[HN Gopher] Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
___________________________________________________________________
Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG
Author : nobodyCloak
Score : 274 points
Date : 2022-08-24 16:55 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mail-archive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mail-archive.com)
| smm11 wrote:
| Oh, no! All the people buying Debian desktops at Best Buy will be
| locked into issues with DDG forever.
| seydor wrote:
| tbh if we want some competition to google we should support bing
| codetrotter wrote:
| DDG relies heavily on Bing, I think
| Liquix wrote:
| The big reasons people seem to be looking for alternatives are
| privacy concerns and increasingly aggressive optimization for
| NLP. DDG and Bing both have ~1% market share and both return
| decent results - why support the one that will ostensibly
| become Google II if given the opportunity?
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| DDG already pays Bing for use of their API though?
| TLLtchvL8KZ wrote:
| Didn't DDG recently have some controversy about censoring things
| they didn't like related to Russia or Russian sites/news?
|
| I don't have links stored in history but it was fairly recent, it
| was their CEO on twitter I believe and they got a LOT of
| backlash.
| blamazon wrote:
| > "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that
| down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation. In
| addition to down-ranking sites associated with disinformation,
| we also often place news modules and information boxes at the
| top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and
| clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly
| unfolding topics."
|
| https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
| melony wrote:
| Need to make sure we are fed the right flavor of neoliberal
| propaganda.
| yegg wrote:
| I realize that due to own my unfortunate phrasing, how our
| news results rankings work have been highly misinterpreted
| since then. I subsequently put out a clarification thread
| (https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515635886855233537) and
| then we (DuckDuckGo) made a help page to explain how our news
| rankings actually work. I suggest anyone interested check it
| out (it's short): https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-
| help-pages/results/ne...
|
| In hope to quickly clear up some common misconceptions about
| them though: we don't censor, we don't move things so far
| down that they are effectively censored, we don't have any
| definition of misinformation, and we don't rank based on any
| political agenda or opinions (that includes mine!). This is
| just a summary though so would read the help page for
| details.
| torpid wrote:
| You still haven't convinced me, or many others who used
| your service to the contrary, and your explanation like in
| this thread here doesn't match what you are preaching.
|
| https://twitter.com/pkm_inc/status/1515677462251945986
| yegg wrote:
| I'm honestly not sure what you are referring to as the
| contrary or contradiction here. The referenced help page
| is the most complete explanation of how our news rankings
| work. Put another way, what would it take to convince
| you?
| ncmncm wrote:
| There was a posting on HN not long ago warning that DDG was run
| by spammers, and that the "privacy" focus is purely a marketing
| ploy.
|
| This should be predictable on the basis that it is a free
| service, making you the product, and _somebody else_ , therefore,
| the customer.
|
| It is hard to know what else one can do to get useful search
| functionality. It has been a long time since Google dropped any
| emphasis on usefulness. Any useful results seem purely luck
| nowadays. You cannot even buy a subscription to "useful" from
| them or from, AFAIHF, anybody else.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Privacy and ads/spam are different things.
|
| DDG has ads based on your search query, that's how they make
| money. The difference is that they don't profile you, at least
| that's what they say. You can spam and respect people privacy,
| just by not looking who you are spamming.
|
| And yes, "privacy" is a marketing ploy for anyone who is not
| Google. As for general purpose search engines, there are only
| two: Google and Bing, most others (including DDG) are just a
| front for Bing. There are other, more specialized crawlers
| including Marginalia whose author often posts on HN, and there
| is Yandex for Russia and Baidu for China, but the general idea
| is that if it is not Google, it is Bing.
| ncmncm wrote:
| "At least that's what they say" is exactly what is at issue.
| You offer no reason to believe what they say.
| zaphar wrote:
| I can find no actual evidence that DDG is run by spammers. This
| does not strike me as credible.
| ncmncm wrote:
| I can find no evidence that DDG is _not_ run by spammers. Any
| claim that it is not is clearly what would demand solid
| evidence.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| That's not how the burden of proof works here.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Regardless of whether you are right or wrong about DDG:
|
| Doesn't this line of logic lead to every free site being evil,
| including the one we're talking on?
