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Is duckduckgo.com partially enforcing the “celebrity threesome injunction”?
- dghughes 10y agoFrom Canada two searches it seems fairly descriptive of who it was, is this unique? Google.ca http://i.imgur.com/1oytIvR.png http://i.imgur.com/1oytIvR.png Duckduckgo.com http://i.imgur.com/SDfLxsV.png http://i.imgur.com/SDfLxsV.png
- Idontagree 10y agoI think you misunderstood the article? He was saying that he needed Elton in the search to find results. Maybe, I misunderstood you, though?
- dghughes 10y agoAh I see.
- Symbiote 10y agoYou would need to search "celebrity threesome injunction", rather than Elton. At the time, people in England didn't know who had the injunction. I wasn't in England, and didn't have much trouble finding it was Elton John. The English newspaper results were first in the results, without names, but I think that's too be expected -- he's a British celebrity, and of limited interest elsewhere, but those newspaper articles are being widely shared in Britain.
- white-flame 10y agoI think it's fairly obvious that the smaller search engines inherit their results from the larger ones, so they're not the ones applying the biases or censorship.
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoFairly obvious to HN readership, but not to the general public or to lawmakers, judges, and juries.
- sp332 10y agoDDG has many sources of information, and applies its own layer of spam filtering as well, so they are not at the mercy of Yahoo's censored data.
- vacri 10y agoHow is DDG meant to detect that there are 'missing' bits of information from the returned results, and then 'insert' the missing stuff? Do we really expect a secondary search engine to hit all the returned search result websites and grep them for the terms, as Stallman suggested? How long would it take people to abandon DDG if they implemented that, given that it would make search intolerably long?
- cynix 10y agoThis was explained in the article. If some results for keywords "A B C D" do not exist in the results for keywords "A B C", then you know these results have been censored.
- tagawa 10y agoThat doesn't seem like a practical solution. One keyword can change the expected search results dramatically, for example: "red ford mustang" and "red ford mustang toy", "wall street 2015" and "wall street 2015 protest", "photos of jam" and "photos of jam jars", etc. In some cases there may be overlap but a lack of it doesn't necessarily indicate censorship.
- rwmj 10y agoIs RMS also enforcing this injunction since he also doesn't name the people involved?
- LeoPanthera 10y agoWho they are isn't relevant to his point.
- mattl 10y agoHis website is hosted in the UK
- fleitz 10y agoYes, although the Church of GNU is pure, even St. Obnoxious is a mere moral and guilty of the same original sin as the rest of us.
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoHe adds "Elton", which is enough to guess or search for an identity.
- robobro 10y agoYeah... FROM REDDIT: David Furnish, Elton John's husband had an affair on at least three occasions with an employee which involved a bath of olive oil circa 2010-2013. David Furnish heavily wanted it to be unprotected anal sex despite his work on the Elton John AIDS charity. Elton himself has been accused of sexual harassment of one of his male bodyguards. The allegations can't be published in England and Wales due to the distress that it could cause to their two children born from a surrogate mother. David and Elton have been using that injunction to threaten various web sites on the grounds that an article hosted on an overseas server could be viewed by somebody in England and Wales.
- Pitarou 10y agoThis is an article about web censorship, not The National Enquirer. RMS does, in fact, mention one of the names involved, but only when it is relevant to the matter of censorship.
- peteri 10y agoWell from my UK based attempt it seems to perfectly visible even on google.co.uk using that specific phrase. I seem to remember originally have finding out via order-order.com. Again not something I particularly care about.
- Pitarou 10y agoIt wasn't like that a few months ago. I think that, in the time since RMS wrote that article, someone has quietly given up on trying to enforce the censorship order.
- Animats 10y agoIt seems to be trivially easy to find. I was thinking it would be some politician, not some '60s musician. Who cares? Besides, Wikipedia has a long section on his sex life. This sounds more like a PR stunt by a has-been.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoYou can only find documents that are available in the index you are using. If the index owner has deleted or filtered them there is no way to know, as an API user, if there are missing results. If you are a service that is minimizing the amount of personal information available to the API provider, the API provider would have to assume the worst and pre-filter any results that were restricted in any jurisdiction. No different than returning results to search queries originating on a Tor exit node.
