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  • both Qwant and Ecosia are working with Microsoft. Not so European.

    Monocles is SearX, which basically is boogle, bing &c behind a shroud. Like Leta also is.

    Mojeek is the only "European" alternative, it seems

  • These posts are already beginning to be tiring. It's always the same software, and always the same arguments against some of the choices.

    Ditching open source projects for corporate European stuff doesn't solve anything, it just moves the problem. How can you be sure that every country in the EU won't break some trade deals and leave the EU at some point? And closed source software is not better at protecting your privacy if that's what you want.

    And the "European based forks/open source projects"(whatever that means) is a stupid argument. For example, cryptography experts pointed out issues in threema, so why recommend it instead of signal which is open source projects, and by definition, not tied to a country?

    And finally, I think we should stop recommending LLMs altogether. They're an ecological and sociological disaster.

    • In any case this (the pic) is the dumb ape "A is bad, so I replace it with something by B, B is my friend, B won't poison it" thought. For whatever reason stupid people always think it's better to look at social context of something and not the actual thing.

      That's the reason a lot of dumb bastards use Telegram for things that would have already gotten them in jail if law enforcement in their countries cared enough. They "trust" Telegram because of different roots than American\European corporate. By the way, due to these different roots probably some of more high-ranking dumb bastards who've been using Telegram are under control of some intelligence services via blackmail, or whatever.

      There are layers of defense and sane expectations of anything's security. If you are afraid of US corporations and state, then using any downstream of a big FOSS project is not normal unless it's done by some Chinese project with a lot of very qualified hands. Scratch anything based on Chromium and Firefox.

      If someone still remembers Cryptonomicon the book, and the rest of smart things Neal Stephenson wrote, people in these never trust tech they use. Neither do people doing secure things in real life. In the beginning of Cryptonomicon they are trying to create some electronic currency mapped to a real-life currency backed by a lot of gold yet to be found, in the end they blow up that gold with no conclusion, which may or may not symbolize exactly what I'm saying.

      That's because it's nonsense, someone else made magic paper to protect your letters and you just trust it? It's really sad Rowling didn't develop the idea enough in HP, not with Riddle's diary, but with Snape's spells (or any spells). I mean, she did in the fifth book, but that was a special connection, should have been something like recipes.

      By the way, it's strange people rarely bring up HP as a book about computers. It really is. That's the reason electronics don't work in Hogwarts, world-building wise. There's the usual outrage about terfs, bad emotional patterns, relationship between fate and logic, negative stereotypes of minorities manifested in characters, - but that's not all those books are.

      And LOTR is usually brought up by wrong people, so is The Napoleon of Notting Hill (I often call my dad a stupid man, but without him I would never have read it), while they are relevant for any new mechanism, and when new tools arise, people sometimes make new mechanisms where they could do with old ones, for the lack of understanding of applying the old mechanisms with the new tools.

      That was a rant.

49 comments