rixthefox

My only reason for not using SearXNG is it seems like the complete opposite of what you want for a search engine replacement. The one shining point of using Kagi, Google, Bing or DDG is that only ONE search engine is getting my search query. With SearXNG you've now taken your search query and sent it all over the place which I don't personally believe is better. My goal is to get my searches OUT of other companies hands, not thrust it directly to all of them all the time.

Additionally, by running a private instance you have effectively given all these companies a spotlight onto YOU. Only your searches are going to come from that instance and these companies already have enough information they can figure out WHO is making that search pretty much right after you click through the first result.

Just from the available public instances you can quickly see that other search engines may block your requests for one reason or another but your server will be constantly retrying to query them from time to time. Last thing I want is to find my IP addresses on some sort of "naughty list" because I wasn't honoring some 403 error my server was getting every time I searched something.

There is nothing that says other search engines won't wise up and figure out how to stop searx from "abusing" their search functions so it almost feels like the only sure way to ensure search privacy is to run your own crawler, for better or worse.

Curious then to hear your thoughts then. If a person can't afford "vacation" what incentives do they have to take them then? Fundamentally you're saying that vacation days should be used like sick days.

So in reality the only people who can afford to have a real vacation are the ultra rich? So people like Elon Musk who feel like the world owes them attention because they are richer than any of us combined and have this constant need to flex that wealth to "own the poor" are okay?

Meanwhile these same rich people will have a heart attack if you so much as dare ask for a living wage that adjusts for inflation. How dare you take away their hard earned money? Right?

I don't propose any alternatives to advertisements. The simple fact of the matter is that as long as people also need to pay for mobile data or are subject to data caps that advertisements are a giant waste of bandwidth and at their very worst a distribution method for malware and other malfeasance on the web. It's a giant "pay for placement" that has no regulation because as long as the advertising companies are making money hand over fist they have no obligation to police the content being pushed through their networks because they get paid either way!

The age old use of advertisements that were generic and placed on TV channels were IMHO the "peak" of what advertising could be. All other forms of advertisements have proven to be predatory. Sites DEMAND you view their ads so that they can receive money to keep the site going.... That inevitably results in traffic to the site going elsewhere and the same result is that the site dies so I absolutely agree that if the site/product requires continuous profit through advertisements because otherwise it would not be able to continue operating then maybe that site/product does not need to continue existing.

I’m more impressed that places are still trying to hold onto IP Reputation in the age of CGNAT where the age old assumption that 1 IP mapped to 1 customer’s house is completely shattered to 1 IP shared in a geographical region.

Given that Canada Airlines killed their Chatbot because they were legally held accountable for the policy their chatbot had created in their case, I think many of these companies are thinking twice before allowing an LLM to respond to people out of fear of the words of the chatbot making legal issues for them.

Ubisoft Director of Subscriptions really opened the floodgates of bad behavior when they came out saying "Gamers need to get comfortable with not owning their games".

I think these companies need to be reminded they do not own our PCs either.

I'm really starting to like that mantra of "If buying isn't owning then piracy isn't stealing".

On the latest iPhones, SOS mode is the emergency fallback to satellite service. It's really meant to be used in situations where you're well outside of any sort of service area but you have a clear, unobstructed view of the sky.

Your iPhone will instruct you on where to point and help you track an emergency satellite that is manned by live humans who will take your emergency request and relay it to the proper people.

More specific info here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/104992

* huge asterisk since I pay to use it and feel the need to disclose that upfront.

Kagi is a very strong and viable candidate IMHO. The search is actually useful and I’ve noticed on a few occasions that my search was “too focused” and yielded “no results found” and I had to rethink my query to better find what I was looking for. Google on the other hand would have spared no opportunity to spam my results with ads even if it couldn’t find what I was looking for. Anything to put more ads in my face.

Hiding the fact that they did it by intentionally giving false answers is in no way clever or even smart. You aren't following the rules just because you make it so you can't give the correct answer. You just convince me that your product has nothing of value to add because every response is now clouded by doubt.

