21 ms·

Our XMPP services at DuckDuckGo

267 points by dn2k 13y ago

claudius 13y ago
So they have a public XMPP server and a bot that gives out the instant answers in their search – I somewhat fail to see how this is groundbreaking or even interesting in any way? Sure, the bot is nice to play with, but somewhat cumbersome in the long term for me. So why is this great? :)
- prg318 13y ago
  I can see this being utilized by Google users who still need to use XMPP. With Google removing XMPP support from their messaging services, users will need to find a new XMPP server, and DuckDuckGo fits the bill.
  - claudius 13y ago
    There are quite a few other public XMPP servers at [1]. Personally, I’ve used jabber.ccc.de for a few years but found it to become unreliable in late 2011 and then decided to host my own, first using Prosody, then ejabberd. Works like a charm. Being a search engine is not exactly a prerequisite to running an XMPP server. :-) [1] http://xmpp.net/ http://xmpp.net/
    - MattJ100 13y ago
      Now I want to know why you switched away from Prosody. It's not something we see happen often :) Anything we can fix?
      - npsimons 13y ago
        I was about to say "not packaged for Debian", but apt-cache has proven that to be a false statement. Can't say why I personally (not the GP) went with ejabberd as my first choice; I just picked it at random, and it worked well enough. I will have to look into Prosody. Thanks!
      - claudius 13y ago
        Clustering. My server was down[0] for a few hours once and so was my XMPP account. After it was back up, I got a small VPS from a friend to act as a backup/fallback/redundancy-whatever. ejabberd offers that out-of-the-box, meaning that I now have two ‘nodes’ hosting my XMPP domains – if one of them goes down, I either don’t notice at all (if I was connected to the other one) or just have to tell Pidgin to reconnect. s2s connections will similarly just reconnect/don’t notice. I liked Prosody better, though, and the arcane failure modes[1] of ejabberd still annoy me. So if you get that into Prosody (or did, I didn’t check in the last year or so), I will definitely consider switching back. [0] Apparently Strato thinks you’re being attacked if a large stream of UDP packets from the 26C3 network hits your server. And I was just using my VPN… [1] I recently moved that VPS and failed to adapt iptables rules on the other host. Instead of telling me that it couldn’t connect (at maximum log verbosity), ejabberd just did nothing/crashed. I can’t exclude an oversight on my part, but the failure to log anything was rather annoying.
        MattJ100 13y ago
        Ah, clustering. Understood, and entirely justified. Prosody clustering is on the roadmap, but it's a tricky problem to solve properly (and I don't think anyone has to date). We've even had people switch from ejabberd clusters to Prosody, as ejabberd's clustering wasn't working out for them anyway (it seems to be designed more for spreading load than increasing availability). Our view is that we wanted to get the foundations of the server right before we began tackling such complex problems. Nevertheless I look forward to welcoming you back some time soon :)
        claudius 13y ago
        If ejabberd starts up, I found it to work rather nicely, so it is not a big problem to me. But I wish you the best of luck with Prosody, as I said, I really liked it at the time and I trust it only got better :) – regarding the ‘soon’, 2015 is likely an optimistic estimate given Debian release schedules etc…
  - p4bl0 13y ago
    There already are plenty of way to get an XMPP account. I'm going to advertise the one which comes with FSF memberships [1] :-). [1] https://www.fsf.org/associate/benefits https://www.fsf.org/associate/benefits
  - HyprMusic 13y ago
    The convenience of Google talk supporting XMPP, for me anyway, was the ability to talk to other people already using Google Talk through the XMPP protocol, and the ability to use XMPP clients.
    - davidw 13y ago
      While we're talking about externalities, this is what's known as the network effect, or positive network externalities. The value is not that someone has an XMPP server, the value is in having an XMPP server that everyone uses.
casca 13y ago
TL;DR: DuckDuckGo, a search-engine known for privacy, has a public XMPP service that promises the same level of privacy as their searches. They also have an XMPP chat-bot that will respond to queries over XMPP, but this is less interesting. I personally am a fan of DDG and use it as my primary search engine. I do wish they'd change their name as it makes it difficult to recommend to non-technical people.
- xwowsersx 13y ago
  Seriously! I love DDG, but the name has got to go!!
  - eterm 13y ago
    For some reason the name always makes me think of 'toilet duck' toiler cleaner. The name alone puts me off to a large degree, although the way it seems to go out its way to say "we're not google" puts me off too. Overall I just don't like the way they advertise, I don't feel like it should be appealing to the sort of person I am.
