
Is duckduckgo.com partially enforcing the “celebrity threesome injunction”? - type0
https://stallman.org/articles/duckduckgo-censorship.html
======
leephillips
"censoring the whole world in obedience to the UK injunction"

Google censors the whole world to avoid annoying the Pakistani government and
Islamic pressure groups; no injunction required.

[http://lee-phillips.org/youtube/](http://lee-phillips.org/youtube/)

~~~
bArray
The video that was censored in the blog:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPpBzF20_7M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPpBzF20_7M)

The Pakistani Government was a ridiculous situation. To me it was an example
of how religion would literally cut off it's nose to spite it's face. Youtube
offers them way more good than it does bad.

I think the moment Governments got involved in the internet was where things
went wrong. It should have been just complete freedom, regardless of what
ended up being put on there with all the consequences of doing so.

~~~
atroyn
'The moment government got involved in the Internet' would be from its
inception as a government project for a communications network that could
withstand nuclear war.

Even if you mean the Web, that came out of CERN, another government project.

Government has always been a part of telecom, it's key national
infrastructure.

Consumer level end to end crypto that can avoid government surveillance is a
very new development.

~~~
apatters
A more defensible position, and doubtlessly closer to the parent's original
intent, would be amending the statement to "the content of the Internet." I
agree that government is becoming too involved in that.

~~~
bArray
Like the physical borders that separate land, the borders of the internet are
also being drawn in the form of applications, IPs, ports, protocols, etc. To
me it's sad, it never had to be that way.

------
DominikD
I'm not terribly surprised that once again Stallman understates complexity of
something he doesn't understand. To him making sure that incoming data isn't
pre-filtered is as simple as making sure that all of the narrowed query
results are part of the broader query results. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

I'll try and apply this kind of reductionism to something else: if search
engines are this simple, how come there's no viable GNU alternative to Google?
Absurd, I know, and so are Stallman's ramblings. It's OK to hold DDG to a
higher standards that anyone else out there. But talking nonsense out of lack
of understanding violates the same higher standards we should expect from rms.

~~~
srtjstjsj
Stallman proposes a simple way to _test_ for censorship; he does not claim how
to design a search engine.

~~~
tagawa
Even that censorship test understates the complexity of the problem. For
example, "how to make playing cards" is not a superset of "how to make playing
cards disappear".

------
qwertyuiop924
No, DDG doesn't have its own crawler. And such censorship as described is
impossible to distinguish from results being pushed up or down the rankings by
more focused terms, without some computation that would slow your search down,
as well as more queries to more sources, resulting in more network roundtrips,
that would slow your search down even more, doing so causing a massive
slowdown on all searches, for a check that is irrelevant 99% of the time. That
kind of slowdown is unacceptable.

But then, who was surprised? RMS has long been known to put purity before
practicality, and to say that network and computing time is cheap, a very MIT
attitude, and one that does not serve people trying to run a service for
hundreds and thousands of people, who all expect their response to come back
fast.

~~~
throw2016
So you are saying censorship is irrelevant 99% of the time, RMS is impractial
to be concerned and the tecnology that is used to search is far more important
that the purpose for which it is used. Ok.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
No. What I AM saying is that it is uncommon for the results from yahoo to be
censored. Implementing the kind of censorship checks that RMS suggests is
impractical and ridiculous, given the present limitations of our hardware, and
the expectation of fast response.

I am NOT saying that we shouldn't be concerned about censorship. Censorship is
an important issue. But the kind of anti-censorship measures that RMS
recommends are imparactical and absurd. This is what I meant when I said that
RMS all to often puts principles before practicality.

~~~
pdkl95
> it is uncommon for the results from yahoo to be censored

Really? How do you know that? Are you simply assuming that or do you actually
have _evidence_?

> impractical

Nonsense. Google implements censorship of various URLs[1]. My friends in China
often complained that the Great Firewall would censor not only search terms
but also URLs.

I think you're underestimating how much censorship already exists.

> RMS all to often puts principles before practicality

As he should. He _invented_ some of those principles.

More importantly, when practicality has precedence, you've giving up on any
principles. Nobody ever said defending important principles would be _easy!_
Defending _tomorrow 's_ freedom, might require that you make a sacrifice
_today_. Do you want to pay the cost of that sacrifice now, or in the future
when the fight is even harder and much larger sacrifices are required?

Unless you defend principles even when it is _inconvenient_ , they will be
stolen or corrupted by anybody willing to "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish"[2]
your principles for a profit.

\--

[1] Try any search of the form [${popular_copyrighted_work} torrent] and note
the links to the DMCA complaints.