Edit:

I just ran my same lyrics test with Bard and it passed 100%. It gave me the full lyrics and chorus using part of the lyrics as input, not telling it specifically what song to use. So in my experience Bard is now better than ChatGPT even though nothing about ChatGPT has changed other than OpenAI has lobotomized it.

I think this is an S+ tier example of why you shouldn't pay for ChatGPT.

I just tried for a few minutes to try and have it "help me remember song lyrics" and where it is somewhat correctly guessing the songs, it's disheartening to watch it absolutely butcher it. I can see they are trying to appeal to copyright but this is not how you do it.

If I was a CEO of a company and I was considering paying money for ChatGPT this would be the demo that convinces me not to. What use is an AI to me that can't even get song lyrics that I can find literally anywhere else on the web? The only thing you're doing in my eyes is making an absolute fool of yourself showing just how much your willing to break your own product to the benefit of what?

It's a fool's errand to intentionally hobble your own AI, if anything you're exactly making the case why we SHOULDN'T use your AI and instead use anything else that will be unrestricted. AI is being killed in the cradle by copyright.

I'm not worried about AI taking over if this is going to be the result.

TY for making the extension. As someone who uses it daily, you are my saving grace and my go-to for telling when a website has enabled IPv6 or not, if it wasn't you making this post that's how I would have found out HN had enabled it too.

I get fun questions from people when I screenshare and they notice the green "6" or the red "4" and ask about it. Sure it doesn't do anything fancy behind the scenes but that's also what makes it perfect.

> don’t look at ads on social media

If Google has its way, you won’t have a choice. How do you convince companies not to advertise on X or YouTube?

This is the wrong assumption to make. I can tell you as someone with a powerful rig that is by no stretch a "slouch" sitting at 0% CPU and 0% GPU I have seen Youtube act like garbage for absolutely no reason. I've even had video playback skip ahead a second as well and it throws me off when watching videos.

> Get a faster computer

or... and keep up with me here. Google has been known to do A/B testing on users. Just because your part of "B" group that doesn't see it doesn't mean that it's not happening. It only means Google is artificially putting their thumb on the scale and I take serious issue with people handwaving issues with "get a better computer" Nothing is wrong with my computer and only Youtube has this issue, any other video platform does not do this so why is it only Youtube?

Here here I was just about to post the same thing!

Boeing needs to be held responsible. Absolutely no way should the FAA grant Boeing an exemption for these planes under ANY circumstances. The planes have proven themselves to be dangerous and Boeing is doing nothing to fix them because it would hurt their bottom line.

This company needs to be investigated to the fullest extent by the FAA. The fact that this newest plane was only just rolled off the factory assembly line 2 months ago… a plane doesn’t just rip itself apart in less than two months. Something is seriously wrong at Boeing.

Besides stating the obvious, SMS already been replaced by other messaging protocols. So what exactly are we paying the carriers to do at this point besides being glorified ISPs of their own that just happen to hold frequency licenses for the Cellular data bands our devices use to communicate on said network?

I already knew SMS was insecure and send in plain text, knowing it's now also being censored and blocked without any warning from the carrier is just the last nail in the coffin for me for SMS. So when will we be able to tell these carriers to no longer provision a phone number but instead just issue me an IP address? It's clear they will mess with anything going over their network so now let's just send everything over TLS and HTTPS and cut them out entirely.

Came to the same conclusion myself.

The only “safe” email host is the one you run yourself or pay for with actual dollars, not data.

The hard part is taking your second paragraph to action. Most people are not ready for that conversation because the major freemail providers have been in service for such a long time that most people really can’t grasp the concept that email is something you have to pay for.

I really blame a lot of that on Google from the very beginning. Gmail, and essentially all free mail providers, are what they are today because of the precedent Google set and the only way companies were going to be able to compete with that was to also make their email services free.

