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The Internet Privacy

Indonesia Bans Search Engine DuckDuckGo On Gambling, Pornography Concerns (reuters.com) 71

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Indonesia said it has banned the privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo, citing concerns that it could be used to access pornography and online gambling websites which are illegal in the country, the communications ministry said on Friday. Indonesia, with the world's biggest Muslim population, has strict rules that ban the sharing online of content deemed obscene. Social media platform Reddit and video-hosting platform Vimeo are blocked.

Usman Kansong, a communications ministry official, told Reuters that DuckDuckGo had been blocked "because of the many complaints made to us about the rampant online gambling and pornography content in its search results." The ministry did not say how DuckDuckGo differs from other search engines such as Alphabet's Google but on its website, DuckDuckGo said it offered several products intended to "help people protect their online privacy" including the search engine, which it said has been praised by privacy advocates.

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Indonesia Bans Search Engine DuckDuckGo On Gambling, Pornography Concerns

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    Might have to give DuckDuck go a look.
    • Re:Hmmm. (Score:4, Informative)

      by ufgrat ( 6245202 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @05:35PM (#64683440)

      Been using it for years, and it's got some nice additions-- search for a tracking number, there's a good chance you'll get a link to the tracking site. It's got a built in password generator.

      It's also, in general, a decent search engine, and when I search for a product, I don't suddenly start getting bombarded with ads, search results, and email regarding said product.

      But I don't get gambling sites, or porn sites as a rule. I'm suspecting Indonesia of being less than transparent.

      • by lsllll ( 830002 )
        I used DDG as well and have for years, but to tout it's password generator as a plus is stretching it. It generates an 8 character password out of printable characters. That's all.

        Freedom of speech and choice is limited in most countries in the world. Their governments do their best to keep "illegal" stuff out of people's hands. I don't believe Indonesia is not being transparent. It's just that their laws aren't the same as where you and I live. I'm not saying it's right for them to block access to
        • The password generator can be useful if you tell it to be. For example, try "password 16 characters strong" for a longer password containing special characters. Could be handy in a pinch.

          https://start.duckduckgo.com/?... [duckduckgo.com]

          • pwgen -Bsy 16 1

            Can be run in termux if you want it portable.

            Why would I want DDG to know my passwords? Even if they don't know where I'm using them.

      • Similarly I've never got random porn and gambling results with DDG. It may be that DDG happily supplies vice results when you ask for them, whereas Google/Bing are programmed to be more sensitive to regional laws. The complaints would then be parents or the like rather than those actually receiving the results.

      • It's also, in general, a decent search engine, and when I search for a product, I don't suddenly start getting bombarded with ads, search results, and email regarding said product.

        Aren't the search results provided by Bing?

        • by ufgrat ( 6245202 )

          According to DDG, some of them are. But others aren't. And the data isn't shared back to Bing, based on the lack of sudden interest syndrome.

      • Been using it for years, and it's got some nice additions-- search for a tracking number, there's a good chance you'll get a link to the tracking site.

        Google was doing that before DDG even existed...

  • Bing (Score:5, Informative)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @04:26PM (#64683252)
    Isn't DuckDuckGo basically Bing with some filters added?
    • yes.
    • Re:Bing (Score:5, Informative)

      by ufgrat ( 6245202 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @05:32PM (#64683430)

      Only if you're incredibly simplistic.

      DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot);

      • Re:Bing (Score:5, Interesting)

        by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @07:11PM (#64683710)

        During last Bing outage in May, DDG was as down as Bing. https://slashdot.org/story/24/... [slashdot.org]

        Some high moderated comments from that time:
        * " DDG keeps telling everyone that they use many search engines and post cumulative results. And yet every time Bing goes it, DDG goes out with it. While those other search engines going out doesn't seem to cause outages on DDG." -- Luckyo
        * "using DDG and StartPage means you are at least NOT giving out information to Google and Microsoft, which is good" -- markdavis

      • Only if you're incredibly simplistic.

        Have you ever tried just comparing Bing and DDG results? They are usually identical, and when they are not, they are almost identical.

    • As a regular DuckDuckGo user, I have to say that you are mostly correct. The difference is that search results are slightly less useful, often irrelevant, and it incorporates an exciting randomization feature called "AI" that mostly gives you the wrong answers. But it has its charm.

      • by hawk ( 1151 )

        also, ducky doesn't make you swat down a half-dozen irrelevant Microsoft sites with little snitch every time you open it . . .

    • Isn't DuckDuckGo basically Bing with some filters added?

      That was my question too, why ban DDG and not Bing, when the results provided are about the same?

  • Bing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Monday August 05, 2024 @04:28PM (#64683258) Homepage Journal

    Wait until they find out about Bing... DDG is tame.

    • by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      You seem to know a lot more than myself on the matter! Could you help me please? I installed DuckDuckGo and Bing in my browser (took me about an hour to find out how and do it) but I still can't find anything. Please help!

      Thanks in advance,

    • Bing, the search engine for finding really f-d up pics.

  • Third time's the charm.
  • Unpopular opinion (Score:3, Insightful)

    by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @04:35PM (#64683290)

    It's arguably better to let people jerk off and gamble a bit, than abstain from both and go blow stuff up instead.

  • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @04:44PM (#64683310)

    Indonesia being the biggest islamic country on the planet has been increasingly implementing sharia-style legislation into its national laws.