| vladcodes wrote:
| How about removing every search engine and letting a user decide?
| I believe Debian users can handle this technical challenge.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Halleluiah?
| radium3d wrote:
| Drop the default search engine and show us a list of search
| engines with the option to add our own instead of setting it for
| us on first run.
| gouggoug wrote:
| Wouldn't changing the default search engine to "no default" be a
| solution too?
|
| I'm sure many people have thought about it, so, I wonder, what is
| the issue with this approach?
| judge2020 wrote:
| The year of the Linux desktop gets further away as people try
| to use their browser and go "why can't I search" and drop it
| all together. A lot of people really don't have the patience to
| configure their computers, they want it to 'just work'.
| gouggoug wrote:
| Yea I guess. Though I'm having a hard time with the idea that
| someone who went through the trouble of running on Debian in
| the first place would have this reaction to the browser not
| automatically opening a search engine.
| kube-system wrote:
| Not everyone who uses Debian also was the same person who
| installed it.
|
| There are a few people (like me) who are crazy enough to
| give Linux desktop systems to real end users. Although I
| suppose I could just set their search engines for them, but
| that's just a pain.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| For a solution to be required there first has to be a problem.
| Then it has to be shown the new solution is better than the
| current implementation.
|
| You're not happy with the default which you can trivially
| change but no one has to change, so you propose having no
| default so you still have to change it but now everyone has to
| change it.
| lingotec wrote:
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Interesting how every post ever made on your account is to spam
| that link, which also happens to be the first time I had ever
| heard of it.
| jonas-w wrote:
| Best approach i think is, they way "ungoogled-chromium" does it.
|
| They don't enforce organization policies, but they set the
| default config to "no search" and then leave it up to the user to
| change it.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| ^This, let the user choose. If you can run Debian you can
| change your default search engine.
| [deleted]
| canadaduane wrote:
| This is only useful for people who know what a search engine
| is. (Seriously, many people equate "googling" = "search
| engine", and don't know there is a general category of this
| thing). Unless there are two big bold buttons on start-up--one
| that says "Use Google for Search" and the other that says "Use
| Duck Duck Go for Search"--it would appear broken to them. Even
| then, almost everyone would pick "Google" just for name brand
| recognition.
| lohfu wrote:
| i would argue most people that install chromium, not chrome,
| no what a search engine is. unfortunately, since chromium
| lost google account login capabilities, i do not install
| chromium anymore. now i just think "search engine" means
| "google".
| xuhu wrote:
| Is it common for distros to have deals with search providers in
| exchange for keeping them as the default in their browsers ?
| aasasd wrote:
| Pretty sure the negotiations would go approximately like: "Best
| I can do is fifty bucks."
| bityard wrote:
| Do you believe Debian has made a deal with a search provider?
| BeefWellington wrote:
| Common? Probably not.
|
| It's not unheard of though. See: Ubuntu.
| oblak wrote:
| It was so cool to have amazon snoop on your presumably local
| searches...
| groovybits wrote:
| Citation?
|
| Lots of folks misremember how the Unity Home Lens feature
| actually worked, and that the Ubuntu installer explicitly
| asked you whether you wanted it enabled.
|
| If enabled, there was no presumption of local-only search.
| It was front and center in your search results, and the
| affiliate revenue was only collected when you clicked on
| that Amazon result.
|
| Canonical claimed that the search was forwarded to them,
| and then anonymized to Amazon. That's more than what
| Microsoft seems to do with Bing results in Windows search,
| which you can't seem to disable without installing third-
| party scripts.
|
| Was it a perfect solution? No - But it was a way to make
| revenue in an otherwise open-source project and free of
| cost. Its interesting how on some days, people argue for
| more money towards FOSS devs, and then others argue that
| revenue-building systems shouldn't be implemented. Yeah,
| Canonical makes enterprise investments, but they're
| obviously weren't in the realm of Red Hat in terms of
| enterprise support.
