Comment by zenexer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zenexer | Hacker News Reader

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I performed the following tests for odysee.com, which is mentioned in the video. Google Voice is on a paid Google Workspace plan. AT&T is a Small Business plan. All others are typical consumer plans. Visible is a Verizon subsidiary. Google Fi is an MVNO that routes texts through T-Mobile.

Google Voice -> T-Mobile: blocked

T-Mobile -> Google Voice: blocked

Google Voice -> AT&T: allowed

AT&T -> Google Voice: allowed

Visible -> Google Voice: allowed

Google Voice -> Visible: allowed

AT&T -> Google Fi: blocked

Google Fi -> AT&T: blocked

T-Mobile appears to be the only provider blocking that particular website. (Google Fi routes SMS through T-Mobile.)

But it gets better. Odysee appears misspelled at first glance, so I decided to look it up to make sure it wasn’t a phishing site. I typed it into DuckDuckGo and…

…nothing. Just a bunch of completely unrelated websites. Not even a Wikipedia article. I tried again a few more times—same results. Tried again about 10 minutes later, and I’m finally seeing limited results. The Odysee website appears, but third-party sources discussing it, including Wikipedia, are nowhere to be found.

It’s pretty clear this is a controversial website, but I don’t appreciate this. It makes it orders of magnitude more difficult for someone such as myself to research the matter and communicate with other researchers.

Not only is the site itself being censored, but information about the site is being censored. I’ve noticed this happening quite a bit with DDG lately, particularly with right-leaning and libertarian websites. Google and Bing both show the expected results, but DDG will censor the bulk of it for about 10 minutes. Disabling safe search has no impact, but retrying repeatedly eventually yields valid results. I’m curious whether this is intentional censorship or an unrelated technical issue.

Are you sure about Odysee? When I search it on DDG, it shows Odysee as the first result. Every subsequent result on the first page is a post or article about Odysee, except for a URL to lbry.

FWIW I have safe search and advertisements turned off, region set to "All Regions" and language set to English. Re-trying with safe search strict and I still get the same results.

Yes, I’m sure. It’s been happening to me a lot with DDG lately. Unfortunately, I haven’t been keeping track of the circumstances, but it seems to correlate with my usage of iCloud Private Relay. I suspect it happens when I’m routed through either Cloudflare or Akamai, but not both. Waiting 10 minutes tends to result in a new route.

It’s very odd behavior, but when it happens, it’s as though a particular organization is scrubbed from the search results. I’m regularly researching controversial organizations, so I find this particularly inconvenient, but at least it’s conspicuous.

Occasionally it’ll happen to mainstream sites such as Hulu. That leads me to believe it may be some sort of regional or safe search glitch, but the correct results will eventually reappear without changing any settings. Regardless of the cause, it comes across as censorship—even Wikipedia will be missing from the results.

DDG's not giving me a Wikipedia result for Odysee, but I'm not surprised either, because DDG rarely gives me Wikipedia results for queries in general. Eg I just searched for "dog" and Wikipedia is not in the first page's ten results (two dictionaries, four lists of breeds, two youtube videos, a shelter, and "dog.com"), while it's number one in Google's results.

Kagi seems to be doing great in this regard.

https://i.imgur.com/fHSbPra.png

I have verified that every single result is relevant. I do not believe there is any censorship of these results in my case.

Anyone else? https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Odysee&ia=web

The first results:

odysee.com https://odysee.com

apps.apple.com https://apps.apple.com › us › app › odysee › id1539444143

Odysee: The New YouTube for the Far-Right - GNET Search domain gnet-research.org https://gnet-research.org › 2021 › 02 › 17 › odysee-the-new-youtube-for-the-far-right

Odysee Overview - Reclaim The Net reclaimthenet.org https://reclaimthenet.org › odysee-overview

reclaimthenet.org https://reclaimthenet.org › odysee-better-than-youtube

Odysee: a new video platform backed by LBRY publish0x.com https://www.publish0x.com › ghastly-gaming › odysee-a-new-video-platform-backed-by-lbry-xpjklpk

Odysee aims to build a more freewheeling, independent ... techcrunch.com https://techcrunch.com › 2020 › 12 › 07 › odysee-launch

Free Odysee Video Downloader HD Quality Fast pastedownload.com https://pastedownload.com › odysee-video-downloader

LBRY - Content Freedom Search domain lbry.com https://lbry.com

Etc

What is weird is that if you accept the suggested spell check: Search only for "Odysee"? You get an entirely different set of results, with Odysee filtered out. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Odysee%22

Can confirm. That is really weird

That's weird but I still see results talking about Odysee in the results. Mostly blogs and whatnot with extreme fringe conspiracy stuff like "graphene razor blade" in vaccines and reptilians, pointing to various social media handles including Odysee.

Yup, this is what is happening to me as well.

The answer to why some of you are seeing different test results from each other is context: you, your location, and other identifying information they can use in their firewall rules. If you are testing with SMS, the carrier knows who you are. DDG is supposed to be user neutral, but the Azure server serving the Bing results may have some information such as location. I do not know the relationship between DDG and MS and what data is shared.

I see exactly the same as you - located in EU.

I am located in the EU too. Maybe that's why we see uncensored results? As an American, I sure hope not.

I can't reproduce the DDG experiment on TMO.

I can reproduce OP video's experiment. TMO is absolutely blocking certain SMS content.

i don't exactly know why you're using Bing/DDG, but Google has all the relevant links:

http://google.com/search?rls=en&q=odysee&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Because google sucks in so many ways.

You're saying that Google sucks because they aren't censoring (in this case)?

I am on tmobile, and searching odyssey via ddg gives me all the relevant results (the homepage, wikipedia, etc)

Google is the search engine I see most aggressively editing my results.

that is different. when you use the web everything these days is via HTTPS, which encrypts the content so tmobile can't see what's going on.

TMobile is censoring SMS texts, which is not encrypted.

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