- yegg 13y ago
  FWIW, we've had both for a long time (years). We just started a company blog and this was an early post. Thanks for using DDG!
  - casca 13y ago
    Hi Gabriel, Thanks for what you've done with DDG. Privacy is a difficult sell when everyone else is offering "free" services in return for it. Is there any chance that you could create another brand with a name that I could get non-tech people to use? It could be exactly the same everything except the name. The number of times I've convinced someone to switch until they hear the name...
    - yegg 13y ago
      People have a love/hate relationship with the name. It really resonates well with women in general and K-12. The most push-back on it being too "non-professional" comes from the UK by far. No immediate plans to change the name or branding, but duly noted! We really do appreciate and consider all feedback.
lucian1900 13y ago
Sadly, most of the people I would talk to are either on Google or Facebook and neither supports XMPP federation. Where's my federated client-independent IM future?
- MattJ100 13y ago
  While Google's recent moves are indeed a backward step, the only way we can fight them is by having open alternatives like this available to people, and by making them as attractive as possible. There are many practical reasons that people and organisations would rather be in control of their communications, so XMPP (or something, the protocol doesn't matter) is here to stay. The challenge is making that open network worth the big players' time, they currently don't seem to think it is.
  - malandrew 13y ago
    Is it possible to set up my DNS records so that I can use DDG XMPP for chat instead of Google XMPP, while still using Google Apps for GMail?
    - pepr 13y ago
      You can do that in principle (XMPP servers for the given domain are stored in SRV records, e.g. for my domain praus.net, it's _jabber._tcp.praus.net) but I can't find anywhere that the DDG XMPP server supports custom domains. So you can do it but I think not with DDG just yet.
- shmerl 13y ago
  Google are really crooked if they decided to kill XMPP federation. A trend of them becoming evil?
  - guyzero 13y ago
    As others have pointed out, it's a good thing they didn't do that then.
shared4you 13y ago
Google also has a chat bot: guru@googlelabs.com . Just add it to your contacts list and you can query it over XMPP.
- dn2k 13y ago
  this is not exactly the point.. the point is that DDG gives you now a free and "we don't track users" XMPP server that support federation...
  - BitMastro 13y ago
    Not to undervalue DDG, but the same service has been offered for years by those servers http://xmpp.net/ http://xmpp.net/ A "we don't track users" XMPP server?? Is this a thing?
    - sukuriant 13y ago
      In a world where tracking is the norm, we need to be reminded when places /aren't/ tracking
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    The assertion that Google tracks XMPP and uses it to target ads has no evidence. Besides, use OTR with XMPP chat and it doesn't matter what the cloud provider says in their privacy policy.
MattJ100 13y ago
The XMPP network needs more independent servers run by trusted entities, so I welcome this very much (I've been trusting DuckDuckGo with my searches for some time now).
shmerl 13y ago
Can anyone please clearly explain what exactly did Google do regarding XMPP? Just stopped using XMPP protocol in their Hangout client? Or disabled XMPP federation on their server? The later doesn't seem to be the case - I can still communicate with the contacts from Google server (though they don't use the Hangout client).
- lukeschlather 13y ago
  They cut out XMPP from hangouts, yeah. I still use XMPP with GChat and IMAP with Gmail. Either of those things changes I'm probably going to start using Bing and find a new email provider.
  - shmerl 13y ago
    I left Google Talk and switched to another XMPP server a while ago, but a big percentage of my contacts use Google Talk. If Google wants to force all Google Talk users to switch to Hangout - it's really crooked, since all those contacts will be inaccessible.
- Macha 13y ago
  Hangout does not support XMPP, at all. Google Talk still does, but the Google Talk Android app was replaced by Hangouts, they're slowly replacing Talk with Hangout in Gmail, and it's quite likely Talk will be shut down altogether given Google's track record.
  - shmerl 13y ago
    I.e. Hangout uses a different server than Google Talk (not just a different client), right?
    - Macha 13y ago
      Yes. But as far as I know, the GTalk client in Gmail is able to talk to Hangout users, but random XMPP clients are not.
scotchmi_st 13y ago
