humans as messed up as we | are. | kenoph wrote: | Related: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism | ldiracdelta wrote: | They've "memory-holed", 1984-style, other conservative sites as | well. Just another narrative-enforcing search-engine. | uuyi wrote: | I prefer to say "shite removal" after the last half a decade. | | At least TPB adds value to peoples lives. | ldiracdelta wrote: | ldiracdelta wrote: | Yes, the Overton Window must be enforced. We have always | been at war with East Asia. | somenameforme wrote: | It depends on what you want out of a search engine. Do you | want a search that tries to give you what it thinks you | want? Or do you want a search that functions more like a | library index where you're going to get what you searched | for, even if that might ironically not really be exactly | what you wanted - so the onus of creating a more correct | search term is on you. | | This isn't a rhetorical question of course. There are major | arguments for both. But I think a pretty good chunk of DDG | users were more often after the library index than what | ideally would be a librarian recommendation, but in reality | is more like a stereotypical used car salesman style | recommendation. | fallingknife wrote: | I would be fine with either. But what I really don't want | is a search engine that gives me what it thinks I should | want. | ta8903 wrote: | Removal of TPB was a positive too. Can't imagine how much | loss of revenue these pirate sites have caused over the | years. | colordrops wrote: | The whole point is to have a place where you can see shite | if you want. I don't need an online nanny. | HeckFeck wrote: | I might agree with shite. Or I might wish to read it for | my own amusement. Or perhaps I want to argue against the | shite, in which case, I need to know what shite is out | there. In any case, it doesn't matter. I only need the | search engine to be an intermediary, not a curator. | | Besides, if someone accidentally searches for shite, he | can revise his search terms. Just like how you might | reword something if a listener was confused. | | This "curation" just doesn't need to exist. But that's a | moral argument and those applying censorship aren't | moral, so won't be partial to it. | asdff wrote: | Isn't DDG just reskinned bing anyhow? | pkdpic wrote: | Sorry to be that guy but what was going on? This is alarming as | someone who uses DDG and youtube-dl kinda too much probably. | | Also if anyone else is slightly hung over and searches DDG in DDG | and gets super confused for three seconds because DDG is a rapper | apparently just know you aren't alone. I'm right here with you, | whoever you are. | [deleted] | jt2190 wrote: | From an April 17 Twitter thread from Gabriel Weinberg at | DuckDuckGo: | | > ... [W]e are not "purging" YouTube-dl or The Pirate Bay and | they both have actually been continuously available in our | results if you search for them by name (which most people do). | Our site: operator (which hardly anyone uses) is having issues | which we are looking into. | | (Note that "site:" in his comment is how you restrict DDG | searches to a specific domain e.g. "site:example.com") | | https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515636218691739653 | naoqj wrote: | Did the original complaints of those sites disappearing | mention the usage of the site: filter? | jt2190 wrote: | Yes. | | > For example, searching for "site:thepiratebay.org" is | supposed to return all results DuckDuckGo has indexed for | The Pirate Bay's main domain name. In this case, there are | none. | | > This whole-site removal isn't limited to The Pirate Bay | either. When we do similar searches for ["site:1337x.to", | "site:NYAA.se", "site:Fmovies.to", site:"Lookmovie.io"], | and ["site:123moviesfree.net"], no results appear. | | https://torrentfreak.com/duckduckgo-removes-pirate-sites- | and... | OJFord wrote: | That's incomplete though, when I tried it (in response to | seeing it posted here a couple of days ago) I couldn't get | any yt-dl.org search results, i.e. adding site: appeared to | function correctly - no results. | codetrotter wrote: | >> Our site: operator (which hardly anyone uses) is having | issues which we are looking into | | I noticed problems with their site: operator too earlier | today, and still now as well. In my case, when I used it in a | search I saw that the word "site" itself was also bolded in | some results. So it looks like it is using the operator | itself also as a search term, which it shouldn't. | | I find it surprising that hardly anyone uses it though. | whoopdedo wrote: | When you handle 10 million searches a day it's easy for | even large groups of users to get lost in the crowd. | [deleted] | fuckcensorship wrote: | These links should provide the additional context you're | looking for: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31044587 | | https://nitter.net/i/status/1515635886855233537 | icare_1er wrote: | Maybe DDG understood that they have no purpose if all they have | to propose is Google's bad sides and censorship, without Google's | search power... | pmoriarty wrote: | DDG's selling point was always privacy. | whoopdedo wrote: | Still missing from Bing. So this is DDG inserting an override. | bilkow wrote: | I also find that searching Bing does not result in youtube- | dl.org, only the repository, while DDG returns both, but Bing | is not the ONLY source for DDG results, at least according to | them. | | https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... | | "We also of course have more traditional links in the search | results, which we also source from multiple partners, though | most commonly from Bing (and none from Google)." | | I've tried comparing Google, Bing and DDG on a private window | before, and I didn't find Bing and DDG more similar than Bing | and Google. Searching for monkey: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598329 | alyandon wrote: | That is really strange - I just searched for both on bing.com | and got relevant results back. Search bubble? | whoopdedo wrote: | Indeed. My search was done in a fresh private window on a | computer I never typically use Bing on. | | Also, throughout this whole situation I always got the Github | page as the first result for "youtube-dl". | jug wrote: | Or search region? I've had different results before based on | your Bing/DDG region setting. | behnamoh wrote: | Sometimes when the damage is done, it's done. I'm never going to | use DDG ever again. | | If this decision was because of legal pressure by Google, I don't | see how that got resolved in a matter of days. Which means it | wasn't because of Google, but rather a poor decision made by DDG | management. How can people trust their product now? | vmoore wrote: | > I'm never going to use DDG ever again. | | The removals were a rarity. It's not as if you can't add a `!g` | bang query to redirect to Google if you can't find something. | And DDG is rampant with all sorts of stuff that shouldn't be | there, so I don't think they're hellbent on censorship. | behnamoh wrote: | !g leads to Google, who also blocks yt-dl and other similar | tools. | | Edit: I was wrong. | oefrha wrote: | Uh, what? youtube-dl.org is the first result for youtube-dl | on Google, followed by GitHub repo, ytdl-org.github.io, | Wikipedia, etc. | | TPB is the first result too. IIRC at one point searching | for TPB only returned proxy sites, but that doesn't appear | to be the case now. | bqmjjx0kac wrote: | Any source on that? I just searched both "youtube-dl" and | "pirate bay" and got reasonable-looking results. | ttybird2 wrote: | You don't get "reasonable-looking" results for "pirate | bay" on google. | ghostly_s wrote: | My first result is https://thepiratebay.org and the rest | of the page is proxies. | ttybird2 wrote: | Weird, I only get shady proxies and the wikipedia page. | spiderice wrote: | > if you can't find something | | You don't always know what you don't know. | | If I don't know about YouTube-dl and I search "download | YouTube command line", how am I going to know that ddg is | hiding the best result from me? | | This definitely isn't a small annoyance kind of problem, in | my eyes. It's a deal breaker. I'll never use ddg again. If | they're going to censor like Google does, then I'm going to | use Google because it generally has better results. Ddg needs | to offer something beyond what Google offers to make up for | their bad results, and they aren't doing that. | lamontcg wrote: | > Ddg needs to offer something beyond what Google offers | | If you're searching on google for medical terms it builds a | profile on you, and you should be concerned that they could | be selling that information to insurers, directly or | indirectly. | 14 wrote: | I've been curious about this as a health care worker. The | number of times I've looked up a client condition to | better help the person I can't count. So is googles | profile of me tainted? | zedadex wrote: | They probably have a good idea of what those profiles | look like, even if they don't already know you work in | healthcare. | lamontcg wrote: | I would be somewhat worried that information could be | abused now or in the future. Since that data is | necessarily going to be noisy, insurers probably aren't | going to make black and white decisions based on it, but | they could score you somewhat worse over it. You could | maybe trust them that their algorithms would be able to | determine that since you work in health care and are | probably in the top 5% of people who search health terms | that your individual data is polluted by your job, but I | would never trust an insurer's black-box algorithms. They | only need to be statistically correct over the | population, they can always fuck you over individually | and still make a fantastic profit for themselves. | | Is this really going on? Maybe not, but is it worth it to | ignore the risk? Can you just use DDG so it isn't a | question? | 14 wrote: | I have long ago switched to ddg but was curious about it | as a past google user | Brian_K_White wrote: | probably not, because probably they also know your | occupation, or you crossed a threshold of too many to be | normal/direct etc. | | (except in reality it's less simple than "they know your | occupation", it's a huge cloud of data points that an ai | makes correlations and assosciations that no human | actually knows. It means the searches would also be | weighted by indirect things like, not only your | occupation but your assosciations. Say you don't have the | medical occupation, but your computer makes a lot of | medical searches, because your roomate in your college | dorm has a medical major etc. And right now, the ais are | still pretty stupid and absolutely making a lot of | obvious unsafe conclusions, but they also do get more and | more spooky every day.) | | But this doesn't make it any better. If they did a | perfectly accurate job of profiling you, that is not | better than doing an inaccurate job. | | That much insight is like being married to someone, where | they intimately know all your biases and motivations, | know all your buttons, know how to manipulate you, know | how to weigh any opinions you might express against their | knowledge of where you got every idea you ever had, | | except it isn't a marriage, and they aren't subject to | all that same vulnerability to you, and they aren't even | a human but a corporation, and they have this intimate | knowledge of everyone not just one spouse or sibling or | best friend. | ufo wrote: | The official stance according to DDG was that it was a bug and | they fixed it. | fallingknife wrote: | Funny how none of these random "bugs" never delist major | mainstream media. | tedunangst wrote: | Would you even know if DDG stopped returning results for | site:cnn.com? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-04-17 23:00 UTC)