> most people realize that their Outlook/Hotmail email service is defective

This is exactly what I've begun telling people and warning friends and family members about. I run my own email... well I run my own ISP at this point and we have our own dedicated block of IPv6 addresses but still rely on IPv4 addresses from our cloud providers and I've started to grow frustrated by the lack of movement by the incumbent email providers that I've started just straight up telling people don't expect any email delivery from me if you're using any provider that still lacks proper IPv6 on their SMTP servers.

It's no longer my problem and I will happily tell people that their email provider is defective and that they need to find a new host. If that is too much for them, to bad so sad not my problem. I did everything I could do. At some point you have to stop trying to work around "Big Cloud" and their nonsense.

I disagree. I don't believe that would solve spam you would just force the spammers to use much more aggressive tactics. If you introduce a fee to email you're only hurting the people who actively communicate back and forth via email as a primary method. Mailing lists anyone?

Spammers will take your $0.02 fee per email as an operational expense. Most spam is not sent by the spammers themselves from their own servers but are instead relayed through a third party who handles the delivery part on their behalf who are paid money to run these spam campaigns through their servers instead anyways so they are already paying a fee, this is just an extra cost on top of what they are already paying to do it.

As a addendum to this. I think many of the J6 crowd thought the same thing when posts they made online were used in evidence against them. You may have nothing to hide, but like Snowden said: "Saying you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say"*

In both situations there is a loss of privacy and autonomy. At some point people just shut down, for the same reasons people behave differently when they know they are under surveillance verses when they think they're not.

*paraphrasing

I expect people in 2023 to understand parental controls.

The one question I want to ask these government officials is "Where are the parents?"

If underage children are accessing explicit content, it is the parents, not the websites that are at fault. Why are you handing children devices that are not parental locked to only permit applications that have been approved by the parent?

If the parent fails to properly vet the apps they allow their children to use then it is the parent that needs to be questioned. Pushing this requirement onto websites and services is moving the goal posts. If the parents are too technically inept or unwilling to police their children's devices then they should not be handing them to their children.

The problem is these studios don't seem to get or understand that nobody likes the subscription model. Nobody likes to feel like they spend thousands of dollars a year to essentially own nothing.

When you bought a DVD in the past it was incredibly easy for you to take that DVD and as long as you have a DVD player you can rewatch that movie over and over again without having to pay another dime for the privilege to do so. Now you have to contend with licenses expiring and a show you wanted to watch on Netflix (for example) is now no longer available because people at the C-level can't stop being greedy and pushing for more and more money.

Edit: Not to say the subscription model is completely wrong. It's actually a very compelling model, pay once each month for access to an entire catalogue of movies and TV shows is amazing. It's just really frustrating to watch streaming platforms hemorrhage content as the original media owners look towards higher licensing fees or even consider standing up their own streaming service, making yet another streaming service you have to pay for to access content.

I disagree. Forging DNSSEC requires LE to strong arm the domain registrar to modify the DS keys per domain which would also require them pointing to an adversary DNS server to answer those requests with a valid signature. That action would definitely be noticed. Without DNSSEC you are back to square 1 of unsigned DNS that can be modified in-flight, a much worse situation. I personally believe we should be advocating for more DNSSEC, not less.

What I think you're advocating for is that DNSSEC should have it's own transparency log that shows when domains update or cycle their DNSSEC KSK/ZSKs which is a great idea, we would just need to get all the domain registrars on board as well which as we can already see with the transparency project, you can't get buy in from everyone.

Wayland never fails to impress me with how much stuff has still been left out (are screenshots still broken?) that it hardly shocks me to learn that it doesn't support screensavers.

Progress over many years worth of time. This is why whenever people ask me what display I run it's always X. X is a piece of work for sure but it's the only display server that actually works for almost every conceivable use case. Despite all the time and effort Wayland devs have spent to try and wrest control over the Linux graphical rendering server they are still a long ways from replacing X for good.

> The moment the Cloudflare dictatorship becomes less benevolent…[]

In my eyes they have already done that. ICYMI I highly suggest checking out their response and subsequent blog post around the Kiwifarms incident.

That whole debacle was enough to prove to me they learned nothing and are going to continue down this path. I migrated web services and closed my account with them shortly after that whole thing.

