231–240 of 436 posts
Succumbing to an onerous government is something companies with $100b+ in the bank just have to do to survive, like classify workers as contractors to not pay health care or move profits around to not pay taxes.
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It's funny you say that. DDG, 2 years ago, was hard for me to use (less relevant). The last 3 months especially, they are about the same. I have a limited search set though...mostly .NET code searches.
I personally find that for a lot of queries, especially ones of the "trivial" or "smart" kind where I'm looking for some old meme or bit of fandom trivia, DDG often returns results that are noticeably worse. Not much worse, and not always - but often enough that if I don't find something on DDG, I frequently try the same search on Google anyway. That said, DDG isn't that much worse than Google in terms of search qual…
Search terms about human rights, democracy, religion and peaceful protests will be among the words blacklisted in the search engine app This is disgusting! I am not using Google Search anymore because of Firefox+DDG, but where are alternatives to YouTube, Gmail, Gmaps?
PeerTube as a YouTube alternative Fastmail, tutanota, protonmail, etc. as a Gmail alternative OpenStreetMap as a Google maps alternative.
I can wholeheartedly endorse them. One other benefit is that they actually have real live humans doing customer support. I haven't needed it much (only when I was setting up my custom domain and feature requests), but it's very reassuring to know it's there.
It was the stories of people who were permanently locked out of their gmail accounts with no recourse and no one to call that ultimately caused me to abandon Google.
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Except there is clear evidence that FastMail employees are able and willing to read through your personal emails, and they've become actively user-hostile in their support: https://twitter.com/shazow/status/1021570521987731458 Make of it what you will, but I worked at Google for a time and I came out more convinced that my data is safer there. This was 2012 so maybe things have changed since then, but we need better…
Employee A reading email X does not scale. Google reading everyone's email with ever-better AI systems does scale, and is a much bigger threat to freedom, political or economical.
There might be many tech companies in China, no doubt, including big names, and companies should comply with local regulations if they want to do business, however the fact that Google pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts, is one big reason for why I respected Google, in spite of my reservations for them. So let me tell you what I think as an EU citizen that's actively concerned…
> we now have concrete proof that they don't have values that are above their bottom line. I had the same reaction. Back in the day, there was this common belief tech companies had a certain set of values and would draw a line. Now? It's always about the money. Welcome to the decline of Western Civilization.
google: "your search did not match any documents"
"alternative political parties"
google: "your search did not match any documents"
...that said the titanic amount of noise and misinformation on the web itself becomes a sort of censorship.
Where are the troves of Googler's who were against helping the US military? They're totally cool with helping China censor information?
Yes, people that support the PRC regime tend to also oppose the US military. How is this even the least bit surprising?
Google is now a willing and active participant in the coverup of massive human rights violations, including the open air murder of political protesters. If you pay for AdSense or G Suite, or even consume the "free" services, you are financing this.
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No it doesn't. The regulations in China are immoral. Obeying immoral laws is also immoral. (If the law says 'gas the [ethnic group]' it is still wrong to do it). If Google must follow immoral laws to operate in China, they should not operate in China. I don't have any pull with the PRC but I can boycott Google.
It sounds like you might be missing a few things. Private companies are, by definition, private entities responsible for prioritizing whatever and however they choose. If you want to have input in a powerful entity, I really recommend starting a government. If you have an old one layout around, maybe dust if off and use that, but it’ll probably take some work. I don’t know where you live, but in the US, there’s a bun…
Using a private company to earn an income and then saying "I can't do anything about [bad thing company is doing], companies are by their nature amoral profit chasing beasts" is moral cowardice.
If you work for or with that evil entity, you can do something about it. That it would impact your comfortable lifestyle is not really relevant to the moral calculus.
The only thing that will make things better is many people individually doing the right thing.
There might be many tech companies in China, no doubt, including big names, and companies should comply with local regulations if they want to do business, however the fact that Google pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts, is one big reason for why I respected Google, in spite of my reservations for them. So let me tell you what I think as an EU citizen that's actively concerned…
> pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts They didn't pull their search engine out of China because of censorship requests, they pulled their search engine because the government kept trying to hack them and steal their source code, which they eventually did. So Google up and left. Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303493904575167... They like to cite censorship a…
Thanks for sharing, I've only ever heard the "PR" flavor of why they left. This makes more sense.