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posted by
Cactus
on Wednesday February 26 2014, @05:30PM
from the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't dept.
from the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't dept.
Fluffeh writes:
According to TorrentFreak, Google is downranking The Pirate Bay's website in its search results for a wide variety of queries, some of which are not linked to copyright-infringing content. Interestingly, the change mostly seems to affect TPB results via the Google.com domain, not other variants such as Google.ca and Google.co.uk.
It also seems that Google may only be downranking searches that are explicitly looking for copyright-infringing content, not searches that are simply looking for The Pirate Bay itself. It will be interesting to see whether this is a backhanded effort to appease the media companies, or a taste of things to come to all the Google domains.
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Google Downranking The Pirate Bay Searches
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It's raisins that make Post Raisin Bran so raisiny ...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tlezer on Wednesday February 26 2014, @05:46PM
Why can't the tool(google) just search, and not apply a bunch of rules made up by marketing/politicians/etc? Google was great early on because it performed searches quickly and well, providing meaningful results to make order out of the web chaos. Back to basics please
(Score: 2, Insightful) by scruffybeard on Wednesday February 26 2014, @06:03PM
The marketing pays for the stuff that supports the search capability.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tlezer on Wednesday February 26 2014, @06:29PM
Yep, I get that, and I can accept seeing advertisements, just don't compromise the utility of the tool or you will soon find no one left to see your advertising.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dilbert on Wednesday February 26 2014, @06:07PM
I try to use competing search engines and avoid google as much as possible. Startpage/ixquick/duckduckgo all see queries from me.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Sir Garlon on Wednesday February 26 2014, @06:10PM
Given that your search engine decides what you see and don't see, you're wise for using more than one.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 3, Informative) by darnkitten on Wednesday February 26 2014, @06:38PM
Agreed.
Opening a private tab [mozilla.org] before you start the search is also a good idea, if your browser supports it.
(Score: 1) by bucc5062 on Wednesday February 26 2014, @06:56PM
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 3, Funny) by darnkitten on Wednesday February 26 2014, @08:55PM
No, it's just an added layer of personal protection. These firefox extensions, however, are designed to keep the "big G" from tracking you. Read the pages before installing, so you know what they do and with which other extensions they might conflict.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rem ove-google-tracking/?src=search [mozilla.org]o gle-privacy/?src=search [mozilla.org]o gle-no-tracking-url/?src=search [mozilla.org]- google-analytics/?src=search [mozilla.org]c /?src=search [mozilla.org]- cookie-for-google-search/?src=search [mozilla.org]
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/go
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/go
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gd
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no
Also, StartPage [startpage.com] does anonymized Google searching, allowing its special/expert searches.
(Score: 5, Informative) by dilbert on Wednesday February 26 2014, @07:32PM
I use TOR for about 90% of my web browsing, and rotate search engines (avoiding google except when I can't find what I need elsewhere). When I use a regular browser (not TOR), I use noscript, betterprivacy, ghostery, https everywhere, and adblock edge. EFF's Panopticlick shows my browser fingerprint as fairly common.
I'm extreme so I take it one step further: I do all of the above inside a VirtualBox VM which I refresh back to a pristine state (via snapshot) every so often which prevents any unknown (to me) tracking methods to work across browsing sessions.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2014, @07:45PM
(Score: 1) by metamonkey on Wednesday February 26 2014, @08:13PM
Holy shit man. Are you like an IRL ninja or secret agent or something?
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
(Score: 5, Informative) by SMI on Wednesday February 26 2014, @08:37PM
I see your NoScript, BetterPrivacy, httpsEverywhere, and AdBlock, and raise you RequestPolicy, ModifyHeaders, Disconnect.me, and SecretAgent.