| silisili wrote:
| I agree that some talk at the time was overblown, most of
| it even.
|
| That said, it was a braindead idea to begin with. Not one
| person in existence wants or expects shopping links when
| searching their computer via a dock like interface. This
| is meant for applications or files.
|
| When shopping, most are going to research on Google...or
| perhaps search a category on Amazon itself before
| choosing a product.
|
| I'd be curious it Ubuntu even made a single sale from
| that venture.
| rvnx wrote:
| It's hosted by Microsoft now, not Amazon anymore
| tristan957 wrote:
| As reported in an earlier comment, DDG did not make a deal with
| Debian for this.
|
| Prior art is that Linux Mint at one point had Yahoo as the
| default search engine in their Firefox builds. I am not sure
| whether that is currently the case.
| kornhole wrote:
| I don't know, but that seems like a reasonable funding solution
| given that Google is expected to pay Apple ~$20B this year:
| https://dazeinfo.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-for-not-la...
| pb7 wrote:
| Apple has hundreds of millions of wealthy customers. Debian
| does not.
| kornhole wrote:
| They have a few though. Certainly they don't have captive
| users who only install what they are allowed to and use the
| default settings. Linux users are probably the worst target
| market for advertisers.
| pb7 wrote:
| >Linux users are probably the worst target market for
| advertisers.
|
| Yes but not for the reason you are imagining. I can think
| of a few things in common between everyone I've ever
| known to use Linux for personal use and general
| consumerism to improve quality of life is not one of
| them.
| rlpb wrote:
| DDG is a more practical default than Google simply because I
| don't get a "We'd like to abuse your personal data" pop-up that
| gets in the way every time I open an Incognito window to search
| for something.
| unknownaccount wrote:
| Can someone please explain why we are supposed to trust DDG? Isnt
| it just a random website that popped up out of nowhere claiming
| to be private yet no audit has ever been conducted which
| substantiated those claims?
| yegg wrote:
| Recently the National Advertising Division looked into our
| privacy claims and found them supported, see
| https://bbbprograms.org/media-center/newsroom/duckduckgo-pri...
| & https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/privacy-
| protection/12106...
|
| Also a lot of what we do is open source on GitHub. We recently
| put out a help page detailing or web tracking protections that
| link to a lot of the relevant repositories:
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we...
|
| And finally, I'm not sure that random or just popped up is an
| accurate characterization for us. We're pretty well established
| at this point, having been around for nearly 15 years! I was an
| early user of this site and a frequent contributor during the
| early days of DuckDuckGo.
| unknownaccount wrote:
| Those aren't proper audits. And again, bringing up the fact
| that it's open source is a meaningless piece of information
| since there is no way to verify it's the same software code
| on production. It only serves to trick the average user who
| doesn't understand how web servers work into trusting your
| service more.
|
| The best thing you could do, if you actually care about
| privacy and not just $$$, is to open-source the entire search
| index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy
| for users to setup their own local instance of DDG which is
| actually auditable. Additionally, posting a notice on-site
| which notifies your users that their searches may be recorded
| and tracked in spite of what the privacy policy says(due to
| the USA jurisdiction of the company making it susceptible to
| National Security Letters and secret gag orders) would be the
| right thing to do.
| no_time wrote:
| You aren't supposed to. Even if you assume they lie in every
| sentence about their data collection, with their current setup
| it would be much harder for them to build a valuable shadow
| profile about you.
|
| They haven't been caught running fingerprinting scripts yet and
| they dont have an account system to tie to your searches. At
| best they could use your ip to build a shadow profile and thats
| wildly inaccurate in our mostly ipv4 world.
| unknownaccount wrote:
| How do you know what server-side profiling occurs or does not
| occur? There is no way to know that. DDG gives people a
| completely misplaced and false sense of security, when they
| are just as easily
| comprimisable/corruptable/subpoenable/susceptible to NSLs,
| EDRs and secret court orders as any other company.