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish)

~~~
qwertyuiop924
>Nonsense. Google implements censorship of various URLs[1]. My friends in
China often complained that the Great Firewall would censor not only search
terms but also URLs.

>I think you're underestimating how much censorship already exists.

And you completely failed to understand what it was that I called impractical.
I said that RMS' suggestion for removing censorship was impractical for a
downstream consumer of search results from other providers, which DDG is. Do I
think think that censorship is bad, and removing it is good? Yes. But RMS'
suggestion is non-viable.

>Really? How do you know that? Are you simply assuming that or do you actually
have evidence?

What percentage of your searches list DMCA removals? If your on HN, that's
probably higher than average. There is some invisible censorship as well, but
even then, how much would you guess that would increase the number? Sure, it
is technically easy to censor, but who would have the motivation to go around
censoring 90% of the kind of things people search for on the internet.
Recipies? Facts? News articles? Please. The thoght police have more important
matters on their hands.

>Defending tomorrow's freedom, might require that you make a sacrifice today.
Do you want to pay the cost of that sacrifice now, or in the future when the
fight is even harder and much larger sacrifices are required?

Fair enough. I would be willing. You know who wouldn't? End users. An extra
second or more per search? All but the most hardcore of DDG users - yes, even
those who understood why - would go back to google. And DDG has a minute
market share already. What do you think is better, I wonder? More protection
of freedoms, with reasonable tradeoffs, and maybe even some other advantages
(!bangs and instant answers are pretty cool), or absolute protection of
freedoms, with unnacceptable performance tradoffs that make everyday
activities and excercise an agony? Whichever you prefer, it doesn't matter,
because the End User population prefers the former, and they're the ones who
drive the industry.

>Unless you defend principles even when it is inconvenient, they will be
stolen or corrupted by anybody willing to "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish"[2]
your principles for a profit.

I always thought embrace, extend, exterminate had a better ring to it. And
actually, you're wrong. If you build a cool thing that is superglued to its
principles, to the point of being slow and hard to use, people won't use it.
Someone without principles will take your idea, and leave your potential users
less secure than if you has just been a bit more practical.

I don't have a problem with defending my principles when it's inconvenient - I
run archlinux without systemd - but that's not what this is about. You don't
seem to realize that.

When you build something for mass consumption, you have to balance practical
useability with your principles, or you will end up like so many FSF projects
that nobody uses.

What do I mean by that? When was the last time you used iceweasel? linux-
libre? Gnu social? Gnu Librejs?

These are all projects that I can admire for sticking to their principles, but
for most people, they are criplingly complex to use, or lack important
features, or seem pointless, or create more problems then they solve, or do
things nobody wanted, or solve problems that are solved simpler, faster, and
better by other software.

For most people "free software," or "open source" isn't a selling point: it's
a bonus.

------
chris_wot
"I am proud to identify myself when stating my views; I can afford to do that
because I am in a fairly safe position. There are people who rationally fear
reprisals (from employers, gangsters, bullies, or the state) if they sign
their name to their views. For their sake, let's reject any social networking
site which insists on connecting an account to a person's real identity." [1]

[https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman-
computing.html)

I guess Stallman considers the celebrities to be in a safe position also. Yet
I find it rather incongruous that he is so strident on privacy and firm on the
view that he should be able to have a private life (he goes to great lengths
to browse anonymously) yet he feels it's ok to allow publications to write
about their private affairs (which may or may not have happened).

I don't necessarily blame Stallman for this contradiction, frankly you can
legitimately hold that censorship is wrong and privacy is important.
Unfortunately there are occasions where they conflict badly.

Stallman genuinely needs to address how DDG are meant to preserve privacy and
counter censorship, because there is a genuine conflict and it's not
necessarily an easy thing to address.

------
throw2016
Slagging off RMS is tedious. In this case there appears to be nothing remotely
objectionable about what he is saying. If there is an objection to the issue
raised it should be stated. Forcing references to others things he has said
just comes off as a diversionary tactic to derail the thread.

Like RMS I am suprised at the effort being put to censor something so trivial
raising questions about far more important matters.

Is there any way to decipher the kind of things being censored, is there any
system maintained or transparency disclosing broadly the orders received and
the censorship operational? This is a slippery slope that we seem to be well
into.