- leephillips 10y ago"censoring the whole world in obedience to the UK injunction" Google censors the whole world to avoid annoying the Pakistani government and Islamic pressure groups; no injunction required. http://lee-phillips.org/youtube/ http://lee-phillips.org/youtube/
- bArray 10y agoThe video that was censored in the blog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPpBzF20_7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPpBzF20_7M The Pakistani Government was a ridiculous situation. To me it was an example of how religion would literally cut off it's nose to spite it's face. Youtube offers them way more good than it does bad. I think the moment Governments got involved in the internet was where things went wrong. It should have been just complete freedom, regardless of what ended up being put on there with all the consequences of doing so.
- olij 10y agoYou guys in the west have some seriously deep delusions about freedom and the internet. Or maybe I should say the brainwashing is strong from the people who most benefit from it. Ignorance, fear and corruption has increased despite the internet and some would rightly argue because of it. Just look at Trump, the rising power of the right wing in Europe, Turkey, India etc. You think debates about modernity and the religious status quo aren't going on within Muslim households all over the world without access to a fucking youtube video? This is the kind of superiority complex that justified Bush's Wars. Just know this just because they make you sing about freedom like robots from childhood doesn't mean the rest of the world needs to be singing with you. It's your song. It's your way of life and if others want it let them choose it without the "free internet" and all the consequences of it being shoved down our throats. And thank god for the Chinese.
- EC1 10y agoThen go back to the sand from where you came from and renounce the west. We don't want you here if you don't want to be here.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoNo, DDG doesn't have its own crawler. And such censorship as described is impossible to distinguish from results being pushed up or down the rankings by more focused terms, without some computation that would slow your search down, as well as more queries to more sources, resulting in more network roundtrips, that would slow your search down even more, doing so causing a massive slowdown on all searches, for a check that is irrelevant 99% of the time. That kind of slowdown is unacceptable. But then, who was surprised? RMS has long been known to put purity before practicality, and to say that network and computing time is cheap, a very MIT attitude, and one that does not serve people trying to run a service for hundreds and thousands of people, who all expect their response to come back fast.
- throw2016 10y agoSo you are saying censorship is irrelevant 99% of the time, RMS is impractial to be concerned and the tecnology that is used to search is far more important that the purpose for which it is used. Ok.
- bArray 10y agoIn China the censorship was ridiculous using "Bangol" or whatever it's called there. I couldn't search for western products, animals, videos - anything (, until I used a VPN of course!). But here in the UK I think it's much less than 1%, although what's worrying is what is actually blocked. It seems as if enough money and/or power will get you any blocks you want.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoNo. What I AM saying is that it is uncommon for the results from yahoo to be censored. Implementing the kind of censorship checks that RMS suggests is impractical and ridiculous, given the present limitations of our hardware, and the expectation of fast response. I am NOT saying that we shouldn't be concerned about censorship. Censorship is an important issue. But the kind of anti-censorship measures that RMS recommends are imparactical and absurd. This is what I meant when I said that RMS all to often puts principles before practicality.
- basicplus2 10y agoI've noticed I am now getting hit by targeted ads relating to searches I do on duckduckgo.. the question is.. what search engine do I switch to now?
- jakobegger 10y agoAre you sure that the problem is searching on DDG and not the pages you click on? DDG claims not to track you; however, they have no way to prevent websites you visit from tracking you.
- basicplus2 10y agonot 100% sure.. only that i have not changed what i do, and the only change I can think of is yahoo is now involved...
- exolymph 10y agoYou need a robust tracker-blocker.
- basicplus2 10y agocan you recommend one... I'm getting "blocking spyware fatigue"
- basicplus2 10y agojust tried ghostery and Cannot see any tracking on duckduckgo
- scrollaway 10y ago- https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger - Wipe third-party cookies on browser shutdown - Also if you're interested, https://www.google.com/settings/ads/plugin https://www.google.com/settings/ads/plugin You don't need anything else with that, though I'd recommend an ad blocker.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoI opened a chrome incognito window and the third google hit with the "injunction" phrasing contained a name.
