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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Well, it worked initially, then more often than not my searches produced no results or confusing error messages.

    Experimented a lot with the SearxNG settings, and also with my browser and firewall settings in case there was some issue there, and eventually gave up.

    I was unable to find information online about the issues I experienced, in part because I had no idea how to describe them in order to find help.

    Think I tried it in three different browsers, over the course of a month or so, but primarily in Firefox.



  • Yup.

    DuckDuckGo’s search engine introduced AI assist and an AI chat as opt-out features, which it repeatedly re-enables at random, with no ability to disable it permanently, even though we’ve been able for years to set a bookmarklet to make all our other DDG settings persist.

    Users are very unhappy, with requests for a way to permanently disable AI features ignored, receiving only patronising responses from DDG.

    No matter, DDG’s utility for searching has deteriorated these past years so severely, even relative to the deterioration we’ve seen with many other options, that I wonder will it survive.

    It is always unfortunate when a recommended privacy tool shifts away from privacy, but several doing so all at once is alarming.





  • UK Labour’s position on Gaza is no different to that of the Tories (or to the DNC in the US). In Scotland, the SNP is strongly pro-Gaza, but were wiped out. That’s likely to have been in matters besides Palestine, but voters had the option to prioritise it and roundly rejected it. In NI & Wales, pro-Gazan candidates did less considerably less well than predicted 18 months ago. A few pro-Gazan candidates ran for the Workers’ Party - a handful of them won seats, but others, including their party head lost theirs. Meantime far-right Reform loathe Israel & loathe Palestine more, but made massive gains.

    In France, pro-Gazan FI is a major component of NFP, the alliance which got the biggest vote share, but they only scraped that by working strategically with the rest of the left & with the neolibs to see off the far-right, and even this alliance did not win a majority. Within this there’s little to no agreement on Palestine, and FI’s position drew in some voters and alienated others.



  • Am tired, but bit confused at sequence of events.

    Did Russia ban Mozilla from offering specific extensions, whereupon Mozilla removed for Russian users the banned extensions?

    Or…

    Did Russia ban Mozilla from offering some undefined type of extension, whereupon Mozilla removed for Russian users any which seemed to fall under the ban under an abundance of caution until they could assess each & reinstate those which did not fit the ban?

    Or, more worryingly, but maybe implied by the supposed temporary intent of the ban…

    Did Russia ban Mozilla from offering specific extensions, whereupon Mozilla temporarily removed for Russian users the extensions in order to give Russia the ability to track or otherwise meddle with Russian users of those extensions… or to enable Russia to interfere with the extensions’ code for their own ends?

    I feel I can make a reasonable guess, but there’s a fairly big safety issue here depending on what happened.

    Anyone dissenting within an authoritarian regime knows to exercise extreme caution, but always good to put out reminders to have multiple layers of protection, so if one fails you are still ok.