How many websites do you browse with links to truly illegal content?

If you live in a country with truly abysmal human rights, definitely don’t bother with this plugin, but in most cases you should be fine on the illegal side.

Even if somehow the website you’re browsing has some super sketchy ad to buyillegaldrugshere.com or whatever, to get in trouble with the law in most civilized places you’d have to actually buy the illegal drugs, not just ping the illegal drugs IP. Especially since you can pretty easily prove to a judge that your system fetches ad links automatically and without further engagement.

Not saying it can’t happen, just that it’s really unlikely you would be served an ad for something so illegal just clicking on it is a liability. The literally only case I can think of coming close is CSAM, but even then, if you’re regularly browsing websites that advertise CSAM, maybe find other websites to occupy your time? And I can just about guarantee any website serving CSAM ads is already doing illegal shit, so you should probably be more worried about that than an ad-click…

I feel it’s more of a mix. Elon is in charge of breaking the government with reckless abandon, Stephen is in charge of weaponizing what’s left of the government against minorities.

Certain other content crosses boarders. Mastadon especially. Whenever you see people replying to messages and it starts with some sort of @user@lemmy.verse tagging, you’re probably eavesdropping on a Mastadon thread and you don’t even know it.

Came over during the great 3rd party app API debacle. It didn’t even make the list. Am I old now?

You ever watch Orphan Black? Based on a true story.

For those who maybe breeze past it in the article linked, here’s an unofficial tool for searching all of the zillions of Kagi bangs: https://kbe.smaertness.net/

They have all the usual, !g for Google, !gi Google Images, !b Bing, !ddg, !brave, etc, plus like a billion niche ones.

Unlike free search where there’s definitely no incentive to sell your data to keep the lights on, right?

Yes, it absolutely can, it’s super easy! Just swap your Minecraft .jar with Paper and it’ll do the rest. It’s a tiny bit harder to go back, but only marginally.

Out of the box, aside from huge performance benefits, Paper is virtually indistinguishable from vanilla, but it also opens the door to a whole world of easy-to-use server-side plugins.

Edit: (you should still make a backup before swapping, just in case)

CPU intensive servers like Minecraft are where you start to run into problems with older hardware. If it’s just you on there, a 10 year old CPU is fine, but if you’ve got a few friends, the server may start to struggle to keep up.

Not sure how recently you ran this, or what all your were running, but in the past couple of years Paper has hit some pretty major milestones in unlocking threaded processing. Barring some sort of spammy 0-tick redstone nonsense or over the top plugins, I’d wager a Raspberry Pi 4 could handle up to about 5 or 6 friends without seeing any TPS dips. Its really remarkable how far they’ve pushed performance recently.

Could I get a larg HDD and ad it in an enclosure to the Mini PC to handle the media volume?

Like an external USB drive? Absolutely.

Anyone know the path to hitting them with CCPA info/take down requests?

If that’s true, why bother “monitoring” a search engine? This whole list screams of somebody who knows nothing about tech put out a vague RFP and a contractor pulled a list of “top sites” and used it to justify an egregious proposal cost.

DOGE, if you’re looking for waste and fraud, perhaps here’s a good source.

Mark my words, they’ll regret this when Y2.1K rolls around and they have to rejigger their entire supply chain to add a 1 to all their model numbers.

Ahh yes, consolidation and centralization, core pillars of the FOSS movement.

In terms of result quality? In my opinion, based on my particular search habits:

Kagi > SearXNG > Brave > Startpage/Google > DDG/Ecosia/Bing

Everyone is going to have their own opinions on each of those companies, but from a results lens, that’s what I find to be most/least effective.

Like all Google products, they will still make a halfhearted attempt to make it as useful as they can before absolutely destroying it with ads

Guessing Edge by default sent you to Bing, no surprise the DDG results look similar, given that they use Bing under he hood. They shuffle rankings slightly, but it’s the same index.

You can also use Ecosia, if your prefer a different shade of lipstick on your pig search results.

There’s not really a strong player in the open source search space.

Mwmbl exists, but per their own readme:

The quality is a long way’s off from matching the commercial engines at the moment

Kagi provides the source code for many of their services, but is not truly open source, especially because at its core, it relies on applying its own rankings to other’s indexes.

That said, search is a space where the old adage rings true:

If you’re not paying for it; you are the product!

For what it’s worth, I find value in my Kagi subscription.

Wanna bet my salary doesn’t go up 6.2% when they do that?