- throw2016 10y agoSlagging off RMS is tedious. In this case there appears to be nothing remotely objectionable about what he is saying. If there is an objection to the issue raised it should be stated. Forcing references to others things he has said just comes off as a diversionary tactic to derail the thread. Like RMS I am suprised at the effort being put to censor something so trivial raising questions about far more important matters. Is there any way to decipher the kind of things being censored, is there any system maintained or transparency disclosing broadly the orders received and the censorship operational? This is a slippery slope that we seem to be well into.
- Semiapies 10y agoIn this case, the weird DDG fanboyism that's so popular on HN is also a big factor.
- csydas 10y agoMmm, I'll agree there is a large fanatic user base of DDG here, but I think in relation to this article, the confusion is more the following: 1. It's an older article, from May, and current search results are inconsistent with what RMS was seeing at the time 2. A lot of users (apparently RMS himself initially) misunderstand/misunderstood that DDG doesn't actually crawl on its own, it relies on Bing results, and by extension, they don't understand that the censorship can be inherited; whether this is censorship on the part of DDG or not I am not willing to comment on. 3. Stallman's solution is a sort of half-solution, as someone else pointed out in the comments, insomuch as certain queries that lack keywords from others may not always be instances of censorship, and that determining this would be really difficult. (the example I'll steal from user tagawa is: "red ford mustang" and "red ford mustang toy", "wall street 2015" and "wall street 2015 protest", "photos of jam" and "photos of jam jars", etc.) That's not so say the fanbase of DDG has never been rabid, but in this instance, I think the confusion and defense is probably applicable - what we see now with DDG is way different than what Stallman saw.
- ubernostrum 10y agoEchoing other comments, my problem is with the framing of it. DDG is, as I understand it, basically a light privacy-protecting wrapper around third-party search APIs. So while you may be getting "censored" results, DDG is not an active participant in that "censorship" -- since its job is just to go out and see what another service said and relay it back to you, the responsibility for active censorship rests with that other service. Whether DDG should try to actively determine when results are censored and correct for it, rather than passively relaying possibly-censored results without further work, is a different question than "is DDG censoring", and trying to sensationalize a story by framing it as the latter when what one really wants is the former is... well, intellectually dishonest.
- chris_wot 10y ago"I am proud to identify myself when stating my views; I can afford to do that because I am in a fairly safe position. There are people who rationally fear reprisals (from employers, gangsters, bullies, or the state) if they sign their name to their views. For their sake, let's reject any social networking site which insists on connecting an account to a person's real identity." [1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html I guess Stallman considers the celebrities to be in a safe position also. Yet I find it rather incongruous that he is so strident on privacy and firm on the view that he should be able to have a private life (he goes to great lengths to browse anonymously) yet he feels it's ok to allow publications to write about their private affairs (which may or may not have happened). I don't necessarily blame Stallman for this contradiction, frankly you can legitimately hold that censorship is wrong and privacy is important. Unfortunately there are occasions where they conflict badly. Stallman genuinely needs to address how DDG are meant to preserve privacy and counter censorship, because there is a genuine conflict and it's not necessarily an easy thing to address.
- Buge 10y agoI just searched "celebrity threesome injunction" on Google, and both the 2nd and 4th result contain "Elton John" in Google's little text preview of the page.
- etatoby 10y agoElton John is promiscuous. News at 9:00.
- timdorr 10y agoActually, it's his partner committing the infidelity in this case.
- tanderson92 10y agoIn fact it's not a case of infidelity: Sir Elton John has an open marriage so the celebrity threesome would be within the bounds of their promises to each other.
- refurb 10y agoDepends on the terms of their open marriage. You can still have infidelity.
- Pitarou 10y agoIt wasn't like that a few months ago. I think that, in the time between RMS's article and now, someone has quietly given up on enforcing the censorship order.
- guelo 10y agoI got so disappointed with ddg when I discovered it's just a wrapper around Bing. With privacy-related AdBlock filters I get the best of both worlds, Google and no tracking. The world needs a non-US based alternate crawler but no one is offering it.
- SamReidHughes 10y agoWhat Adblock filter prevents Google from knowing what searches you make?
