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Popular Pirate Sites ‘Disappear’ from DuckDuckGo’s Top Search Results

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Re: Popular Pirate Sites ‘Disappear’ from DuckDuckGo’s Top Search Results

#91

Post by coldtea »

criddell wrote: post #29
miked85 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want a search engine removing whatever they deem a "conspiracy theory" or "misinformation". I can decide on my own.

Isn't that essentially saying you don't want your search engine ranking by relevance and quality?

No, it's like saying I want the search engine ranking by relevance and quality of search terms and matches.

If I search "we never landed on the moon" I want to see results about those theories, not see them censored because the search engine "knows better".

Re: Popular Pirate Sites ‘Disappear’ from DuckDuckGo’s Top Search Results

#92

Post by mschuster91 »

smaryjerry wrote: post #74
mschuster91 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any person should already be educated on topics such as anti vaccination. The quality of US public schools can vary immensely , especially for students in poor areas where the community can't put up much money and education budgets are the first thing to be slashed. Additionally, many states allow outright lies such as creationism or abstinence-only sex ed to be taught - both of this is further evidence that it can…

Yes there are stupid people out there but it is not the majority, even in poor areas as you are claiming. Let’s say you are even correct that poor people now are too stupid to understand anti vaccination groups are not science based. The solution is not censorship of anti vaccination groups, it is education campaigns to counter this. Education in schools, commercials, websites and social media. Not censorship of bad…

That would require that people are actively interested in being educated. And to be honest most people aren't even in school, much less when they're grown up.

To make it worse, antivaxxers explicitly mistrust science and only trust the blogs and "mama groups" and other crap. How is anything the government, scientists, the media, anyone supposed to overcome that mistrust?

Re: Popular Pirate Sites ‘Disappear’ from DuckDuckGo’s Top Search Results

#93

Post by cortesoft »

miked85 wrote: post #72
cortesoft wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but a search engine has to sort by SOMETHING

Right, but sorting results isn't the same as removing a subset entirely.

Putting something last on a search result of thousands is basically the same as removing it entirely. Hell, even putting it on the second page is basically equivalent to not returning it at all.

Re: Popular Pirate Sites ‘Disappear’ from DuckDuckGo’s Top Search Results

#94

Post by mschuster91 »

textgel wrote: post #83
cortesoft wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I would say is that while it might be true that truth eventually finds a away, the lies can do a lot of damage in the meantime, and can in fact be used to prevent the truth from coming out. For example, take fascist propaganda... the lies are effective, and if left unchecked, can convince people to support fascist leaders, who will then block free speech, preventing the truth from winning out. This is a for…

Perhaps the fixes for the problems we have shouldn't involve some patchwork bodge to the laws that align our principles but should instead start at investigating why we need these bodges in the first place? It's an unthought out idea but between existing slander laws, a reasonable expectation of common sense/reason from your average citizen and a lack of corruption in government; I'm wondering if setting up the syste…

> a reasonable expectation of common sense/reason from your average citizen

Half the US has voted for someone explicitly denying science, half the UK has voted for Brexit, in some areas of Germany 25% vote for people just a few beards short of Nazis, Bolsonaro is still in office. The "average citizen" can not be trusted to vote in their own interest or in the interest of the future generations.

Re: Popular Pirate Sites ‘Disappear’ from DuckDuckGo’s Top Search Results

#95

Post by _23sd »

yakireev wrote: post #84
_23sd wrote: post #77

I see moves like this as seriously harmful. By removing popular pirate sites (already shady enough), search engines steer traffic to even worse places: referral spam blogs, mirrors with malware-laden ads, abandoned and spam-filled forums, etc. Boosting these sites directly aids malware campaigns like SocGholish that use poorly secured blogs and forums to spread trojans that are then used to give access to ransomware…

Harmful for whom? For common folks, who are trying to download a movie but get a virus instead - yes, very harmful. For the parties who have a say about the situation - not really: Google/Bing/DDG lose nothing (given that all search engines behave the same), "copyright holders" win. This is a part of the effort to decrease visibility of piracy and to drive to the "freak" zone: "piracy is illegal and dangerous, so bet…

I think the lesser popularity of piracy with the younger generations is somewhat less about intentional takedown-based anti-piracy efforts and more their preference for mobile devices and the "pirate" options failing to keep up while the legal streaming services are worlds better than they were 10 years ago. Apple not allowing torrent clients on the app store definitely helped, though. That comes back to the broader narrative of the war on general-purpose computers: perhaps the most effective anti-piracy effort of all has been selling people devices that run crippled OSes like iOS and Android instead of Windows.