|
| And I disagree with your premise that it's particularly
| difficult to link a persons IP to their real world identity.
| There are organized fraud gangs who have it down to a
| science. know exactly what dept. of the ISP to call, what to
| say, etc. Basically if someone knows your IP and your ISP
| account is registered in your name it's game over.
| no_time wrote:
| I am aware that they are susepctible to nation state level
| data collection, just like every site on the internet. I
| conduct all my non e2e encrypted
| communications/interactions with this in mind.
|
| I just want to avoid my data being monetized.
| unknownaccount wrote:
| I'm more worried about teenage crooks equipped with
| Emergency Data Request PDF templates than any nation
| state. We know Google, Facebook, Snapchat etc were all
| giving up information on users without a court order to
| these crooks. All it took(probably still) was a EDR
| notice alleging an imminent threat to human life is about
| to occur -sent from a real or fake police dept email- and
| companies will hand over your data without second
| thought.
| tremon wrote:
| Even if they do server-side profiling, they can only track
| you on duckduckgo.com. Last I checked, DDG did not also own
| an analytics service that has infested half the world's
| websites.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _Last I checked, DDG did not also own an analytics
| service that has infested half the world 's websites._
|
| uMatrix shows a 3rd party request to
| improving.duckduckgo.com every time I visit a page from
| DDG search results, ostensibly to measure click-through
| rate. This is claimed to be anonymous, but in principle
| it gives DDG the opportunity to log much about their
| users' browsing habits.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| It is a legit company based in Pennsylvania, not some random
| website. Their privacy policy explicitly states they do not
| collect user info. If they are caught doing it anyway they
| could be open to legal action. While they may be lying, at
| least it's better than other search engines where collecting
| data is explicit and built into their business model.
|
| edit: I should have just down-voted and moved on.
| unknownaccount wrote:
| That doesnt mean anything. I can go ahead and register an LLC
| in Pennsylvania too for a few hundred bucks and then put up a
| website with a completely fictional privacy policy. I could
| collect everyones IPs depite claims that we do not, and no
| one would be able to prove it.
| jader201 wrote:
| > _While they may be lying, at least it 's better than other
| search engines where collecting data is explicit and built
| into their business model._
|
| Just to be clear, are you saying that given the choice
| between collecting data and lying about it vs. collecting
| data and being explicit about it, you'd choose the first
| option?
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _Just to be clear, are you saying that given the choice
| between collecting data and lying about it vs. collecting
| data and being explicit about it, you'd choose the first
| option?_
|
| Yes. Absolutely. Because that would give me some legal
| recourse.
|
| Would you hire someone who hides in the fine print they can
| steal from you and you can't do anything about it, or hire
| someone else and accept the chance that they might steal.
|
| The choice is between a bad thing definitely happening, or
| a bad thing possibly happening.
| aendruk wrote:
| Some unintended consequences:
|
| > This change caused my chromium browser to report that it's
| being managed by my "organization". I thought that my machine was
| somehow compromised. This is terrifying! I wound up deleting my
| entire chromium profile before I discovered that the root cause
| was this DuckDuckGo config change.
|
| https://bugs.debian.org/956012
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| That sounds like a Firefox bug (and a common one I've seen in
| other software).
|
| Tell me _what_ organization. "Debian" would have been
| perfectly fine to show here.
| mattashii wrote:
| How is that a Firefox bug if the software it is reported on
| is Chromium? Those are two very distinct projects.
| aendruk wrote:
| Surely they meant the browser in question. Feigning
| cluelessness isn't helping anything; at best the
| distinction you're highlighting is orthogonal to their
| point.
| lohfu wrote:
| how can you be sure? feigning verity isnt helping
| anything; at best you will not get downvoted.
| aendruk wrote:
| People sometimes absentmindedly misspeak. Either that
| happened and you can politely s/Firefox/browser/ so that
| the comment reads as a reasonable, even insightful
| contribution to the discussion, or the comment is utter
| nonsense and you can feel smug that you're not as stupid
| as they must be. Granting the former interpretation is
| the more charitable option.