- morganvachon 10y agoNone that I've found, but ixquick.com can perform an anonymous Google search for you. Now, whether you trust them with your search history (they claim they don't record anything[1]) is entirely up to you. [1] https://www.ixquick.com/eng/privacy-policy.html?hmb=1 https://www.ixquick.com/eng/privacy-policy.html?hmb=1
- guelo 10y agoIf you're not loggedin and and blocking their tracking all they'll have is your IP address, which is the same thing ddg gets.
- SamReidHughes 10y agoDuckDuckGo doesn't save your IP address, that's part of what they mean when they say they don't track you.
- tomcam 10y agoHow would it be paid for?
- WildUtah 10y ago"The world needs a non-US based alternate crawler but no one is offering it." How about a US-based alternative that doesn't enforce UK, Pakistani, EU, and various other censorship lists that foreign countries promulgate?
- shaughan 10y agoThe names are in the first result on startpage.com (ixquick).
- Frondo 10y agoI'm surprised RMS is willing to use a closed-source search engine when there are open-source ones (like Yacy) he could be using instead.
- sandij 10y ago"We don't condemn the server operator for being at the mercy of nonfree software, and we certainly don't boycott her for this. Rather, we are concerned for her freedom, as with any user of nonfree software. Given an opportunity, we try to explain how it curtails her freedom, hoping she will switch to free software. "Conversely, if the service operator runs GNU/Linux or other free software, that's not a virtue that affects you, but rather a benefit for her. We don't praise or thank her for this; rather we felicitate her for making the wise choice." https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/network-services-arent-free-or-nonfree.html.en https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/network-services-arent-free-o...
- Bud 10y agoIs it just me, or is Stallman agitating about something as trivial as this really pathetic and sad?
- Gigablah 10y agoWould you have made this comment if it were anyone else than Stallman?
- raverbashing 10y agoRMS does not know how search engines work If he's searching for "celebrity threesome injunction" the top results are the most authoritative for that expression. Meaning: they have to be the best sites that have that expression. Which happen to be the ones that are censored (UK based websites) When you add the name, you are removing those previous results that don't contain the name
- DominikD 10y agoI'm not terribly surprised that once again Stallman understates complexity of something he doesn't understand. To him making sure that incoming data isn't pre-filtered is as simple as making sure that all of the narrowed query results are part of the broader query results. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. I'll try and apply this kind of reductionism to something else: if search engines are this simple, how come there's no viable GNU alternative to Google? Absurd, I know, and so are Stallman's ramblings. It's OK to hold DDG to a higher standards that anyone else out there. But talking nonsense out of lack of understanding violates the same higher standards we should expect from rms.
- srtjstjsj 10y agoStallman proposes a simple way to test for censorship; he does not claim how to design a search engine.
- tagawa 10y agoEven that censorship test understates the complexity of the problem. For example, "how to make playing cards" is not a superset of "how to make playing cards disappear".
- tedunangst 10y agoPretty sweet test: Google for "apple" then Google for "apple pie". Observe that none of the results for the second query appear for the first. Conclusion: Google is unamerican and censors information about apple pie.
- red_admiral 10y ago> The company might want to take some steps to detect specific examples of search result censoship, such as when items that appear when searching yahoo for A B C D do not appear at all in a search for A B C without D, and fix them. To me this does not sound like censorship, but SEO on behalf of D. My guess would be that D paid some web presence management company to cultivate a strong presence of pages containing A B C but not D (since they want to hide their name after all), and that's what the engine is picking up. There could even be an innocent explanation for this - lots of UK discussion about A B C that does not mention D since they're not allowed to, and very few outside the UK who care. So the {A,B,C}\{D} pages would naturally rise to the top of search results. This particular case aside, Stallman's test looks like misuse of statistics to me - searching for "washington" gets me lots of pages that don't mention the town in England, whereas "washington england" finds it. Conspiracy? Censorship? No.
- HappyFunGuy 10y agoIf you want uncensored search results, you need a decentralized search engine. (Your human friends and fellow hacker news bros are such an engine.) As long as search engines are centralized, state power will bend them to their will.
- zepto 10y agoYou fellow hacked news bros and human friends are more likely to be censoring things they don't like than a centralized algorithm, not less.