DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, offers a variety of useful features such as instant answers and bangs. The latter are particularly useful for people who want to use DuckDuckGo to search directly on other sites. Typing '!yt keyword', for instance, will do a direct search on YouTube, while '!w keyword' goes to Wikipedia. This library of bangs has been around for a long time and has grown to more than 10,000 over the years.

From a report: However, a few days ago, roughly 2,000 of these were removed. Interestingly, this included many bangs that link to torrent sites, such as The Pirate Bay, 1337x and RARBG. Similarly, bangs for OpenSubtitles, Sci-Hub and LibGen are gone too. Initially, it was unclear what had happened, but after people started asking questions on Reddit, DuckDuckGo staff explained that this was part of a larger cleanup operation. DuckDuckGo went through its bangs library and removed all non-working versions, as well as verbose ones that were not actively used. In addition, many pirate site bangs were deleted as these are no longer"permitted."

"Bangs had been neglected for some time, and there were tons of broken ones. As part of the bang clean-up, we also removed some that were pointing to primarily illegal content," DuckDuckGo staffer Tagawa explains. The search engine still indexes the sites in question but it feels that offering curated search shortcuts for these sites in their service might cause problems. "It may not seem like so at first blush, but it is very different legally if it is a bang vs. in the search results because the bangs are added to the product by us explicitly, and can be interpreted legally as an editorial decision that is actively facilitating that site and its content," the staff wrote.

Tumblr, the underground social media site known for its pornographic content and tight-knit community, will be instituting a major change to its guidelines in a couple of weeks. The company said in a blog post today that it will permanently ban adult content from its platform on December 17th. The company flatly stated that "adult content will no longer be allowed here." The Verge reports: Banned content includes photos, videos, and GIFs of human genitalia, female-presenting nipples, and any media involving sex acts, including illustrations. The exceptions include nude classical statues and political protests that feature nudity. The new guidelines exclude text, so erotica remains permitted. Illustrations and art that feature nudity are still okay -- so long as sex acts aren't depicted -- and so are breastfeeding and after-birth photos.

After December 17th, any explicit posts will be flagged and deleted by algorithms. For now, Tumblr is emailing users who have posted adult content flagged by algorithms and notifying them that their content will soon be hidden from view. Posts with porn content will be set to private, which will prevent them from being reblogged or shared elsewhere in the Tumblr community. "Blogs that have been either self-flagged or flagged by us as 'explicit' per our old policy and before December 17, 2018 will still be overlaid with a content filter when viewing these blogs directly," the blog post reads. "While some of the content on these blogs may now be in violation of our policies and will be actioned accordingly, the blog owners may choose to post content that is within our policies in the future, so we'd like to provide that option..."

Seeking compliance with Linux's new Code of Conduct, Intel software engineer Jarkko Sakkinen recently requested comments on a set of changes to kernel code comments which Neowin described as "replacing the F-word with 'hug'. "

80 comments quickly followed on the Linux Kernel Maintainer's List: Several contributors responded to the alterations calling them insane. One wondered if Sakkinen was just trying to make a joke, and another called it censorship and said he'd refuse to apply any sort of patches like this to the code he's in charge of...

Some of the post-change comments read "Some Athlon laptops have really hugged PST tables", "If you don't see why, please stay the hug away from my code", and "Only Sun can take such nice parts and hug up the programming interface".
Eventually LWN.net publisher Jonathan Corbet deflated most of the controversy by pointing out that Linux's new Code of Conduct applies to future comments but clearly indicates that it does not apply explicitly to past comments.

And Jarkko Sakkinen acknowledged that he had missed that part of the discussion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept about Google's secretive plans to build a censor version of its search engine for China: The objective, code-named Dragonfly, was to build a search engine for China that would censor broad categories of information about human rights, democracy, and peaceful protest. Yonatan Zunger, then a 14-year veteran of Google and one of the leading engineers at the company, was among a small group who had been asked to work on Dragonfly. He was present at some of the early meetings and said he pointed out to executives managing the project that Chinese people could be at risk of interrogation or detention if they were found to have used Google to seek out information banned by the government.

