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The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

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Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#101

Post by veave »

Barrin92 wrote: post #91
kypro wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a comment a few years back how I was using Yandex quite a bit at the time because there are things I'm simply unable to find on Google – sites like sci-hub for example. Today though I find myself using it daily. The results are far from perfect, but I've never suspected them to be randomly hiding or suppressing search results like many of the popular Western alternatives. I don't use image search much, but ye…

>but I've never suspected them to be randomly hiding or suppressing search results the word 'random' must be doing a lot of work in that sentence given that they are subject to Roskomnadzor's regulations and are thus forced not just arbitrarily but systematically censor content: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/01/a-window-into-yandex...

But us westerners usually don't care much about that kind of censorship because it doesn't affect the searches we normally do. ("normally" as in "we usually don't search stuff about russian politics")

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#102

Post by xenator »

0xDEF wrote: post #63
tenpies wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Western billionaire versus Russian oligarch - even if the source of wealth is virtually identical and their political power probably higher in the West.

>Also Western billionaire versus Russian oligarch - even if the source of wealth is virtually identical and their political power probably higher in the West. The term "oligarch" has a specific meaning and, surprisingly, Western media uses the term correctly about the subset of corrupt Russian and Ukrainian businessmen who got rich in the 1990s by buying billions worth of state monopolies for pennies. I have never se…

Oligarch means businessman who have monopoly in some field. So, it is not very different from old money in Europe. Or corporations in USA.

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#103

Post by atahanacar »

sva_ wrote: post #53
kypro wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a comment a few years back how I was using Yandex quite a bit at the time because there are things I'm simply unable to find on Google – sites like sci-hub for example. Today though I find myself using it daily. The results are far from perfect, but I've never suspected them to be randomly hiding or suppressing search results like many of the popular Western alternatives. I don't use image search much, but ye…

> sites like sci-hub for example To be fair, that is not Google's fault. It always cracks me up that when you see the DMCA note on the bottom and you click on it, you get to see the hosts anyways: https://lumendatabase.org/notices/26024315

That is how I search for pirated content.

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#104

Post by simoncion »

dijit wrote: post #75
azangru wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That campaign seems to have ended, and nobody cares if your project has either anymore. Has the movement to rename every master branch to main quietened down as well?

Only because it was successful.

There are many active 'master' branches at work, and many, many active 'master' branches on Github.

By that measure, the movement to rename every 'master' branch to 'main' has been a resounding failure.

(If you look at the events at the time it sprung up, you could pretty safely say that it was encouraged as a way to distract from the then-current "GitHub is doing business with US's ICE!" hatestorm, and man was it successful.)

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#105

Post by dindobre »

roenxi wrote: post #48
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #13

>Do we want, at a time when Russia is considering the UK as an enemy, to be providing all our personal details to a server in Moscow? Depends how good the search is. Google doesn’t seem to want to provide me proper results anymore, even very basic image search tasks on google now net you only about 20 results all of which are wrong or useless. Yandex image search actually works. If you don’t want me to use the Russia…

There is a reasonable argument that, as a minor nobody, we should rather use services from hostile countries. It isn't feasible for Russia to to compel someone in an English-speaking country to do something unpleasant. That is a lot more than can be said for the local police or politicians. Russian corruption doesn't generally touch Western governments - the atmosphere is too hostile to it.

>Russian corruption doesn't generally touch Western governments

No offense but the fact that someone on HN could get to this conclusion is rather shocking to me. Western Europe has plenty of russian corruption and I'm afraid the ongoing war has unearthed only a fraction of it.

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#106

Post by gostsamo »

roenxi wrote: post #48
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #13

>Do we want, at a time when Russia is considering the UK as an enemy, to be providing all our personal details to a server in Moscow? Depends how good the search is. Google doesn’t seem to want to provide me proper results anymore, even very basic image search tasks on google now net you only about 20 results all of which are wrong or useless. Yandex image search actually works. If you don’t want me to use the Russia…

There is a reasonable argument that, as a minor nobody, we should rather use services from hostile countries. It isn't feasible for Russia to to compel someone in an English-speaking country to do something unpleasant. That is a lot more than can be said for the local police or politicians. Russian corruption doesn't generally touch Western governments - the atmosphere is too hostile to it.

check how many western politicians went to work for gasprom or other russian government companies and talk again.

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#107

Post by morkalork »

dessant wrote: post #37
GaggiX wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I found ridiculous about Google today is the image reverse search, unusable, but I have an extension to use the previous one before Google Lens was a thing.

The classic reverse image search results from Google will not be around for much longer, I've been getting reports about my browser extension no longer working with Google Images in some regions. Yandex Images also possibly going away or becoming heavily censored is also an issue for journalists and researchers, since it is the best performing publicly available reverse image search engine.

What, you don't like the reverse image product search? You want actual... images? Not thumbnails of stuff you can buy from rando websites? How anti-consumer of you!

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#108

Post by unsupp0rted »

talldatethrow wrote: post #89
unsupp0rted wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that time a year ago in February when the Namecheap CEO gave every person with a Russian ID, living inside and outside Russia, 1-week notice that their account is terminated and they have to host elsewhere? Including expats, refugees, objectors, what have you. Your contract with Namecheap is terminated for being connected to Russia. Prove to us you're not, if you want to keep your service. His justification?…

[flagged]

Whatever a person's stance on ongoing political events or active conflicts, punishing them en masse for choosing to be born on the wrong side of an arbitrary border is nonsensical.

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#109

Post by justrealist »

azangru wrote: post #67
londons_explore wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It mostly happens via private messaging, but yes. It's part of the "you are either with us or against us" mentality of many campaign groups. See ~2 years ago when every opensource project was forced to publish a code of conduct and diversity and inclusion policy... Often the people asking for the policies weren't even users of the software involved, let alone interested in writing code for the proect. That campaign s…

> That campaign seems to have ended, and nobody cares if your project has either anymore. Has the movement to rename every master branch to main quietened down as well?

GitHub changed the default to "main" so 95% of new projects will default there.

Re: The Yandex leak: How a Russian search giant uses consumer data

#110

Post by justrealist »

londons_explore wrote: post #46
boeingUH60 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Oligarchs" refer to underground Russian businessmen that cheaply bought up state assets after the USSR collapsed and sold it for exceedingly higher sums later. It's a blasphemy to capitalism to conflate those bandits with Western entrepreneurs that founded and built their own companies from scratch, even though they have their own set of issues.

> cheaply bought up state assets In the west, we call that "privatization", and it happens pretty frequently, and it's common for the process to be technically open, but practically exclude all but a handful of buyers. It's also common for those buyers to make a lot of money from the assets before returning them to the state 20 years later, unmaintained and debt laden.

> In the west, we call that "privatization", and it happens pretty frequently

That's not even slightly true? It's headline news and massively controversial every time this happens.

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