searcher1

If you're wondering why a web host, who could potentially be immune to prosecution under CDA 230, was charged with the distribution of child pornography, according to the warrant [1] an admin of one of the pedo sites claimed that Freedom Hosting had "full control" over the websites (well, he had root access to the servers, but so did OVH), was patching the websites, that the pedo site hosting was free, and that he assumed that Marques covered the hosting costs as a service to the "pedo community". Technically the prosecutors might have had to prove that he knew what the sites were hosting, but he did plead guilty. Hopefully the actual operators of the pedo sites are found and prosecuted, and not just this sysadmin.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.247657/...

The military and intelligence needs use of Tor to be functioning and anonymous more than they need hidden services to be functioning and anonymous. The unknown "investigation" technique in this article is about deanonymizing hidden services, not individual Tor users (at least not directly, they used the discovery of the hidden services to send an exploit which has been publicly identified to individual users).

The article explicitly does mention "EgotisticalGiraffe" (the Firefox TBB exploit). But the point is that the exploit was dropped on all websites that Freedom Hosting was running, which raises the question that the article is really about, "how did they know where the hidden services were?"

I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that the simplest explanation for investigations being constantly spiked or important evidence repeatedly disappearing during Epstein's life, is that enough high-ranking officials got invited to "parties" and slept with his underage sex slaves (or worse) on video, and were then blackmailed. The fact that even after his life there aren't gobs of collaborators being arrested also leads me to think that he wasn't even in charge of the whole thing.

Qwant, Ecosia, and (to an extent) DDG share the same Bing backend for web results, so if you're particularly interested in trying out alternatives, here are some others. All of these have their own search indexes.

https://yippy.com - ugly, but probably the best independent search engine outside the "big ones" and DDG

https://private.sh/ - Run by PIA as a proxy for Gigablast, small index but rapidly getting better

https://mojeek.com - UK-based, worth trying but has a spam problem

https://beta.cliqz.com - German based, their technical blog has been posted frequently on HN. Will eventually require a browser extension or their own browser to search.

https://yandex.com - Ought to be mentioned, but certainly not privacy focused.