Scott Beaumont, Google's head of operations in China and one of the key architects of Dragonfly, did not view Zunger's concerns as significant enough to merit a change of course, according to four people who worked on the project. Beaumont and other executives then shut out members of the company's security and privacy team from key meetings about the search engine, the four people said, and tried to sideline a privacy review of the plan that sought to address potential human rights abuses. Google's leadership considered Dragonfly so sensitive that they would often communicate only verbally about it and would not take written notes during high-level meetings to reduce the paper trail, two sources said. Only a few hundred of Google's 88,000 workforce were briefed about the censorship plan. Some engineers and other staff who were informed about the project were told that they risked losing their jobs if they dared to discuss it with colleagues who were themselves not working on Dragonfly.

Starbucks announced that it will start blocking pornography viewing on its stores' Wi-Fi starting in 2019. "A Starbucks representative told NBC News that the viewing of 'egregious content' over its stores' Wi-Fi has always violated its policy, but the company now has a way to stop it," reports NBC News. From the report: "We have identified a solution to prevent this content from being viewed within our stores and we will begin introducing it to our U.S. locations in 2019," the company representative said. The announcement was first reported by Business Insider and comes after a petition from internet-safety advocacy group Enough is Enough garnered more than 26,000 signatures. The nonprofit launched a porn-free campaign aimed at McDonald's and Starbucks in 2014, and it says that while McDonald's "responded rapidly and positively," Starbucks did not.

In a letter that [Enough is Enough CEO Donna Rice Hughes] said she received from Starbucks over the summer, the company vowed to address the issue "once we determine that our customers can access our free Wi-Fi in a way that also doesn't involuntarily block unintended content." Starbucks has not released details about how it plans to restrict the viewing of pornographic sites or illegal content over its Wi-Fi. In response, the vice president of YouPorn responded by sending a memo to staff banning Starbucks products from company offices starting Jan. 1, 2019.

A group of Google employees have put their name to a public letter calling on the company to abandon its plans for a Chinese search product that censors results. From a report: Project Dragonfly, as the initiative is known, would enable state surveillance at a time when the Chinese government is expanding controls over the population, according to the letter signed by at least 10 workers, predominately software engineers and researchers. The document also called on management to commit to transparency, be accountable and provide clear communication.

Ever since plans for Dragonfly emerged in August, Google parent Alphabet has been riven by internal dissent at the prospect of a search engine bending to Beijing's censorship. It was that sort of government control that prompted co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to effectively pull out of China in 2010 when it decided to stop removing controversial links from web queries. "We refuse to build technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be," the Google workers wrote in the letter. "Dragonfly in China would establish a dangerous precedent, one that would make it harder for Google to deny other countries similar concessions."

An anonymous reader writes: Alphabet's cybersecurity division Jigsaw has designed a new open source private VPN aimed at journalists and the people sending them data. "Their work makes them more vulnerable to attack," said Santiago Andrigo, Jigsaw's product manager. "It can get really scary when they're outed and you're passing over information."

Unscrupulous VPN providers can steal your identity, peek in on your data, inject their own ads on non-secure pages, or analyze your browsing habits and sell that information to advertisers, says one Jigsaw official. And you can't know for sure whether you can trust them, no matter what they say in the app store. "Journalists should be aware that their online activities might be subject to surveillance either by government agencies, their internet service providers or a hacker with malicious intent," said Laura Tich, technical evangelist for Code for Africa, a resource for African journalists. "As surveillance becomes ubiquitous in today's world, journalists face an increasing challenge in establishing secure communication in the digital space."

The new private VPN, dubbed "Outline", is specifically designed to be resistant to censorship — because it's harder to detect as a VPN (and therefore is less likely to be blocked). Outline uses an encrypted socks5 proxy that looks like normal internet traffic. Once the user chooses a server location, Outline spins up a DigitalOcean server on Ubuntu, installs Docker, and imports an image of the actual server.

