Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG • Hacker News Board

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#171

Post by shadowgovt » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 2:28 AM UTC

paulryanrogers wrote: post #156

jonas-w wrote: post #16

Best approach i think is, they way "ungoogled-chromium" does it. They don't enforce organization policies, but they set the default config to "no search" and then leave it up to the user to change it.

Perhaps a ballot on first run, much like browsers should be in a well regulated market.

My favorite thing is when a government "solves" a market problem by incentivizing forcing a user to choose when most don't care

It worked great for cookies in the EU. Really improved my browsing experience.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#172

Post by shadowgovt » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 2:30 AM UTC

wusher wrote: post #165

yegg wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently the National Advertising Division looked into our privacy claims and found them supported, see https://bbbprograms.org/media-center/newsroom/duckduckgo-pri... & https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/privacy-protection/12106... Also a lot of what we do is open source on GitHub. We recently put out a help page detailing or web tracking protections that link to a lot of the relevant repositories: https://help.duc…

I stopped trusting ddg when they said they were going to sensor Russian news. I assume google and other major search engines sensor political issues but I didn’t think ddg would.

The very nature of a search engine is to rank information. Everything a search engine does implies some information gets relatively down-sampled.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#173

Post by chlorion » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 2:37 AM UTC

unknownaccount wrote: post #92

Can someone please explain why we are supposed to trust DDG? Isnt it just a random website that popped up out of nowhere claiming to be private yet no audit has ever been conducted which substantiated those claims?

Thanks for bringing this up. I don't understand why people seem to automatically trust things just because they advertise as being more "private" than the alternatives. I guess none of us are immune to advertising tactics, but it's so important to remember that they have no obligation to be truthful and will lie every chance they get.

I am not claiming that DDG is bad or anything, I just don't like putting trust into something just because it says "you can totally trust me!".

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#174

Post by wusher » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 2:50 AM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #172

wusher wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped trusting ddg when they said they were going to sensor Russian news. I assume google and other major search engines sensor political issues but I didn’t think ddg would.

The very nature of a search engine is to rank information. Everything a search engine does implies some information gets relatively down-sampled.

It was announced in a very political way. It came across as signaling that they were “doing there part.”

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#175

Post by _-david-_ » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 3:03 AM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #152

_-david-_ wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a list of the blocked domains?

Yeah, I didn't start annotating them until recently though, and like 39700 out of 40000 the domains are blacklisted because of spam. Probably a few false positives in there though but it's 40k domains :-/ You can check if a site is blacklisted using a site:-search like https://search.marginalia.nu/site/news.ycombinator.com

Thanks. That is a great feature.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#176

Post by paulryanrogers » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 3:17 AM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #171

paulryanrogers wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a ballot on first run, much like browsers should be in a well regulated market.

My favorite thing is when a government "solves" a market problem by incentivizing forcing a user to choose when most don't care It worked great for cookies in the EU. Really improved my browsing experience.

You prefer the alternative, whomever owns the platform wins?

There is a spectrum between everyone votes on everything and yielding everything to our corporate overlords. For example there could be an "I don't care" button which picks one at random.

Cookie banners despite their annoyance are educating people and motivating corps to minimize their PII usage.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#177

Post by strken » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 3:37 AM UTC

lohfu wrote: post #118

canadaduane wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only useful for people who know what a search engine is. (Seriously, many people equate "googling" = "search engine", and don't know there is a general category of this thing). Unless there are two big bold buttons on start-up--one that says "Use Google for Search" and the other that says "Use Duck Duck Go for Search"--it would appear broken to them. Even then, almost everyone would pick "Google" just for nam…

i would argue most people that install chromium, not chrome, no what a search engine is. unfortunately, since chromium lost google account login capabilities, i do not install chromium anymore. now i just think "search engine" means "google".

I would argue that even though most people can e.g. walk up stairs or fill in a form or change their browser settings, you should often provide e.g. wheelchair ramps or helpers or sensible defaults for the ones who can't.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#178

Post by brnt » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 3:44 AM UTC

sascha_sl wrote: post #130

brnt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being "managed by" and loading a policy config do not equate in meaning, unless we let PR departments redefine words. Moreover, defaulting to Google is also a policy.

The intent behind policy loading in Chrome is to allow an MDM to configure the browser, not for distros to not write a real patch.

Perhaps. Describing loading a custom policy with "managed by" is still incorrect and potentially misleading.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#179

Post by aendruk » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 3:45 AM UTC

rlpb wrote: post #119

DDG is a more practical default than Google simply because I don't get a "We'd like to abuse your personal data" pop-up that gets in the way every time I open an Incognito window to search for something.

Not sure about Chromium but at least in Firefox you can set a separate default search engine for incognito sessions.

Re: Debian's Chromium changes default search engine to DDG

#180

Post by dotancohen » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 4:15 AM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #170

okasaki wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The messaging does seem excessive and hostile. It says "Managed by your organization." every time you click the menu button. It's even in a different background color and bigger margins. If you click it, it says "Your administrator can change your browser setup remotely. Activity on this device may also be managed outside of Chromium. Learn more" I made the policy myself and copied it myself. The remote part is purel…

So it's in the same category as "this incident will be reported" when forgetting your own password for sudo. Nothing to see here; we can move along.

More along the lines of "printer on fire" due to the perceived urgency. But yes, this message follows in a long tradition of make-the-message-as-scary-as-possible going back literally decades.