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Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

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Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#191

Post by dwighttk »

recuter wrote: post #187
Jenk wrote: post #125

Clicking the images tab probably explains why. There are many pictures of very young girls in various states of undress.

I believe you but mostly I got pictures of tanks! Is it picking up VK profile pictures? Sort of reminds me of myspace but with, err, Russian sensibilities. I also tried it with Bing and got literally the exact same results. Google is definitely different, it shows mostly logos instead of photos. I never used VK but I got the impression it is a real social network, for better or for worse. Should Bing drop them from i…

huh... looks like the default search is now showing multiple things for me (showed just one result first time I checked)

However I'm seeing lots of slightly uncomfortable pictures of young girls (not porn, but didn't want to scroll too far because it felt like there could be some mixed in) and tanks in the image search. This doesn’t change noticeably using the three strictness settings.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#192

Post by ryantgtg »

Jenk wrote: post #125

Clicking the images tab probably explains why. There are many pictures of very young girls in various states of undress.

It’s because DDG = Bing, and Bing is known[0] to be really bad at filtering out this crap from they image search.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/09/us/internet-c...

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#195

Post by ripply »

Yetanfou wrote: post #194

I get loads of results, both related to VKontakte and other things (e.g. a "Roland VK-8 and VK-77 Combo Organ"), "Vaartkapoen", etc. I live in Sweden, maybe the VK-limiting filter is set on US search results?

It seems to have been fixed, I refreshed the tab I had open when this first popped up on hn (that had empty results) and the results look normal now (US).

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#196

Post by FabHK »

t0mbstone wrote: post #69
temp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>without leaking your info to google. Can you elaborate? It just does the same query on Google, how is it preventing leakage of information to Google?

If it runs the query through DDG's server side, then Google would just see at as an anonymous query along with a million other anonymous queries coming from DuckDuckGo's servers. Unfortunately, that's NOT what they do. Instead, they just forward you to the google search result, which is pointless and stupid.

> which is pointless and stupid

Not so. The point is that you can set DDG to be your default search engine, and put !g anywhere in the search string to search google in case you need it.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#197

Post by chroma »

prophesi wrote: post #181

One thing that rocked me to the core and changed my stance on privacy recently is how child porn/abuse/trafficking/grooming/etc is simply swept under the rug by the Tech Giants. Safe Harbor laws have been used to push the problem elsewhere, and the issue is accruing exponentially. These images are absolutely everywhere; Facebook removes millions every year from their platform. And these are just the ones posted in pl…

I really think Sam had the wool pulled over his eyes by Gabriel Dance. Around 17 minutes into the podcast, Dance says that he's been investigating tech companies for years and goes into issues with ad targeting, Twitter bots, etc. Then when he's relating the story about getting a tip, he effectively admits that he's pursuing this because he wants to make tech companies look bad. This explains why he always quotes absolute numbers (instead of percentages of all images/video shared), and why he never says what fraction of that content is teens sexting. It also explains why he avoids suggesting concrete solutions to the problem: there aren't any good ones.

The only solution to the problem of child pornography is backdoors in all encryption. Facebook must be able to scan the messages you write. Apple must be able to scan the photos you take. AWS must be able to scan your servers. The US Government must be able to intercept your communications and decrypt your devices. If there is any consumer device with real encryption, it will be used by perverts, sadists, revolutionaries, psychopaths, and a few weird principled nerds. And the problem of child pornography will still exist, except now the government will be able to spy on everyone's private communications and use that to exert much more control over them.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#198

Post by banana_giraffe »

prophesi wrote: post #181

One thing that rocked me to the core and changed my stance on privacy recently is how child porn/abuse/trafficking/grooming/etc is simply swept under the rug by the Tech Giants. Safe Harbor laws have been used to push the problem elsewhere, and the issue is accruing exponentially. These images are absolutely everywhere; Facebook removes millions every year from their platform. And these are just the ones posted in pl…

I had an associate that was tasked with writing a crawler to find this sort of stuff.

There were two problems: Burn out from seeing what the crawler found. And only scratching the surface and getting more hits than any law department could ever hope to track down.

It's all just amazingly depressing.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#199

Post by smallchungus »

tomcam wrote: post #130
Jenk wrote: post #125

Clicking the images tab probably explains why. There are many pictures of very young girls in various states of undress.

WTF. That was creepy beyond belief.

Those kinds of pictures only show up when I manually switch region to United States.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#200

Post by prophesi »

chroma wrote: post #197
prophesi wrote: post #181

One thing that rocked me to the core and changed my stance on privacy recently is how child porn/abuse/trafficking/grooming/etc is simply swept under the rug by the Tech Giants. Safe Harbor laws have been used to push the problem elsewhere, and the issue is accruing exponentially. These images are absolutely everywhere; Facebook removes millions every year from their platform. And these are just the ones posted in pl…

I really think Sam had the wool pulled over his eyes by Gabriel Dance. Around 17 minutes into the podcast, Dance says that he's been investigating tech companies for years and goes into issues with ad targeting, Twitter bots, etc. Then when he's relating the story about getting a tip, he effectively admits that he's pursuing this because he wants to make tech companies look bad. This explains why he always quotes abs…

It's been a few weeks since I listened to the podcast, but I thought Dance explicitly mentioned how sad it was for Facebook to get a bad rep for releasing those numbers when such transparency is a positive thing. It shows that they're at least trying to get it off their platform. And if more people knew the numbers, this issue would finally become too large of an elephant to ignore.

And he did offer one concrete solution: platforms with easy discoverability (in other words, easy to masquerade as and target teens) may not need end-to-end encryption. Let FB and such run their algorithms on those messages. And it may be safe to assume three letter agencies are listening in. End-to-end encryption still serves its purpose for whistleblowing, privacy, and fair democracy; it'll just be found elsewhere, like Signal and such.

This still isn't an ideal solution. I personally think it's an unwinnable battle. Easily duplicated instantaneous secure multimedia communication is ridiculously revolutionary.

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