It's been named Outline because in places where internet use may be restricted — it gives you a line out.

A new survey from Axios finds that a majority of Americans don't think social networks are good for the world. An anonymous reader shares the key findings: Silicon Valley has a big and growing problem: Americans have rising concerns with its most popular products and a growing majority wants big social media companies regulated, according to new poll conducted by Survey Monkey for "Axios on HBO." In the past year, there has been a 15-point spike in the number of people who fear the federal government won't do enough to regulate big tech companies -- with 55% now sharing this concern. In that same period, there was a 14-point increase in those who feel technology has hurt democracy and free speech. The biggest spike has been among Republicans, presumably because of increased concern about perceived censorship of conservative voices on social media. About 40% of Americans still feel that social media is a net positive for society. Overall, 65% of people say smartphones have made their quality of life better. The study also found that nearly two-thirds (63%) of respondents say they sleep with their phone in or next to their bed; and that jumps to 73% among millennials. Also, "More than half (51%) say smartphones are the hardest technology for most people to live without," reports Axios. "And that jumps to 67% among millennials."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg signed by 86 organizations and published on Tuesday implores Facebook to provide a clear, fast mechanism that allows users to appeal instances of content takedowns and account deactivations. The letter which was spearheaded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Article 19, Ranking Digital Rights, and the Center for Democratic Technology (CDT) -- expanded upon the Santa Clara Principles published earlier this year, which called for all social media platforms to improve its transparency and responsiveness to flagged posts and appeals for removed content.

In April of this year, Facebook launched appeals for posts that are removed on grounds nudity, hate speech, or graphic violence. The press release claims that one of Facebook's human content reviewers will review all appeals within 24 hours, and notify users if their appeal has been approved or denied. The open letter to Mark Zuckerberg also requests that all content takedown and deactivation appeals are reviewed by a human moderator, which Facebook claims that it already does. EFF Director of International Freedom of Expression, Jillian York, believes the undercurrent of content moderation on social media is the censorship or restriction of speech towards marginalized groups.

"There are accounts, [and] there is content that is taken down frequently from social media, and we don't hear those stories as much because they're often overshadowed by the pushes for hate speech to come down," York said. "I respect the people doing that work, I think it's really important. But really, the thing about appeals is they work in every case. So if someone breaks the rules for hate speech and they appeal, they're not gonna get their account restored. But if someone who should not have had their account taken down in the first place, appeals are the right solution to that."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Nintendo has won a lawsuit seeking to take two large retro-game ROM sites offline, on charges of copyright infringement. The judgement, made public today, ruled in Nintendo's favor and states that the owners of the sites LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co, will have to pay a total settlement of $12 million to Nintendo. The complaint was originally filed by the company in an Arizona federal court in July, and has since lead to a swift purge of self-censorship by popular retro and emulator ROM sites, who have feared they may be sued by Nintendo as well.

LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co were the joint property of couple Jacob and Cristian Mathias, before Nintendo sued them for what they have called "brazen and mass-scale infringement of Nintendo's intellectual property rights." The suit never went to court; instead, the couple sought to settle after accepting the charge of direct and indirect copyright infringement. TorrentFreak reports that a permanent injunction, prohibiting them from using, sharing, or distributing Nintendo ROMs or other materials again in the future, has been included in the settlement. Additionally all games, game files, and emulators previously on the site and in their custody must be handed over to the Japanese game developer, along with a $12.23 million settlement figure. It is unlikely, as TorrentFreak have reported, that the couple will be obligated to pay the full figure; a smaller settlement has likely been negotiated in private.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday launched a push to regulate the internet. France and U.S. technology giants, including Microsoft, are pushing for governments and companies worldwide to sign up for a new initiative aimed at establishing regulations for the internet, to fight such online threats as cyber attacks, hate speech and online censorship. A report adds: With the launch of a declaration entitled the 'Paris call for trust and security in cyberspace,' French President Emmanuel Macron is hoping to revive efforts to regulate cyberspace after the last round of United Nations negotiations failed in 2017.