~~~
Semiapies
In this case, the weird DDG fanboyism that's so popular on HN is also a big
factor.

~~~
ubernostrum
Echoing other comments, my problem is with the framing of it.

DDG is, as I understand it, basically a light privacy-protecting wrapper
around third-party search APIs. So while you may be getting "censored"
results, DDG is not an active participant in that "censorship" \-- since its
job is just to go out and see what another service said and relay it back to
you, the responsibility for active censorship rests with that other service.

Whether DDG should try to actively determine when results are censored and
correct for it, rather than passively relaying possibly-censored results
without further work, is a different question than "is DDG censoring", and
trying to sensationalize a story by framing it as the latter when what one
really wants is the former is... well, intellectually dishonest.

~~~
Semiapies
_Echoing other comments, my problem is with the framing of it._

Your and their concerns, while reasonable, aren't the entirely of the DDG
defenses here. I'm not even sure they're the majority.

------
white-flame
I think it's fairly obvious that the smaller search engines inherit their
results from the larger ones, so they're not the ones applying the biases or
censorship.

~~~
sp332
DDG has many sources of information, and applies its own layer of spam
filtering as well, so they are not at the mercy of Yahoo's censored data.

~~~
gcb0
OK i will be that guy: wrong!

first, ddg has only a single source of data. and it's Microsoft bing. yahoo
doesn't have any search and Google gave the middle finger to ddg.

ddg links to many sources. if you add !g you go to Google. if you add !i you
go to Bing images. etc. but any search on ddg site is only Bing and nothing
else.

lastly, and ironically, Yahoo is the only one still fighting for freedom
online. i think it's one of the perks of being an underdog with lots of money.
see how recently they were the first to publish several secret government data
requests.

~~~
bestnameever
>first, ddg has only a single source of data. and it's Microsoft bing. yahoo
doesn't have any search

Duckduckgo has a partnership with Yahoo

[https://duck.co/help/company/yahoo-
partnership](https://duck.co/help/company/yahoo-partnership)

Wikipedia also states that DuckDuckGo returns search results using data from
Yahoo among other providers

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo)

Edit: You can view all of DuckDuckGo's sources right here. Yahoo is included.

[https://duck.co/help/results/sources](https://duck.co/help/results/sources)

~~~
azernik
Yahoo does not run its own search engine anymore; the results at
search.yahoo.com are served up by
Bing.[[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm)]

~~~
bestnameever
Interesting. You got me googling and it seems the bing thing is not exclusive.
Yahoo apparently has a partnership with google as well.

[http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/20/9577519/yahoo-google-
sear...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/20/9577519/yahoo-google-search-deal)

------
guelo
I got so disappointed with ddg when I discovered it's just a wrapper around
Bing. With privacy-related AdBlock filters I get the best of both worlds,
Google and no tracking. The world needs a non-US based alternate crawler but
no one is offering it.

~~~
SamReidHughes
What Adblock filter prevents Google from knowing what searches you make?

~~~
guelo
If you're not loggedin and and blocking their tracking all they'll have is
your IP address, which is the same thing ddg gets.

~~~
SamReidHughes
DuckDuckGo doesn't save your IP address, that's part of what they mean when
they say they don't track you.

------
red_admiral
> The company might want to take some steps to detect specific examples of
> search result censoship, such as when items that appear when searching yahoo
> for A B C D do not appear at all in a search for A B C without D, and fix
> them.

To me this does not sound like censorship, but SEO on behalf of D. My guess
would be that D paid some web presence management company to cultivate a
strong presence of pages containing A B C but not D (since they want to hide
their name after all), and that's what the engine is picking up.

There could even be an innocent explanation for this - lots of UK discussion
about A B C that does not mention D since they're not allowed to, and very few
outside the UK who care. So the {A,B,C}\\{D} pages would naturally rise to the
top of search results.

This particular case aside, Stallman's test looks like misuse of statistics to
me - searching for "washington" gets me lots of pages that don't mention the
town in England, whereas "washington england" finds it. Conspiracy?
Censorship? No.

------
ChuckMcM
You can only find documents that are available in the index you are using. If
the index owner has deleted or filtered them there is no way to know, as an
API user, if there are missing results. If you are a service that is
minimizing the amount of personal information available to the API provider,
the API provider would have to assume the worst and pre-filter any results
that were restricted in any jurisdiction. No different than returning results
to search queries originating on a Tor exit node.