Sorry if this is slightly off-topic, but I was wondering if anyone could explain the technical reasons why, with minimal modification, we couldn't just replace all electronic messaging systems from SMS to email with xmpp, and forevermore live in a magical fantasy world where email headers, text fees and security concerns don't exist? I mean, it has these things going for it- 1. SSL/TLS embedded in the standard. 2. Easy to set up OTR encryption, (as well as any other standard I imagine). 3. Messages are "pushed" to clients, rather than "pulled". 4. The standard is simple, and servers like Prosody are super-easy to implement (unlike Exim). 5. There are plenty of clients already available. Admittedly it's not something I've researched much, but I doubt it'd take all that much to get Adium or whatever to work like a simple email client, (but with xmpp). I'm aware of all of the social reasons why such a thing may not work, but I'd be interested to know if it were just a question of getting people to adopt it, were it to exist.
- TylerE 13y ago
  Because push doesn't scale.
  - MattJ100 13y ago
    Care to elaborate?
    - TylerE 13y ago
      Server has to keep tabs on all clients, rather than being polled.
  - scotchmi_st 13y ago
    Really? So there are no large-scale implementations of push-notification systems? Is there some detail I'm missing here?
  - eikenberry 13y ago
    Push can scale. Ask Urban Airship. It is hard though and while polling is generally easier it has its own set of scaling problems.
brunoqc 13y ago
Is it accessible on the 443 port like GTalk?
- jaryd 13y ago
  Actually no, but this is something that we are discussing. We see the value in providing the service on this port, and want to accommodate all users. Thanks for the feedback, and feel free to hit me up with questions (if you have any) at my $username at duckduckgo.com :) EDIT: Or, hop on Freenode and chat with us in #duckduckgo
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pepr 13y ago
Does anybody know if this supports custom domains or just the domain assigned by DDG? They seem to support only dukgo.com
MMXII 13y ago
One of the biggest strengths of gchat is the integration with gmail, and why they have so much traction. It makes less sense to chat on a free service that no one is using, but maybe some people will use it if there were a DDG email service.
anoncow 13y ago
What will you do if they make encryption illegal? A reason why there reportedly are backdoors in skype is because of government requirements. For eg. see this news article about India asking Skype to setup local servers in India http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-05-20/infrastructure/39391625_1_internet-telephony-law-enforcement-servers http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-05-20/infra...
- dublinben 13y ago
  DuckDuckGo has no legal presence in countries like that, or any desire to have one. They'll do what is legal in the US, and ignore the complaints of any other country.
- jmillikin 13y ago
  Who is "they"? Your city council? Your nation's legislature? The commie-nazi-jewish-muslim-reptilian cabal who puts radios in your teeth? No major government will forbid effective encryption, because citizens are far more afraid of other citizens than they are of the government. That's why governments request backdoors, or pass legislation permitting warrantless searches. Think of it this way: your city council will never be able to pass a law forbidding people from locking their car door, because everyone with a car would be screaming about theft. But they could easily pass a law requiring car manufacturers to provide a master key to law enforcement.
  - anoncow 13y ago
    This makes sense. By 'they', I meant governments. I always wondered why no mail/im providers support pgp or similar encryption. This means there never will be such a service, since the only master key would be with the end user.
    - jmillikin 13y ago
      Webmail providers don't provide PGP support because it is not possible to securely implement PGP for webmail. All web-based interfaces are inherently a proxy through a third party, so if you want to read your encrypted mail on the web, you must give your webmail provider the decryption key. Given this, it's better for webmail providers to not pretend to support secure mail.
jweir 13y ago
This feature is great. A bit of a trojan horse - I will keep DuckDuckGo open now and search it before trying that "other" search engine. The goodies (https://duckduckgo.com/goodies https://duckduckgo.com/goodies) are really cool. Although they do not seem to consistently work in the chat client. Some do, some do not.
- crazedpsyc 13y ago
  A lot of those plugins are written in client-side Javascript, so the bot can't (easily) work with those.
ausjke 13y ago
I must agree that duckduckgo is too long and not cute, a big turn off for people like me, bad naming in my opinion, and it matters a _lot_ plus, duck goes slowly and unstably, again, ugly naming.
Hontano 13y ago
X