In the document, which is supported by many European countries but, crucially, not China or Russia, the signatories urge governments to beef up protections against cyber meddling in elections and prevent the theft of trade secrets. The Paris call was initially pushed for by tech companies but was redrafted by French officials to include work done by U.N. experts in recent years. [...] In another sign of the Trump administration's reluctance to join international initiatives it sees as a bid to encroach on U.S. sovereignty, French officials said Washington might not become a signatory, though talks are continuing.

Richard Stallman recently gave a 9,000-word interview in which he first reminisces about his early days at MIT's AI Lab where he "found something worth being loyal to" -- and then assesses how things have played out. Open source is an amoral, depoliticized substitute for the free-software movement... [I]t's not the name of a philosophy -- it refers to the software, but not to the users. You'll find lots of cautious, timid organizations that do things that are useful, but they don't dare say: users deserve freedom. Like Creative Commons, which does useful, practical work -- namely, preparing licences that respect the freedom to share. But Creative Commons doesn't say that users are entitled to the freedom to share; it doesn't say that it's wrong to deny people the freedom to share. It doesn't actively uphold that principle.

Of course, it's much easier to be a supporter of open source, because it doesn't commit you to anything. You could spend ten minutes a week doing things that help advance open source, or just say you're a supporter -- and you're not a hypocrite, because you can't violate your principles if you haven't stated any. What's significant is that, in their attempt to separate our software from our ideas, they've reduced our ability to win people over by showing what those ideas have achieved...

For a long time, Microsoft was the main enemy of users' freedom, and then, for the past ten years or so, it's been Apple. When the first iThings came out, around 2007, it was a tremendous advance in contempt for users' freedom because it imposed censorship of applications -- you could only install programs approved by Apple. Ironically, Apple has retreated from that a little bit. If a program is written in Swift, you can now install it yourself from source code. So, Apple computers are no longer 100 per cent jails. The tablets too. A jail is a computer in which installation of applications is censored. So Apple introduced the first jail computer with the iPhone. Then Microsoft started making computers that are jails, and now Apple has, you might say, opened a window into the jail -- but not the main door.
Stallman cites free-software alternatives to Skype like Linphone, Ekiga, and xJitsi, and also says he's In favor of projects like GNU social, a free software microblogging server, and the distributed social networking service Diaspora. "I know they're useful for other people, but it wouldn't fit my lifestyle. I just use email." In fact, he calls mobile computing one of the three main setbacks of the free-software movement. "[P]hones and tablets, designed from the ground up to be non-free. The apps, which tend now to be non-free malware. And the Intel management engine, and more generally the low-level software, which we can't replace, because things just won't allow us to do so....

"[P]eople in the software field can't avoid the issue of free versus proprietary software, freedom-respecting versus freedom-trampling software. We have a responsibility, if we're doing things in the software field, to do it in a way that is ethical. I don't know whether we will ever succeed in liberating everyone, but it's clearly the right direction in which to push."

Like many people, Alex Stamos, former Facebook chief security officer, thinks tech platforms like Facebook and Google have too much power. But he doesn't agree with the calls to break them up. And he argues that the very people who say Facebook and Google are too powerful are giving them more power by insisting they do more to control hate speech and propaganda. From a report: "That's a dangerous path," he warns. If democratic countries make tech firms impose limits on free speech, so will autocratic ones. Before long, the technology will enable "machine-speed, real-time moderation of everything we say online." In attempting to rein in Big Tech, we risk creating Big Brother. So what's the solution? I spoke to Stamos at his Stanford office to find out.

Technology Review: So is the disinformation/propaganda problem mostly solved?
Stamos: In a free society, you will never eliminate that problem. I think the most important thing [in the US] is the advertising transparency. With or without any foreign interference, the parties, the campaigns, the PACs [political action committees] here in the US are divvying up the electorate into tiny little buckets, and that is a bad thing. Transparency is a good start. The next step we need is federal legislation to put a limit on ad targeting. There are thousands of companies in the internet advertising ecosystem. Facebook, Google, and Twitter are the only ones that have done anything, because they have gotten the most press coverage and the most pressure from politicians. So without legislation we're just going to push all of the attackers into the long tail of advertising, to companies that don't have dedicated teams looking for Russian disinformation groups.