------
raverbashing
RMS does not know how search engines work

If he's searching for "celebrity threesome injunction" the top results are the
most authoritative _for that expression_. Meaning: they have to be the best
sites that have that expression. Which happen to be the ones that are censored
(UK based websites)

When you add the name, you are removing those previous results that don't
contain the name

------
Frondo
I'm surprised RMS is willing to use a closed-source search engine when there
are open-source ones (like Yacy) he could be using instead.

~~~
sandij
"We don't condemn the server operator for being at the mercy of nonfree
software, and we certainly don't boycott her for this. Rather, we are
concerned for her freedom, as with any user of nonfree software. Given an
opportunity, we try to explain how it curtails her freedom, hoping she will
switch to free software.

"Conversely, if the service operator runs GNU/Linux or other free software,
that's not a virtue that affects you, but rather a benefit for her. We don't
praise or thank her for this; rather we felicitate her for making the wise
choice."

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/network-services-arent-
free-o...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/network-services-arent-free-or-
nonfree.html.en)

------
dghughes
From Canada two searches it seems fairly descriptive of who it was, is this
unique?

Google.ca [http://i.imgur.com/1oytIvR.png](http://i.imgur.com/1oytIvR.png)

Duckduckgo.com
[http://i.imgur.com/SDfLxsV.png](http://i.imgur.com/SDfLxsV.png)

~~~
Idontagree
I think you misunderstood the article? He was saying that he needed Elton in
the search to find results. Maybe, I misunderstood you, though?

~~~
dghughes
Ah I see.

------
Buge
I just searched "celebrity threesome injunction" on Google, and both the 2nd
and 4th result contain "Elton John" in Google's little text preview of the
page.

~~~
etatoby
Elton John is promiscuous. News at 9:00.

~~~
timdorr
Actually, it's his partner committing the infidelity in this case.

~~~
tanderson92
In fact it's not a case of infidelity: Sir Elton John has an open marriage so
the celebrity threesome would be within the bounds of their promises to each
other.

~~~
refurb
Depends on the terms of their open marriage. You can still have infidelity.

------
peteri
Well from my UK based attempt it seems to perfectly visible even on
google.co.uk using that specific phrase. I seem to remember originally have
finding out via order-order.com.

Again not something I particularly care about.

~~~
Pitarou
It wasn't like that a few months ago.

I think that, in the time since RMS wrote that article, someone has quietly
given up on trying to enforce the censorship order.

------
rwmj
Is RMS also enforcing this injunction since he also doesn't name the people
involved?

~~~
robobro
Yeah...

FROM REDDIT:

David Furnish, Elton John's husband had an affair on at least three occasions
with an employee which involved a bath of olive oil circa 2010-2013. David
Furnish heavily wanted it to be unprotected anal sex despite his work on the
Elton John AIDS charity. Elton himself has been accused of sexual harassment
of one of his male bodyguards. The allegations can't be published in England
and Wales due to the distress that it could cause to their two children born
from a surrogate mother. David and Elton have been using that injunction to
threaten various web sites on the grounds that an article hosted on an
overseas server could be viewed by somebody in England and Wales.

------
HappyFunGuy
If you want uncensored search results, you need a decentralized search engine.
(Your human friends and fellow hacker news bros are such an engine.)

As long as search engines are centralized, state power will bend them to their
will.

~~~
zepto
You fellow hacked news bros and human friends are _more_ likely to be
censoring things they don't like than a centralized algorithm, not less.

------
Animats
It seems to be trivially easy to find.

I was thinking it would be some politician, not some '60s musician. Who cares?
Besides, Wikipedia has a long section on his sex life. This sounds more like a
PR stunt by a has-been.

~~~
tamana
The article is about censorship, not the story being censored.

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
I opened a chrome incognito window and the third google hit with the
"injunction" phrasing contained a name.

------
shaughan
The names are in the first result on startpage.com (ixquick).

------
Bud
Is it just me, or is Stallman agitating about something as trivial as this
really pathetic and sad?

~~~
Gigablah
Would you have made this comment if it were anyone else than Stallman?

------
basicplus2
I've noticed I am now getting hit by targeted ads relating to searches I do on
duckduckgo..

the question is.. what search engine do I switch to now?

~~~
jakobegger
Are you sure that the problem is searching on DDG and not the pages you click
on?

DDG claims not to track you; however, they have no way to prevent websites you
visit from tracking you.

~~~
basicplus2
not 100% sure.. only that i have not changed what i do, and the only change I
can think of is yahoo is now involved...

~~~
exolymph
You need a robust tracker-blocker.

~~~
basicplus2
can you recommend one... I'm getting "blocking spyware fatigue"

~~~
scrollaway
\- [https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

\- Wipe third-party cookies on browser shutdown

\- Also if you're interested,
[https://www.google.com/settings/ads/plugin](https://www.google.com/settings/ads/plugin)

You don't need anything else with that, though I'd recommend an ad blocker.

~~~
basicplus2
Thanks! appreciate your time