| chippiewill wrote:
| Mozilla's never been the same since they started putting
| bugs in Chromium
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| Perhaps it reminds them of a similar bug in Firefox?
| [deleted]
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Sounds like a Chromium bug, not a Debian bug--it's an insidious
| way to keep Google search as the default.
| unknownaccount wrote:
| The only bug here is the changing of the search engine to a
| sketchy website without user input or consent.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Uh, no? This is managed policy, and this is a 100% good way
| of letting the user know that someone else has control of
| their settings
|
| Just because Debian thinks that they are doing the right
| thing, they are in fact, controlling the user's settings
| through a policy It's just telling you that, as it should.
|
| The notion that it has anything to do with keeping search the
| default or not is like, such a silly assumption i don't know
| where to begin.
|
| The feature overall came from a desire of enterprises to
| manage browser settings. Back then, Google was one of the
| first to tell you someone was doing that to you so that you
| knew your organization could see and control your settings.
|
| IE had a deployment kit that let you deploy managed browser
| settings, but you didn't get told (this changed, eventually,
| i think, it's been a while)
|
| Letting orgs change the default search engine was an
| explicit, designed goal, since some wanted to redirect people
| to their internal searches by default, etc.
|
| There is in fact, another way to do this that is easy and
| doesn't give the user the same warning, and is meant for
| software distributors
|
| You can just use master preferences here for this kind of
| thing and it is meant for this use case.
|
| Google in fact, made this easy and officially supported,
| despite your claim.
|
| It would likely be pretty silly to make this hard - end users
| aren't using these interfaces or tools, and distributors
| always know how to change this stuff .
|
| As HN as grown in popularity, the sheer number of kneejerk
| reaction comments has unfortunately kept pace (IE the overall
| percent has not dropped. Even sadder, nobody ever goes back
| and edits it or replies and was like "you know what, i was
| probably wrong".
|
| They feel comfortable moving on and doing it again.
| fabianhjr wrote:
| > Uh, no? This is managed policy, and this is a 100% good
| way of letting the user know that someone else has control
| of their settings
|
| So Google's defaults are "un-managed" and imply no control
| over users' settings?
|
| Why shouldn't the Google built Chrome binaries display the
| same warning and a binary from a specific linux distro
| should?
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Because those are the default browser settings. As
| explained, there is another more appropriate way to
| change default settings for distributions. The way Debian
| did it is more for enterprise management.
| blibble wrote:
| > a 100% good way of letting the user know that someone
| else has control of their settings
|
| ah, so it should also be displayed if it's set to Google's
| preferences
|
| they're "someone else" as equally as Debian
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Reporting that there is a policy is no bug, but maybe there
| should be a way to signify that it's customized by your
| software vendor (i.e. signed and keys are compiled in) and
| that it just sets the default search engine.
|
| Chromium does change the message to "This device is managed
| by <google workspaces domain>" if attached to Chrome
| Enterprise.
| brnt wrote:
| Being "managed by" and loading a policy config do not
| equate in meaning, unless we let PR departments redefine
| words.
|
| Moreover, defaulting to Google is also a policy.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| The intent behind policy loading in Chrome is to allow an
| MDM to configure the browser, not for distros to not
| write a real patch.
| kccqzy wrote:
| The policy config is designed for enterprises, not
| software distributors. It's Debian that's taking an
| unnecessary shortcut here. They could've patched the
| source code to change the default search engine.
| yunohn wrote:
| Preconfigured profiles are the right way to solve this, it's
| just that the message could be worded more kindly.
| nightpool wrote:
| No, preconfigured profiles are not the right way to solve
| this, as the message clearly indicates, pre-configured
| profiles are designed to be managed by the owner of the
| computer, not the software distributor. The right way to
| solve this would be to change the built-in default that
| applies before any profile is processed. This also would
| allow any other profile to override it if they wanted.