267 points by dn2k 13y ago

So they have a public XMPP server and a bot that gives out the instant answers in their search – I somewhat fail to see how this is groundbreaking or even interesting in any way? Sure, the bot is nice to play with, but somewhat cumbersome in the long term for me. So why is this great? :)

prg318 13y ago
I can see this being utilized by Google users who still need to use XMPP. With Google removing XMPP support from their messaging services, users will need to find a new XMPP server, and DuckDuckGo fits the bill.
- claudius 13y ago
  There are quite a few other public XMPP servers at [1]. Personally, I’ve used jabber.ccc.de for a few years but found it to become unreliable in late 2011 and then decided to host my own, first using Prosody, then ejabberd. Works like a charm. Being a search engine is not exactly a prerequisite to running an XMPP server. :-) [1] http://xmpp.net/ http://xmpp.net/
  - MattJ100 13y ago
    Now I want to know why you switched away from Prosody. It's not something we see happen often :) Anything we can fix?
    - npsimons 13y ago
      I was about to say "not packaged for Debian", but apt-cache has proven that to be a false statement. Can't say why I personally (not the GP) went with ejabberd as my first choice; I just picked it at random, and it worked well enough. I will have to look into Prosody. Thanks!
    - claudius 13y ago
      Clustering. My server was down[0] for a few hours once and so was my XMPP account. After it was back up, I got a small VPS from a friend to act as a backup/fallback/redundancy-whatever. ejabberd offers that out-of-the-box, meaning that I now have two ‘nodes’ hosting my XMPP domains – if one of them goes down, I either don’t notice at all (if I was connected to the other one) or just have to tell Pidgin to reconnect. s2s connections will similarly just reconnect/don’t notice. I liked Prosody better, though, and the arcane failure modes[1] of ejabberd still annoy me. So if you get that into Prosody (or did, I didn’t check in the last year or so), I will definitely consider switching back. [0] Apparently Strato thinks you’re being attacked if a large stream of UDP packets from the 26C3 network hits your server. And I was just using my VPN… [1] I recently moved that VPS and failed to adapt iptables rules on the other host. Instead of telling me that it couldn’t connect (at maximum log verbosity), ejabberd just did nothing/crashed. I can’t exclude an oversight on my part, but the failure to log anything was rather annoying.
      - MattJ100 13y ago
        Ah, clustering. Understood, and entirely justified. Prosody clustering is on the roadmap, but it's a tricky problem to solve properly (and I don't think anyone has to date). We've even had people switch from ejabberd clusters to Prosody, as ejabberd's clustering wasn't working out for them anyway (it seems to be designed more for spreading load than increasing availability). Our view is that we wanted to get the foundations of the server right before we began tackling such complex problems. Nevertheless I look forward to welcoming you back some time soon :)
        claudius 13y ago
        If ejabberd starts up, I found it to work rather nicely, so it is not a big problem to me. But I wish you the best of luck with Prosody, as I said, I really liked it at the time and I trust it only got better :) – regarding the ‘soon’, 2015 is likely an optimistic estimate given Debian release schedules etc…
- p4bl0 13y ago
  There already are plenty of way to get an XMPP account. I'm going to advertise the one which comes with FSF memberships [1] :-). [1] https://www.fsf.org/associate/benefits https://www.fsf.org/associate/benefits
- HyprMusic 13y ago
  The convenience of Google talk supporting XMPP, for me anyway, was the ability to talk to other people already using Google Talk through the XMPP protocol, and the ability to use XMPP clients.
  - davidw 13y ago
    While we're talking about externalities, this is what's known as the network effect, or positive network externalities. The value is not that someone has an XMPP server, the value is in having an XMPP server that everyone uses.

casca 13y ago

TL;DR: DuckDuckGo, a search-engine known for privacy, has a public XMPP service that promises the same level of privacy as their searches. They also have an XMPP chat-bot that will respond to queries over XMPP, but this is less interesting. I personally am a fan of DDG and use it as my primary search engine. I do wish they'd change their name as it makes it difficult to recommend to non-technical people.