Cloudflare routinely ignores abuse reports for its network and takes no responsibility for the utter garbage being carried across their network. It’s almost comical how they so desperately cling to the claim that they are “just a dumb pipe” on one side of the house and on the other a “serious security vendor” who is “protecting the web” while blocking out users simply for the “crime” of trying to preserve their privacy.

If they wanted to convince me they had the web’s best interest at heart they wouldn’t host half the sites they do. They would actually respond to abuse reports and take abusive websites offline rather than wait for it to hurt their bottom line and reputation before taking action but they don’t.

> You have no idea what you're talking about.

I said it in force, you took it too literally. I don't care who they are or what their "achievements" are. If you care about improving security to the point that you will create patches on top of a open source program and then turn around and lock them behind an EULA that prevents people from sharing that code with the rest of the world you're not helping the security landscape at all. All your doing is making security something that only a select few will actually be able to pay for which is where I take the most issue.

If the GRSecurity team was actually invested in improving the security of the kernel they would be working to submit those patches to mainline. I have not seen any effort to refute this.

Edit: So again, because they work behind closed doors I'm just supposed to take their security contributions at face value without any way to audit what they have done? Again I ask again. How does that improve security? Security through obscurity is not security.

Whatever I do not wish to argue this.

> from the folks who invented almost every major security mitigation in modern computers

I wouldn't praise them that much. Linus himself called the code quality "questionable" at best and for people who care so much about "improving the security landscape" by walling off the very contributions that can help keep others safe online.... I don't really care what they put on their CV I wouldn't want them on my security team.

If true security is something you can only achieve by having "hidden" patches, I don't buy your snakeoil and will gladly take security advice with the people who actually share that information rather than lock it behind a paywall.

Edit: This is not to say if your contributing a lot of time and effort into securing the Linux kernel that you shouldn't get paid, you should. I just think you need to be realistic. If the patches work, cool. Now work on making it capable to be merged into the mainline tree. If your not actively contributing to the product as a whole then the only thing your doing is building a business solely to keep those patches working. That does not inspire confidence with me. God forbid the company go under and all that work never makes it into the main tree. Now you've wasted yours and everyone else's time. You have furthered Cyber Security by exactly 0 points. Good job.

Both groups of people who have no direct understanding of how any of this works.

You can demand change all you want but it doesn't change how the real world works. These people need to come off their high horse and come join the rest of us. So sick and tired of C-level people demanding shit they know nothing about.

This was kind of my experience as well. I switched from my Pixel 4 to an iPhone 14 and as much as I was distraught to even have been considering an iPhone (for reference my last iDevice was the iPod Touch 4th Gen iOS 6.1.2) I felt like I couldn't deal with getting yet another phone that wasn't going to do what I needed it to do.

The final straw for me was when I was sitting at home one night and a family member calls me exasperated saying "I've been trying to call you all day". I had no missed call notification and no voicemail notice. Sure enough I log into my voicemail and there is 20+ messages waiting. If Google can't even get basic functionality like CALLING to work I had no intention of sticking around waiting for a future update that would magically fix it.

I made the realization that I need a phone that works and will continue to receive updates for at least 7 years. The Pixel 4 was released on October 2019 and received it's last update from Google in February of this year. The iPhone 6S was released in September of 2015 and it's only JUST reaching EOL after 7 years of continuous support by Apple.

If Google wants to stop the bleeding they are going to need to fix the basics. They are also going to need to pledge to support the phones longer. The fact that I can purchase a $1,000 iPhone and it will last me 7 years vs buying a $1,000 Pixel that will only last me 3-4 years, I don't need to be a mathematician to see which is the better option.

Personally whenever I find videos I like on YouTube I will immediate send them into yt-dlp and save it locally to view after the fact.

At this point the amount of advertising has become so pervasive that I’ve lost all care. This “monetization” game as far as I’m concerned is blackmail to creators as their content is heavily regulated by the platform and god forbid you say the wrong thing and then all the money you would get per view goes away but the ads will continue playing because someone else is going to get that money.

What a scam.