!g has been my exclusive portal to Google for years (also on mobile). I never understood what all the rage was about until I went to try it in the "normal" Google. This is the first time I've seen that "lightning" icon. Wow.
So that's how it feels like to be a "lucky 10 000".
Does Bing have "bangs" such as !gm for Google Maps, !gh for GitHub, !wa for WolframAlpha and so on? With no user tracking?
I was a heavy user of address bar search prefixes, but it's amazingly convenient to not have to think about it until the very end of a query (or even add it in the middle).
> If all the leaks in the past decade have shown anything it's that everyone spies on everyone. It's been like that forever too.
It may have been like that for a long time, but it's not entirely true anymore. The leaks show an emergent trend of cooperation between the western intelligence agencies, i.e. the "fourteen eyes".
This is the most worrying part IMO. Now you have a small elite sitting on enough power to take out anyone or control pretty much all information on the internet. We laugh at Baidu and Yandex, but if these people want something they'll have it.
A law would not "fix" this. It's a workaround. Which law was this guy breaking to begin with?
The problem is lack of scrutiny by the officers handling this. The process should have gone something like this:
United: "Hey, we have this guy refusing the leave the airplane. Can you help us remove him?"
Chicago PD: "Why won't he leave the airplane?"
United: "He says he needs to catch this flight for something work-related."
Chicago PD: "Is he threatening other passengers? Why do you need to remove him?"
United: "We need to fill the seat for some last-minute flight crew. Look, this is really important, can't you just come and take this guy for us? It's already becoming something of a scene."
Chicago PD: "So what you are saying is, you are asking a paying passenger who is already seated in a departing plane to leave. And he won't do so voluntarily. Can't you ask someone else to go instead?"
United: "We tried, but no one is willing to take less than $1600 worth of our $50 flight coupons. Ridiculous! We do no more than $1200 per FAA guidelines."
Chicago PD: "But did he break any laws?"
United: "Not sure, maybe there's something in the ToS."
KDE and Gnome are both really good nowadays, but Ubuntu is a buggy piece of shit. I've helped friends install it a couple of times recent years, and seen various desktop program crashes every time. It wasn't like this back in the Gnome2 days.
What we really need is Red Hat to start selling Fedora computers. And KDE Neon to ship laptops based on Debian stable. And obviously at least one big retailer to have them in a physical store, so we tell our friends where to go.
> there's little doubt that being able to read everyone's private messages will enable the intelligence services to better do their jobs
[citation needed]
Seriously, this argument is FUD. I'm sorry for picking on this quote, as I agree with the rest of your post, but allow me to go on a short rant..
We've seen this argument used many times over. It was used to introduce surveillance cameras on every UK street. What has it achieved? Less parking lot crimes[1].
The EU used it when introducing the data retention directive. Which was "nullified" eight years later due to violating fundamental human rights[2]. Of course, the infrastructure is still in place, and everyone is still using it. What has it achieved? AFAICT nothing except a blatant danger to society. The ability to know everything about anyone and actively take over their private devices is not something that should be taken lightly.
The GCHQ even admitted that the London terrorist was "on their radar". Well duh, who isn't. If that's not admitting mass surveillance is ineffective, I don't know what is.
It is impossible to prevent all crime before it occurs. The world isn't NP complete. Get over it. Or, to paraphrase Gödel: "I would rather live in a world that is inconsistent, than one that is incomplete"[3].
The intelligence agencies are just bored. They have no wars, except drugs and "terror". They use this "downtime" to get more data sources by influencing politicians.
Guess what, gathering more of the same shit data won't increase your signal.
I know you are a stand-up guy [0]. Have you considered working with the free software community to create a truly free and modern browser?
No-one trusts Chromium since it's filled with Google-specific bits and tweaks, even analytics. Assuming you've trimmed all of that away, releasing your add-ons as free software (e.g. GPL or BSD) would create some real traction around Vivaldi as a browser alternative.
This also avoids the "Opera mistake". If Presto had been open sourced, it would still be alive and kicking today. With Blink things are different, and I don't see how keeping a proprietary user interface is going to sustain a browser company.
Suggestion: make the core browser slim, pluggable and free, and sell extensions and infrastructure parts necessary for sync, updates etc with a GPL and/or proprietary license.
What I really meant was "inversely proportional", rather than opposite, although I do abide by that (if only because the words have such different meanings).
Increasing one will not reduce the other, or vice versa. As an example, imagine a scenario where everything the government does is in the open, and all systems can be publicly audited and verified. This is transparency, at no cost to privacy.
Conversely, if encryption, Tor, and leaving your house without a tracking device is outlawed, that would not increase transparency. It would merely make it more difficult to reduce the opacity of the receiving end of the tracking device.
Privacy and transparency are not opposites. It is possible to have privacy in a perfectly transparent world.
I agree that the privacy battle as we know it is already lost. Once someone has the kind of powers the "umpteen eyes" are possessing, no amount of legislation will make them give it up.
That does not mean we should pretend that it is not a problem. There is a massive discrepancy right now in the kind of tools and information that is publicly available, and what secret government operations are possessing.
What we should be fighting for is transparency, not privacy. I want to know exactly what kind of data is collected about me, and I want to know who accesses it and when (unless I'm subject to an investigation, during which the information about my data being accessed can be embargoed until it's over).
I would blog about this, if it wasn't so damn difficult to host a website without revealing my full identity. I don't want future employers to judge me for political views, sexuality or whatever. That's why privacy is important, and still will be in a fully-transparent world (which I do think is inevitable, but no government is currently working towards that).