|
| EDIT: Apparently the Debian team agrees:
| https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=956012#72
| vetinari wrote:
| If it was implemented by managed policy file, then
| Chrome/Chromium will complain exactly this way.
|
| You can see the details in the chrome://policy page.
| neilv wrote:
| Yeah, that was alarming. Figuring out that it was innocuous
| took me 15-30 minutes of urgent, drop-everything-else work.
|
| I should've thought to post a Debian bug report after that
| (especially since the Debian bugs database was one of the first
| things I checked). I'd reported the cause informally to some
| colleagues, and then must've gotten distracted with what I was
| trying to do before I saw the suspicious message.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Fedora did this for a while to inject the word "Fedora" into
| the User Agent. They eventually stopped because users were
| similarly spooked.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Putting _even more_ identifying information into User Agent
| strings seems completely insane, who 's interests is that
| meant to serve? The number of people in any town with Fedora
| in their UA must be minuscule, that blows a huge number of
| 'privacy bits', and for what?
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I think it's for installation tracking to some degree --
| they do this by the browser user agents but _also_ machine-
| ids sent with DNF (the package manager)
|
| I love the project, I really dislike this 'gather things
| that might be useful to someone' behavior and having to
| MITM my system to see what it's actually doing
| fbhabbed wrote:
| They still do it
| babypuncher wrote:
| I'm on a fresh install of Fedora 36 (KDE Spin) and my
| Firefox UA is currently showing as "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux
| x86_64; rv:103.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/103.0".
| lohfu wrote:
| cool, so don't switch to chromium. then the internet will
| know you run fedora.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| This is actually not that uncommon... I've stumbled on a
| similar thing with the browsers as shipped by Fedora
|
| It's superficial but I completely understand the alarm
|
| For those noticing this, be aware that you'll likely see it
| elsewhere. Don't panic.
| teloli wrote:
| Context and rationale here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
| bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=956012
| chasil wrote:
| ...slightly related question, what is the benefit of using the
| Debian package, versus the Ubuntu snap?
|
| As a CentOS user, the Ubuntu snap is updated much more often
| than the EPEL package.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| TLDR
|
| > Hey let's change the default engine to DDG
|
| > I've used DDG for a week, let's do it!
| edward wrote:
| Better link: https://tracker.debian.org/news/1355283/accepted-
| chromium-10...
| jchw wrote:
| This leaves me with conflicting emotions. I don't know where the
| easiest place to find the actual explanation of the change is
| (not very familiar with Debian development practices) but I
| wonder if it clears things up.
| teloli wrote:
| https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=956012
| jacooper wrote:
| If anyone uses the debian chromium package that is. Because its
| always out of date, just use Flatpak.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| Did they fix the bug that did not allow you to log on to your
| Google account and sync from Chromium?
|
| Or was that intentional?
| striking wrote:
| That's something Google did to Chromium, not Debian.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| Ah, thank you.
|
| That's a shame.
| kyrra wrote:
| Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work on chrome or anything
| related.
|
| Many companies put out free software to drive people towards
| their products, and Chrome with Google Search seems to be one of
| those. As many know, improving and maintaining Chrome is not
| free, and having Google Search being a default is one part of
| what helps pay for this work.
|
| Yes, this is Google, yes, this is likely a tiny drop in the
| bucket for them, but at the same time, it's taking away potential
| revenue from Google.
|
| If this was some smaller company that produced a product that had
| some default that pointed to one of their SaaS offerings or the
| like, there would be potential issues raised over the Debian
| maintainers changing this default.
| guipsp wrote:
| > If this was some smaller company that produced a product that
| had some default that pointed to one of their SaaS offerings or
| the like, there would be potential issues raised over the
| Debian maintainers changing this default.
|
| Well, thankfully this is Google, and not a small company then.
| mtmail wrote:
| > it's taking away potential revenue from Google.
|
| Google still has 92.5% global market share, 10x more than all
| other search engines combined
| https://radar.cloudflare.com/notebooks/searchengines-2022-q1
| josefx wrote:
| Microsoft also has people contributing to Chrome and apparently
| DDG searches go to Bing. So no difference.