Not as much of a fan as Ghostery, though. Also, wise move with the VM.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by darnkitten on Wednesday February 26 2014, @09:11PM
Hey...slightly offtopic, but--I used to use HttpsEverywhere on shared computers (I run a small library), but had to disable, as I was getting certificate error messages from popular email and social networking sites (ie., Google and facebook). These would require me to reset the cert8 file to resolve. Do you know if that is still happening?
HttpsEverywhere seems such an obvious fit for public computers, but having to fix them 2-3 times a week got real old real fast.
(Score: 3, Informative) by SMI on Wednesday February 26 2014, @09:34PM
I can't speak re: popular email and social networking sites (ie., Google and Facepalm), as I avoid them like the plague, but I can tell you that I've never had any problems with HttpsEverywhere. If your issues were more than a few months ago, maybe try again? I doubt that such an issue would be allowed to simmer very long...
Furthermore, you might look into changing rulesets [eff.org].
(Score: 1) by darnkitten on Friday February 28 2014, @03:06AM
Thanks. It has been a while. I'll have to test it on one or two of the machines and see what happens.
Me too, but most of the patrons who come in to use the public computers are just there to use FB or other social sites. I never see the problems until the patrons trigger them.
(Score: 2) by SMI on Friday February 28 2014, @03:13AM
"I never see the problems until the patrons trigger them."
I understand completely.
(Score: 2, Informative) by spxero on Wednesday February 26 2014, @10:16PM
Don't forget to add Self-Distructing Cookies to your addon list!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by philovivero on Thursday February 27 2014, @06:44AM
This is not particularly useful.
What we need is for someone to generate such a VM image and distribute it so that all that crazy stuff you mentioned (about 1/3 of which I haven't even heard of) is already set up and functional.
The 2/3 of that I've heard of I think it would take me weeks to be 100% sure I've set them up properly and test them to be sure there isn't some trivial mistake I made that makes me uniquely identifiable.
(Score: 2) by SMI on Thursday February 27 2014, @05:29PM
Useful is subjective.
If you're looking for an image to get started with, I would recommend either Tails [boum.org] or Liberte Linux [dee.su]. First thing to be aware of is that putting either one on optical media is the safest method.
Additionally, it's important to note that these, like the FF add-ons previously referred to, are just tools. A hammer is useless to someone who doesn't know what it is or what it can do. What we all really need is comprehension of how the modern internet is designed, so that we can all individually make informed choices regarding what information we want to expose, as well as which sites and services we want our computers to interact with. The first thing to understand about security in any context is that it is an on-going process, not an end in itself.
Lastly, don't fault yourself or get discouraged because of the learning curve. We all have to start somewhere.
(Score: 1) by GeminiDomino on Thursday February 27 2014, @06:05PM
I've got pretty much the same set of extensions, except that I use RequestPolicy along with NS and ABE, and I don't use Ghostery (it murders performance is one reason, this [businesswire.com] is another). I switched to Disconnect after that.
Let me ask you: what do you run in that VM? I've thought for awhile it might be useful to have a small, lightweight OS just for tasks like full-featured browsing, rather than running a full Xubuntu install just to surf the web without too much hassle.
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 1) by dilbert on Thursday February 27 2014, @08:36PM
FYI, Ghostery does let you opt out of the data collection but I'm always looking for more effective/freedom respecting tools. Thanks for the recommendation, I'll have to check out Disconnect (+1 over Ghostery for being open source).
The VM is running Mint 16 'Petra'. Once everything is properly configured, the snapshot can be in a powered off/on state depending on preference. A snapshot in an 'on' state will result in a larger snapshot size as it includes the contents of the VM's RAM while a snapshot in an 'off' state will be smaller but require the VM to boot each use.
The entire process takes only a few seconds per browsing session, which is a small inconvenience for a significant increase in privacy.
(Score: 1) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 27 2014, @03:54PM
Oh hey, it looks like Google finally fixed their weird behavior where when I searched on "QC", the first result was Questionable Content but I'm Feeling Lucky-ing it took me to some marketing page instead. Nice.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"