xwowsersx 13y ago
Seriously! I love DDG, but the name has got to go!!
- eterm 13y ago
  For some reason the name always makes me think of 'toilet duck' toiler cleaner. The name alone puts me off to a large degree, although the way it seems to go out its way to say "we're not google" puts me off too. Overall I just don't like the way they advertise, I don't feel like it should be appealing to the sort of person I am.
yegg 13y ago
FWIW, we've had both for a long time (years). We just started a company blog and this was an early post. Thanks for using DDG!
- casca 13y ago
  Hi Gabriel, Thanks for what you've done with DDG. Privacy is a difficult sell when everyone else is offering "free" services in return for it. Is there any chance that you could create another brand with a name that I could get non-tech people to use? It could be exactly the same everything except the name. The number of times I've convinced someone to switch until they hear the name...
  - yegg 13y ago
    People have a love/hate relationship with the name. It really resonates well with women in general and K-12. The most push-back on it being too "non-professional" comes from the UK by far. No immediate plans to change the name or branding, but duly noted! We really do appreciate and consider all feedback.

lucian1900 13y ago

Sadly, most of the people I would talk to are either on Google or Facebook and neither supports XMPP federation. Where's my federated client-independent IM future?

MattJ100 13y ago
While Google's recent moves are indeed a backward step, the only way we can fight them is by having open alternatives like this available to people, and by making them as attractive as possible. There are many practical reasons that people and organisations would rather be in control of their communications, so XMPP (or something, the protocol doesn't matter) is here to stay. The challenge is making that open network worth the big players' time, they currently don't seem to think it is.
- malandrew 13y ago
  Is it possible to set up my DNS records so that I can use DDG XMPP for chat instead of Google XMPP, while still using Google Apps for GMail?
  - pepr 13y ago
    You can do that in principle (XMPP servers for the given domain are stored in SRV records, e.g. for my domain praus.net, it's _jabber._tcp.praus.net) but I can't find anywhere that the DDG XMPP server supports custom domains. So you can do it but I think not with DDG just yet.
shmerl 13y ago
Google are really crooked if they decided to kill XMPP federation. A trend of them becoming evil?
- guyzero 13y ago
  As others have pointed out, it's a good thing they didn't do that then.

shared4you 13y ago

Google also has a chat bot: guru@googlelabs.com . Just add it to your contacts list and you can query it over XMPP.

dn2k 13y ago
this is not exactly the point.. the point is that DDG gives you now a free and "we don't track users" XMPP server that support federation...
- BitMastro 13y ago
  Not to undervalue DDG, but the same service has been offered for years by those servers http://xmpp.net/ http://xmpp.net/ A "we don't track users" XMPP server?? Is this a thing?
  - sukuriant 13y ago
    In a world where tracking is the norm, we need to be reminded when places /aren't/ tracking
- cromwellian 13y ago
  The assertion that Google tracks XMPP and uses it to target ads has no evidence. Besides, use OTR with XMPP chat and it doesn't matter what the cloud provider says in their privacy policy.

MattJ100 13y ago

The XMPP network needs more independent servers run by trusted entities, so I welcome this very much (I've been trusting DuckDuckGo with my searches for some time now).

shmerl 13y ago

Can anyone please clearly explain what exactly did Google do regarding XMPP? Just stopped using XMPP protocol in their Hangout client? Or disabled XMPP federation on their server? The later doesn't seem to be the case - I can still communicate with the contacts from Google server (though they don't use the Hangout client).

lukeschlather 13y ago
They cut out XMPP from hangouts, yeah. I still use XMPP with GChat and IMAP with Gmail. Either of those things changes I'm probably going to start using Bing and find a new email provider.
- shmerl 13y ago
  I left Google Talk and switched to another XMPP server a while ago, but a big percentage of my contacts use Google Talk. If Google wants to force all Google Talk users to switch to Hangout - it's really crooked, since all those contacts will be inaccessible.
Macha 13y ago
Hangout does not support XMPP, at all. Google Talk still does, but the Google Talk Android app was replaced by Hangouts, they're slowly replacing Talk with Hangout in Gmail, and it's quite likely Talk will be shut down altogether given Google's track record.
- shmerl 13y ago
  I.e. Hangout uses a different server than Google Talk (not just a different client), right?
  - Macha 13y ago
    Yes. But as far as I know, the GTalk client in Gmail is able to talk to Hangout users, but random XMPP clients are not.