Technology Review: Facebook has been criticized over Russian political interference both in the US and in other countries, the genocide in Myanmar, and a lot of other things. Do you feel Facebook has fully grasped the extent of its influence and its responsibility?
Stamos: I think the company certainly understands its impact. The hard part is solving it. Ninety percent of Facebook users live outside the United States. Well over half live in either non-free countries or democracies without protection for speech. One of the problems is coming up with solutions in these countries that don't immediately go to a very dark place [i.e., censorship]. Another is figuring out what issues to put engineering resources behind. No matter how big a company is, there are only a certain number of problems you [can tackle]. One of the problems that companies have had is that they're in a firefighting mode where they jump from emergency to emergency. So as they staff up that gets better, but we also need a more informed external discussion about the things we want the companies to focus on -- what are the problems that absolutely have to be solved, and what aren't. You mentioned a bunch of a problems that are actually very different, but people blur them all together.

Technology Review: How do you regulate in a world in which tech is advancing so fast while regulation moves so slowly? How should a society set sensible limits on what tech companies do?
Stamos: But right now, society is not asking for limits on what they do. It's asking that tech companies do more. And I think that's a dangerous path. In all of the problems you mentioned -- Russian disinformation, Myanmar -- what you're telling these companies is, "We want you to have more power to control what other people say and do." That's very dangerous, especially with the rise of machine learning. Five or ten years from now, there could be machine-learning systems that understand human languages as well as humans. We could end up with machine-speed, real-time moderation of everything we say online. So the powers we grant the tech companies right now are the powers those machines are going to have in five years.

samleecole shares a report from Motherboard: The parental controls in the iPhone's new iOS 12 are blocking innocuous sexual education content on Safari, while allowing websites like the white supremacist Daily Stormer and searches for bomb-making instructions through its filter. The settings, found under Screen Time in the new iOS 12, are meant to give parents greater control over how their kids use their phones unsupervised, including filters for "explicit" content and content ratings and restrictions, with the option to "limit adult websites." As tested by Motherboard, the filter blocks longstanding educational sites like Scarleteen and O.school, but allows sites like The Daily Stormer, an extremist neo-Nazi white supremacist platform.

The filter in question "limits adult websites" on Safari. When Motherboard tested this filter, we found several similarly blocked searches and websites: The searches "how to say no to sex," "sex assault hotline," and "sex education" were all restricted, but the results for the searches "how to poison my mom," "how to join isis," and "how to make a bomb" were allowed. 4chan and 8chan are blocked, but Reddit -- including many NSFW and porn-focused subreddits, are not. The subreddit r/gonewild, which is pornographic, is not caught by the filter, which even allows users to click through Reddit's own age-gating.

"Facebook will ban false information about voting requirements and fake reports of violence or long lines at polling stations in the run-up to and during next month's U.S. midterm elections," reports Reuters. The latest efforts are to reduce voter manipulation across its platform. From the report: The world's largest online social network, with 1.5 billion daily users, has stopped short of banning all false or misleading posts, something that Facebook has shied away from as it would likely increase its expenses and leave it open to charges of censorship. The ban on false information about voting methods, set to be announced later on Monday, comes six weeks after Senator Ron Wyden asked Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg how Facebook would counter posts aimed at suppressing votes, such as by telling certain users they could vote by text, a hoax that has been used to reduce turnout in the past.

