4 ms·

Use duckduckgo and this is a non-issue.

azureel 5y ago
I think this reply is for you https://twitter.com/jjcollinsworth/status/1390666239450755074 https://twitter.com/jjcollinsworth/status/139066623945075507...
- fuzxi 5y ago
  "I complained on a public forum and received advice. What a horrible day to have an internet connection."
- 0-_-0 5y ago
  Wow this guy loves to be a victim in as many ways as possible to squeeze into 3 tweets! This must be a kind of a Twitter archetype.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  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.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  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.
  - hyperdimension 5y ago
    > 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)
Garlef 5y ago
I tried it and went back to google because google saves me time. As a dev, I google a lot to figure out how to do X. My experience with DuckDuckGo was that it added 2-10 minutes of filtering for usable results every time.
- stephc_int13 5y ago
  I am using DuckDuckGo and my experience is completely different, but I might be missing something. Do you have an example of a search you've done where the results were much better from Google Search than from DuckDuckGo?
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    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.
    - Garlef 5y ago
      This might be true. But my point was that DuckDuckGo costs me too much time. To rephrase it: DuckDuckGo is more expensive to use. (At least for me).
    - greshario 5y ago
      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.
  - Garlef 5y ago
    > Do you have an example of a search ... Due to the very topic this HN post is about, I don't think this is a good method - your results might be vastly different from mine. But let's look at the number of relevant results among the top 5 results for some thing I recently wanted to learn about. "Comprehension categories" - a rather specific term from category theory https://www.google.com/search?q=comprehension+category https://www.google.com/search?q=comprehension+category https://duckduckgo.com/?q=comprehension+category https://duckduckgo.com/?q=comprehension+category Google: 5/5 (for me) DuckDuckGo: 1/5 (for me)

I think this reply is for you https://twitter.com/jjcollinsworth/status/1390666239450755074 https://twitter.com/jjcollinsworth/status/139066623945075507...

fuzxi 5y ago
"I complained on a public forum and received advice. What a horrible day to have an internet connection."
0-_-0 5y ago
Wow this guy loves to be a victim in as many ways as possible to squeeze into 3 tweets! This must be a kind of a Twitter archetype.
jessaustin 5y ago
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.
pessimizer 5y ago
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.
- hyperdimension 5y ago
  > 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)

Garlef 5y ago

I tried it and went back to google because google saves me time. As a dev, I google a lot to figure out how to do X. My experience with DuckDuckGo was that it added 2-10 minutes of filtering for usable results every time.

stephc_int13 5y ago
I am using DuckDuckGo and my experience is completely different, but I might be missing something. Do you have an example of a search you've done where the results were much better from Google Search than from DuckDuckGo?
- mrweasel 5y ago
  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.
  - Garlef 5y ago
    This might be true. But my point was that DuckDuckGo costs me too much time. To rephrase it: DuckDuckGo is more expensive to use. (At least for me).
  - greshario 5y ago
    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.
- Garlef 5y ago
  > Do you have an example of a search ... Due to the very topic this HN post is about, I don't think this is a good method - your results might be vastly different from mine. But let's look at the number of relevant results among the top 5 results for some thing I recently wanted to learn about. "Comprehension categories" - a rather specific term from category theory https://www.google.com/search?q=comprehension+category https://www.google.com/search?q=comprehension+category https://duckduckgo.com/?q=comprehension+category https://duckduckgo.com/?q=comprehension+category Google: 5/5 (for me) DuckDuckGo: 1/5 (for me)