| dchest wrote:
| Nah, it's just a fork of KHTML.
| bityard wrote:
| Chromium isn't just gratis software ("free" has a different
| meaning), it's open source software. There is no implicit
| expectation that downstream users can't change it any way
| want[1] and redistribute the result, that's the whole point of
| the open source license that Chromium is released under.
|
| 1. Within existing legal boundaries, of course
| kyrra wrote:
| Chromium is distributed under the 3-clause BSD license, so I
| totally agree with you that distros can do whatever they want
| with it (more details here:
| https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/licensing/ ). I'd
| imagine many people that work on Chromium would agree with
| this and are happy for distros to do what they'd like. If
| Google wanted to be pushy with the software, it could do some
| other kind of licensing saying people couldn't modify it and
| still use the Chromium branding, but they obviously chose not
| to do this.
|
| My take from a business perspective is that Google produces
| Chrome and Chromium for a number of reasons. Good will to the
| community (with how permissive they are with the license),
| and having a stable platform to be able to build things like
| GMail and Search on-top of. But there is also the Ads side
| that benefits from Google Search being the default.
|
| So I guess there are really many benefits for Chrome's
| existence, and Google Searching being a default is only part
| of that. But I still stand by my original post and reasoning.
| blibble wrote:
| it's also a derived work of KHTML
|
| so complaining that it is being modified to restore it back
| to its demonitised form reeks of entitlement
| tremon wrote:
| _it 's taking away potential revenue from Google._
|
| Wow. Yes, that's how competition works. Are people at the tech
| monopolists really that entitled that they consider the entire
| world's purse strings theirs to control?
| blibble wrote:
| > but at the same time, it's taking away potential revenue from
| Google.
|
| many of us see this as a positive
| yazzku wrote:
| What a bizarre way to justify surveillance. Who said the web
| browser can't be sold instead? The browser and the search
| engine should not be developed by the same company, there are
| clear conflicts of interest there, but we all know why Google
| provides all of these products and services "for free".
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I think that they will need to fork the web browsers and maintain
| the forks instead of the originals, in order to make
| improvements. This is one of them but is not only one. To
| actually make the web browsers good, will require further changes
| (sometimes involving adding stuff back in that was removed in
| older versions, or removing some of the newly added stuff while
| keeping some of it).
|
| However, I would prefer the default to be "no search", and to
| only search if the user explicitly specifies which search engine
| to use. (This does not necessarily mean that Debian has to do
| this; it only means that it is what would be my own preference.
| Some other people will agree with me, although some people will
| disagree.)
|
| Regardless of the default settings though (sometimes different
| default settings might be suitable due to the distribution; in
| this case it doesn't matter, but for some settings of some
| programs, it will matter), the end user should have the
| opportunity to change all of the settings.
| bla3 wrote:
| DDG is for-profit and serves for the most part Bing results. Why
| not pick something truly open, like search.marginalia.nu?
| rvnx wrote:
| Money.
|
| DDG earns money through Yahoo/Bing Ads & Amazon affiliate
| links, and then they share revenue with Linux distributions
| (side-note: DuckDuckGo, litterally, can precisely knows what
| items you bought via the Amazon affiliate link).
|
| More explanations here: https://lwn.net/Articles/490517/
|
| Btw, 25% or 50% revenue-share is outrageously low for such
| partnerships. I hope Debian negotiated better.
| yegg wrote:
| We (at DuckDuckGo) actually have no current relationship (or
| commercial deal) with Debian. They did this on their own.
| That is, there is no revenue share here.
|
| Also, we no longer use the Amazon affiliate program, or Yahoo
| for that matter, and we don't (and never have had) any idea
| what any individual bought.
| flatiron wrote:
| They know the types of items you buy. You don't get the exact
| items from Amazon. They can guess if you click a link to an
| iPhone and then later bought a $1,200 electronic but if you
| click on an iPhone and buy a PS5 they don't know what you
| bought.