The information on voting methods becomes one of the few areas in which falsehoods are prohibited on Facebook, a policy enforced by what the company calls "community standards" moderators, although application of its standards has been uneven. It will not stop the vast majority of untruthful posts about candidates or other election issues.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has refused to answer a list of questions from U.S. lawmakers about the company's secretive plan for a censored search engine in China. From a report: In a letter newly obtained by The Intercept, Pichai told a bipartisan group of six senators that Google could have "broad benefits inside and outside of China," but said he could not share details about the censored search engine because it "remains unclear" whether the company "would or could release a search service" in the country. Pichai's letter contradicts the company's search engine chief, Ben Gomes, who informed staff during a private meeting that the company was aiming to release the platform in China between January and April 2019. Gomes told employees working on the Chinese search engine that they should get it ready to be "brought off the shelf and quickly deployed."

[...] In his letter to the senators, dated August 31, Pichai did not mention the word "censorship" or address human rights concerns. He told the senators that "providing access to information to people around the world is central to our mission," and said he believed Google's tools could "help to facilitate an exchange of information and learning." The company was committed to "promoting access to information, freedom of expression, and user privacy," he wrote, while also "respecting the laws of jurisdictions in which we operate."

Google intends to launch a censored version of its Search app for China sometime in the next six to nine months, according to a leaked transcript from a private employee meeting held last month. The Intercept's Ryan Gallagher today reported the company's Search engine chief, Ben Gomes, held a meeting to congratulate a room full of employees working on the platform, dubbed Project Dragonfly. From a report: According to The Intercept, Gomes talked about the launch timeline: "While we are saying it's going to be six and nine months [to launch], the world is a very dynamic place." He goes on to point out that the current political climate makes it difficult to pinpoint a definite timeline, but indicates employees should be ready to launch whenever a "window opens." These comments come in stark contrast to public statements given recently by both Gomes and Google's chief privacy officer, Kieth Enright.

Speaking to members of Congress last month, Enright tried to skirt the issue of the Dragonfly project by playing dumb. According to Wired he didn't quite deny involvement, and in fact admitted the company had explored the idea, but simply stated Google wasn't "close to launching" the censored Search engine and that he was "not clear on the contours of what is in scope or out of scope for that project." Gomes took the soft-denial a step further when he told the BBC "Right now all we've done is some exploration, but since we don't have any plans to launch something there's nothing much I can say about it."

Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they built. An anonymous reader shares a report: At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech start-ups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere. That's a change from the past, when Silicon Valley workers typically developed products with little questioning about the social costs. It is also a sign of how some tech companies, which grew by serving consumers and businesses, are expanding more into government work. And the shift coincides with concerns in Silicon Valley about the Trump administration's policies and the larger role of technology in government.

"You can think you're building technology for one purpose, and then you find out it's really twisted," said Laura Nolan, 38, a senior software engineer who resigned from Google in June over the company's involvement in Project Maven, an effort to build artificial intelligence for the Department of Defense that could be used to target drone strikes. All of this has led to growing tensions between tech employees and managers. In recent months, workers at Google, Microsoft and Amazon have signed petitions and protested to executives over how some of the technology they helped create is being used. At smaller companies, engineers have begun asking more questions about ethics.

On Thursday, the U.S. Vice President Mike Pence weighed in on Dragonfly, a project run by Google to build a censored search engine app for China. He said Dragonfly app would make it easier to track someone's internet searches. From a report: Pence said in a speech that business leaders are now thinking twice before entering the Chinese market "if it means turning over their intellectual property or abetting Beijing's oppression." He added, "More must follow suit. For example, Google should immediately end development of the 'Dragonfly' app that will strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers."

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZDNet: Jigsaw, a technology incubator created by Google and operated as a subsidiary under the Alphabet brand, has released today an Android app named Intra that can encrypt DNS queries as a protection against DNS manipulation at the ISP (internet service provider) level. DNS manipulation is one of the most common forms of online censorship used by oppressive regimes or unscrupulous ISPs, used to block access to news sites, information portals, social media platforms, undesirable software, and more. Intra protects against DNS manipulation by keeping DNS traffic hidden from third-parties with state-level surveillance capabilities, such as internet service providers in countries with autocratic regimes. Reports suggest that Alphabet tested the app with a few dozen political activists in Venezuela before the global roll-out.