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DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

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Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#31

Post by siddboots »

AlexMax wrote: post #16
latch wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG logs very litte information...so while NSA can subpoena DDG, there's no data to get. Developers should read "Playing chicken with cat.jpg" [1] which was a response from cperciva [2] to the 37 Signals privacy blunder. It was discussed quite a bit on HN [3] and for me it was a perspective-changing read on privacy. [1] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-01-19-playing-chicken-w... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/u…

Why bother asking DDG itself when traffic can be intercepted and logged at their ISP?

That's why you should https everywhere.

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#32

Post by Kylekramer »

spodek wrote: post #18

Google's strategy is to profit from advertising. It fundamentally benefits from knowing as much about its users as possible. Every tactic it has will always support that strategy or it will risk failure. You can tell its strategy motivates it toward evil (its term, not mine), because its slogan is "Don't be evil." It chose that slogan because it risks being evil, in its own terms. It doesn't need a slogan like "Don't…

Isn't DuckDuckGo's strategy to profit from advertising? Does that mean it will inevitably become "evil"?

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#33

Post by siddboots »

clicks wrote: post #6
theGimp wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, DDG claims not to keep a record of your searches, so a subpoena would not provide anyone with much information.

Yep, exactly. Now, this makes me wonder: What could be an equivalent implementation for e-mails. An e-mail host that encourages immediate download, totally deletes e-mail contents, deletes logs of any sort, etc. when you delete messages?

> An e-mail host that encourages immediate download, totally deletes e-mail contents, deletes logs of any sort, etc. when you delete messages?

That would be POP3.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#34

Post by Fice »

clicks wrote: post #6
theGimp wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, DDG claims not to keep a record of your searches, so a subpoena would not provide anyone with much information.

Yep, exactly. Now, this makes me wonder: What could be an equivalent implementation for e-mails. An e-mail host that encourages immediate download, totally deletes e-mail contents, deletes logs of any sort, etc. when you delete messages?

The first thing to do is to avoid using the most popular email hosts. The world's email should not be centralized around some popular service like Gmail, but should be distributed over many hosts and countries.

And we also need distributed search engines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_search_engine).

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#35

Post by m-r-a-m »

Kiro wrote: post #25

I hope people are aware of the fact that DDG does not have its own index and is using Bing under the hood.

"DuckDuckGo gets its results from over one hundred sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, which are stored in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), WolframAlpha, Bing, and Yandex." [1]

[1] http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#36

Post by dotmanish »

arnoooooo wrote: post #26
Yrlec wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct, I was drawing the wrong conclusions from how the HTTP headers are sent. It doesn't affect how much info the ISP gets. However, POST parameters are somewhat more secure, since less info about your query is cached by your browser: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/198462/is-either-get-or-p...

POST parameters also usually won't show up in logs, unlike GET parameters.

Whose logs?

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#37

Post by dotmanish »

Amarandei wrote: post #17

Too bad the actual search results are not relevant at all. I tried searching for something and I switched back to Google in the end.

For the searches that don't bring relevant results, I choose the "Give Feedback" option and report Bad Results. Then I add "!g" to the search and continue.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#39

Post by jusben1369 »

Kylekramer wrote: post #32
spodek wrote: post #18

Google's strategy is to profit from advertising. It fundamentally benefits from knowing as much about its users as possible. Every tactic it has will always support that strategy or it will risk failure. You can tell its strategy motivates it toward evil (its term, not mine), because its slogan is "Don't be evil." It chose that slogan because it risks being evil, in its own terms. It doesn't need a slogan like "Don't…

Isn't DuckDuckGo's strategy to profit from advertising? Does that mean it will inevitably become "evil"?

No! Because it has cleverly avoided having any reference to "evil" in its slogan.

Re: DuckDuckGo Sees Record Traffic After NSA PRISM Scandal

#40

Post by waffle_ss »

jacobparker wrote: post #2

They run a tor exit enclave which is really, really, cool; there is a blog post about it here: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/08/duckduckgo-now-o... One motivation for switching: they have lots of "gadgets" like Google, and will take suggestions and/or apparently let you develop new ones. Here is a cool example: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Programming/crontab_0_0______... Another useful feature: https://…

The Tor Project [discourages exit enclaves][1]:

Overall the use of enclaves is not advised for these two main reasons:

- They will not be supported in future versions of Tor (> 0.2.3.x)

- They do not fit any particular threat model

[1]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ExitEnclav...

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