| jbman223 wrote:
| That's not exactly true - as an Amazon affiliate you do see
| the exact items purchased under each of your specific
| tracking IDs, as well as the price it was purchased for,
| category and device group it was purchased using (desktop,
| tablet, mobile). This also includes any purchases the user
| makes in a 24 hour session of browsing after clicking your
| referral link to Amazon.
|
| I'm unsure how many tracking IDs you can create in your
| account, and as far as I'm aware and can tell, you cannot
| pass specific UTM codes or other identifying information
| along with a click to Amazon that is passed back to you on
| the reporting side. Meaning, you could track users you send
| to Amazon, and where you're sending them, and you can see
| outcomes, but Amazon only provides the tracking ID back to
| you as a reference (this ID is meant to be used on a
| site/channel wide level, but as I mentioned above could
| possibly be abused depending on how many you can create)
| nortonham wrote:
| that lwn.net article is from 10 years ago...is it still
| accurate?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Is that really the case here? I really doubt it considering
| how careful debian is when it comes to privacy. Even the
| popularity contest is opt in.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > I hope Debian negotiated better
|
| Do you have any evidence that Debian negotiated a deal?
| Debian is not a company.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| Why are you spouting off accusations without any evidence?
| This blind cynicism makes HN a worse place.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Flattering.
|
| Unfortunately my search engine is far away, both in terms of
| functionality and hardware capacity from being able to deal
| with that. Maybe some day, who knows, but not yet. Even if I'm
| destined to make the Linux of search engines, we're
| metaphorically living in 1992 or so.
|
| Would be funny though because it's both developed on a Debian
| workstation and hosted on a Debian server.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| After DDG decided they would censor material they considered
| misinformation from Russia I went out search engine shopping
| and I'm using brave search. I value transparency and fairness
| and can make my own mind about things (I remember when being
| against the Iraq or Lybia wars made you a terrorist
| sympsthizer).
|
| Do you have any stance there? (I'm not saying you should have
| one or agree with mine, just curious. Every search engine
| might have its time and place).
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| In general I'm not a big fan of censorship. I think it's
| ultimately counterproductive. It sends the message that the
| "truth" needs to be protected from independent scrutiny,
| effectively undermining the credibility of the
| institutions, while enabling crackpots to develop a
| persecution narrative.
|
| That said I do block some sites, mostly nazi stuff if it's
| designed in such a way that it crops up in regular
| searches. It's a fairly small number of sites though.
| brnt wrote:
| A Debian (or FSF, or ...) hosted SearX instance would indeed be
| interesting and perhaps most Free.
| aendruk wrote:
| risiOS hosts a searx instance for its users and configures it
| as the default search engine.
|
| I worry about the sustainability of such a service though.
| Don't they inevitably get blocked upstream?
|
| It might work better for more local organizations to host
| such projects. I've always liked the idea of community
| centers and churches and whatnot hosting shared services for
| their community.
| bj-rn wrote:
| /e/OS does too. https://spot.ecloud.global
| zagrebian wrote:
| > DDG is for-profit and serves for the most part Bing results
|
| What's the problem? What matters is that my searches aren't
| recorded and added to a profile.
| garciasn wrote:
| Because the results from search.marginalia.nu are absolutely
| irrelevant?
| mrweasel wrote:
| It would also crash marginalia I think. Which would be sad.
|
| What would we have Debian change the default search to? I get
| that DuckDuckGo might not be ideal, but it is better than
| Google, Bing, Yahoo or Marginalia. The results need to be
| good enough, but also not obviously anti-privacy. It
| basically leave you with DuckDuckGo, Qwants or Ecosia.
| Personally I might had picked Ecosia, had they not had a
| cookie banner.
| aendruk wrote:
| Probably because one doesn't exist? That particular example
| isn't a general purpose search engine.
| nanna wrote:
| I think you're confusing for-profit, opensource and, as I
| assume would be the motive behind this switch, at least
| relatively privacy protecting?
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