Re: Popular Pirate Sites ‘Disappear’ from DuckDuckGo’s Top Search Results

#96

Post by Normille »

spurgu wrote: post #52
hiccuphippo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first thing I do when searching for images is `-site:pinterest.com` The quality of results increases immensely.

IIRC Google used to have a dropdown in the search results similar to "Don't show results from this site". Luckily I don't see Yahoo Answers results anymore but would be nice to have Pinterest removed.

If you use Greasemonkey / Tampermonkey, etc. you might want to check out 'Google hit Hider by domain'[0] [in spite of the name, it works on several search engines, not just Google]. It provides a really simple interface to ban [with various levels of extreme prejudice] sites from ever again appearing in your search results.

[0] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...

Re: Popular Pirate Sites ‘Disappear’ from DuckDuckGo’s Top Search Results

#97

Post by _23sd »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #85
_23sd wrote: post #77

I see moves like this as seriously harmful. By removing popular pirate sites (already shady enough), search engines steer traffic to even worse places: referral spam blogs, mirrors with malware-laden ads, abandoned and spam-filled forums, etc. Boosting these sites directly aids malware campaigns like SocGholish that use poorly secured blogs and forums to spread trojans that are then used to give access to ransomware…

> But Hollywood's imaginary lost revenues justify any unintended consequences, right? In their minds, yes. They're absolutely self-righteous about their data monopoly. We had a thread about a content decryption key leak some days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25078096 Here's some fun posts... > Who remembers when TPB were going to buy Sealand in order to host trackers out of the reach of authorities? > Is…

The whole Twitch music DMCA fiasco and the obvious outrage of punishing people for playing their favourite tunes in public made a funny thought occur to me. With the trend toward "smart cities" and "smart vehicles" and the increased surveillance that comes with that, how far are we from the day when the smart freeway Content ID's the music you're playing loudly enough for others to hear and shuts down your car speakers? It's a really asinine dystopia we're headed towards.

Re: Popular Pirate Sites ‘Disappear’ from DuckDuckGo’s Top Search Results

#98

Post by umvi »

coldtea wrote: post #86
ximeng wrote: post #3

The best long term solution to overbearing copyright is to create more content with permissive licenses. E.g. David Revoy creates art using open source software: https://www.davidrevoy.com/ Just as Microsoft and Apple would no doubt have even more locked down OSes if there wasn’t a fallback of Linux, so the more competition for people’s attention that is not controlled by large corporations, the less bargaining and c…

The best long term solution to overbearing copyright is to make people not depend on salaries for living. Because else, all other things like talent being equal, a lot of the best content will be from those that have the income/time (afforded by income)/resources (afforded by income)/practice time (afforded by income)/etc to create it, and thus be given for pay, not with a permissive license. Especially true for thin…

So what should people be dependent on, if not salaries?

Re: Popular Pirate Sites ‘Disappear’ from DuckDuckGo’s Top Search Results

#99

Post by coldtea »

umvi wrote: post #98
coldtea wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best long term solution to overbearing copyright is to make people not depend on salaries for living. Because else, all other things like talent being equal, a lot of the best content will be from those that have the income/time (afforded by income)/resources (afforded by income)/practice time (afforded by income)/etc to create it, and thus be given for pay, not with a permissive license. Especially true for thin…

So what should people be dependent on, if not salaries?

Perhaps you've missed the memo, but it has been discussed quite a lot the past 5 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income

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