scotchmi_st 13y ago

Sorry if this is slightly off-topic, but I was wondering if anyone could explain the technical reasons why, with minimal modification, we couldn't just replace all electronic messaging systems from SMS to email with xmpp, and forevermore live in a magical fantasy world where email headers, text fees and security concerns don't exist? I mean, it has these things going for it- 1. SSL/TLS embedded in the standard. 2. Easy to set up OTR encryption, (as well as any other standard I imagine). 3. Messages are "pushed" to clients, rather than "pulled". 4. The standard is simple, and servers like Prosody are super-easy to implement (unlike Exim). 5. There are plenty of clients already available. Admittedly it's not something I've researched much, but I doubt it'd take all that much to get Adium or whatever to work like a simple email client, (but with xmpp). I'm aware of all of the social reasons why such a thing may not work, but I'd be interested to know if it were just a question of getting people to adopt it, were it to exist.

TylerE 13y ago
Because push doesn't scale.
- MattJ100 13y ago
  Care to elaborate?
  - TylerE 13y ago
    Server has to keep tabs on all clients, rather than being polled.
- scotchmi_st 13y ago
  Really? So there are no large-scale implementations of push-notification systems? Is there some detail I'm missing here?
- eikenberry 13y ago
  Push can scale. Ask Urban Airship. It is hard though and while polling is generally easier it has its own set of scaling problems.

brunoqc 13y ago

Is it accessible on the 443 port like GTalk?

jaryd 13y ago
Actually no, but this is something that we are discussing. We see the value in providing the service on this port, and want to accommodate all users. Thanks for the feedback, and feel free to hit me up with questions (if you have any) at my $username at duckduckgo.com :) EDIT: Or, hop on Freenode and chat with us in #duckduckgo

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

pepr 13y ago

Does anybody know if this supports custom domains or just the domain assigned by DDG? They seem to support only dukgo.com

MMXII 13y ago

One of the biggest strengths of gchat is the integration with gmail, and why they have so much traction. It makes less sense to chat on a free service that no one is using, but maybe some people will use it if there were a DDG email service.

anoncow 13y ago

What will you do if they make encryption illegal? A reason why there reportedly are backdoors in skype is because of government requirements. For eg. see this news article about India asking Skype to setup local servers in India http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-05-20/infrastructure/39391625_1_internet-telephony-law-enforcement-servers http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-05-20/infra...

dublinben 13y ago
DuckDuckGo has no legal presence in countries like that, or any desire to have one. They'll do what is legal in the US, and ignore the complaints of any other country.
jmillikin 13y ago
Who is "they"? Your city council? Your nation's legislature? The commie-nazi-jewish-muslim-reptilian cabal who puts radios in your teeth? No major government will forbid effective encryption, because citizens are far more afraid of other citizens than they are of the government. That's why governments request backdoors, or pass legislation permitting warrantless searches. Think of it this way: your city council will never be able to pass a law forbidding people from locking their car door, because everyone with a car would be screaming about theft. But they could easily pass a law requiring car manufacturers to provide a master key to law enforcement.
- anoncow 13y ago
  This makes sense. By 'they', I meant governments. I always wondered why no mail/im providers support pgp or similar encryption. This means there never will be such a service, since the only master key would be with the end user.
  - jmillikin 13y ago
    Webmail providers don't provide PGP support because it is not possible to securely implement PGP for webmail. All web-based interfaces are inherently a proxy through a third party, so if you want to read your encrypted mail on the web, you must give your webmail provider the decryption key. Given this, it's better for webmail providers to not pretend to support secure mail.

jweir 13y ago

This feature is great. A bit of a trojan horse - I will keep DuckDuckGo open now and search it before trying that "other" search engine. The goodies (https://duckduckgo.com/goodies https://duckduckgo.com/goodies) are really cool. Although they do not seem to consistently work in the chat client. Some do, some do not.

crazedpsyc 13y ago
A lot of those plugins are written in client-side Javascript, so the bot can't (easily) work with those.

ausjke 13y ago

I must agree that duckduckgo is too long and not cute, a big turn off for people like me, bad naming in my opinion, and it matters a _lot_ plus, duck goes slowly and unstably, again, ugly naming.

Hontano 13y ago