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posted by chromas on Thursday January 10 2019, @04:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the time-to-switch-to-dodododogo dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Is this for real? DuckDuckGo has grown in popularity primarily on its claim: We don't track you. Is this no longer true?

DuckDuckGo now fingerprinting visitors

DuckDuckGo is using the Canvas DOMRect API on their search engine. Canvas is used to make unique geometry measurements on target browsers, and DOMRect API uses rectangles. This can be verified with the CanvasBlocker Firefox add-on by Korbinian Kapsner. DDG has recently been redirecting some website navigations to cute pictures with remarks about their privacy promises. The organization is now seeking to expand their Internet presence. DDG are without question data brokers, and commercial websites that make promises like DDG does will not survive for long if they actually keep them.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Thursday January 10 2019, @04:44PM (5 children)

    by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday January 10 2019, @04:44PM (#784541) Journal

    Anyone here using YaCy or other open/distributed search engines?

    I recently installed YaCy on one of my servers and have been experimenting with it a bit. The results are usually slow and poor, but for some things it's alright. Probably I need to spend more than a week building up indexes. Very easy to automate an export of your Firefox history though (Firefox stores them as sqlite files) and feed that in as a crawler, so at least it'll index stuff you've already seen if you need to pull it back up.

    SSL support (without using default self-signed certs) has been giving me a ton of trouble though...to the point where trying to enable it has locked up the server process and screwed up the configuration so bad that I ended up just wiping the container and reinstalling -- more than once. This time I've allocated a hell of a lot more RAM though (8GB and counting...) which seems to be helping, so that might be my main issue.

    I was recently looking for alternatives too though...and did not find any. Anyone here know of any others?

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  • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Thursday January 10 2019, @04:55PM

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Thursday January 10 2019, @04:55PM (#784545) Homepage Journal

    My experiences with experimental technologies, so far, has been disappointing because I invariably find that the hassle of making "it" work just never ends. I don't have experience with YaCy though, so let me know how it turns out for you and if it is worth it. DISCLAIMER: I am back to using google after experimenting with ddg and bing for 1 year.

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 10 2019, @05:09PM (3 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 10 2019, @05:09PM (#784556) Journal

    Look at Searx. https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Installation [github.com]

    I got it working, then promptly screwed it up during configuration. It looks interesting, is why I tried it. But, when interest gets kicked in the head, it wants to take some time off. Maybe it's age - ten years ago, I would have doggedly stayed with it until it worked.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 10 2019, @05:12PM (2 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 10 2019, @05:12PM (#784557) Journal

      Sorry, THIS is the page I worked from for installation - https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/dev/install/installation.html [github.io]

      • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday January 10 2019, @05:55PM (1 child)

        by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday January 10 2019, @05:55PM (#784583) Journal

        I think I might have seen Searx in the Wikipedia list...but it's not really a search engine, it's just an aggregator. So my concerns would be:

        1) It's just forwarding requests to another search engine. If I set up my own instance, then it wouldn't be difficult to correlate my searches against my IP address (my server is in my living room, not some random cloud instance). I don't see how forwarding a request to Google through my own server would be any better than just using Google directly. And if I use someone else's installation, then I just have some lesser-known entity that I have to trust. For a project like this, those are probably less likely to be trying to monetize every single thing that they can, and therefore more trustworthy...but they're also harder to find if they do something illegal, and they might not be keeping up on maintenance and security. So probably more trustworthy but also more risky if they aren't.

        2) I block a lot of stuff on my home network. Including every Google domain I can find. Part of the reason I want to use YaCy is because every time I search on DDG, half the results are blocked. And I WANT them to be blocked, I just don't want them appearing in my results. If I run my own crawler then it can't index anything that my firewall prohibits, so that solves that issue nicely. Although I guess some kind of greasemonkey style script could potentially accomplish that goal as well if YaCy doesn't...

        • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 10 2019, @10:14PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 10 2019, @10:14PM (#784691)

          Searx is nice because it's an aggregator AND it's open source. You can turn engines on/off easily and quickly, and setup takes about 10 minutes if you know how to use a web server and follow their simple instructions. So I can have it search using YaCy and whatever other engines I want. It's particularly nice when you're using it to search documentation.