    This is about executing Communications Ministry's Ministerial Regulation 5 from 2020, which requires all "Electronic Service Operators" to register with the government and accept obligations in things like content blocking. It's a part of their "healthy internet" program, which itself is a part of slow strangling of evil freedoms that are inherently anti-islamic.

    Those ESOs that didn't register and accepted obligations are now getting blocked by the government one by one. They already banned reddit, paypal, steam, epic games, yahoo and vimeo among many others. Majors like alphabet, meta, microsoft and amazon have all registered and accepted their legal obligations such as content censorship and user monitoring for the government.

    So the problem here is that bing is censored and monitored by Communications Ministry in Indonesia, whereas DDG is not. Hence it's getting banned and bing isn't.

    • Yup. In this case being banned is a virtue, those that aren't banned should be ashamed.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      no surprise, right out the door it smelled like "we can't track people in DDG, time to ban"

      an element of "we will have no doubleplusungood thinking" is also out of every other country's playbook, visa & mc out here dictating the world, think their headlines on the matter have surpassed paypal's at this point

    • by dcooper_db9 ( 1044858 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @08:25PM (#64683850)

      If you had ever lived in Indonesia you would understand how wrong this characterization is. Indonesia is indeed the worlds most populous Muslim majority nation, but Islam is layered on top of other elements of cultural identity, including Buddhist and Hindu religious roots.

      Indonesia officially recognizes 6 religions. They are Islam, Protestant Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. 87 percent of Indonesians identify as Muslim, followed by Protestantism (7%), Catholicism (3%), Hinduism (2%), other (1%) and unspecified (<1%).

      The Javanese and Sundanese people make up the two largest ethnic groups at 40 and 15 percent of the population respectively. 30 percent of the population is split between 13 other ethnic groups, and another 15 percent are divided into ethnic groups so small they are categorized as other.

      Indonesia is the 16th largest nation by land mass but it spans more than 13,000 islands, 922 of which are permanently inhabited. Its people are so diverse that it simply is not possible to hold the nation together without embracing cultural diversity. Early in its post-colonial history Indonesia rejected the idea of allowing Islam an official role in government. The outcome of that early conflict resulted in the adoption of Pancasila as the official foundational philosophy, similar to how Americans think about the Declaration of Independance. Pancasila has five elements, but it is often expressed as "Unity through Diversity".

      There are pro-Islamist elements in Indonesia. Some of those people led an insurgency for decades that was centered around Banda Aceh province. That insurgency ended after the Boxing Day Tsunami devastated the region in 2004. The Indonesian government negotiated a peace agreement that allowed a limited form of Islamic law to operate in that province. Islamic law is not allowed to rule in any other part of the country.

      In recent years Indonesia, like many other countries, has slid backwards on civil liberties. I very much hope this trend will reverse, but it's a mistake to attribute this deterioration to Islam.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        For those unaware of islamic propaganda being spewed here, islamization of Indonesia is a fairly recent thing, so islam in it is in the conquest mode, slowly taking the nation over island by island, and community by community. In that phase of conquest, islam utilizes coercion, torture, slavery and butchery as primary tools of conquest of locals. Those already subjugated have their laws slowly changed closer and closer to islamic law, which is an island wide endeavour, one aspect of which is in the OP. Thos

        • I don't know how to break this to you, but from our perspective there's not too much discernible difference between Christians and Muslims. I mean, you've both collectively been driving us out of places and killing us for fun for centuries now, until recently both of you admitted it (although since somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, Christians worldwide have shown some softening in this regard).

          Truth to tell, I'm not even a reform Jew anymore. Agnostic, with strong atheist leanings. Only

          • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            >but from our perspective there's not too much discernible difference between Christians and Muslims.

            A very common problem with modern Marxists who view all religions are equally bad. This is not due to religions being even remotely comparable, but because Marxism in itself is a genocidal cult that views all other religions as inherently evil due to them standing in the way of developing class/critical consciousness (depending on subtype of marxism being involved).

            It's how you get "jews (but just a drop)

            • All religions are equally bullshit. They are not all equally harmful, but that is only because they are not all equally large.

              As soon as a religion gets big it gets to be worth taking over and using to make money, control people, blah blah blah. It doesn't matter what the intent was, or indeed what the tenets were. "Jesus" "said" give everything to the poor and follow me, but most Christians are now followers primarily of prosperity theology. I know god loves me because I can afford a big shiny SUV!

              Christia

              • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                >All religions are equally bullshit.

                All humans have a party of their psyche that is specifically for religion. This indicates that religion is an evolved behavior. Evolved behavior by definition is best adaptation to environment, because alternatives are selected out in process of natural selection.

                You're arguing against theory of evolution. And you're not even smart enough to understand that. Granted that is the norm among your ideology, as far left believes humans to be universally interchangeable blan

                • ...a whole bunch of eyes and teeth. Y'know, that whole holocaust thing you're on about (we call it the Shoah, incidentally. Goys - oy!)? You know that Hitler was a Christian, right? Made treaties with the Catholic Church, got their list of who'se who as Jews in Europe and went to town. The Catholic church just figured they'd found a solution to the Jewish problem and washed their hands. Why is it that Christians seem to have OCD, is there that much blood on your collective hands?

                  There were a few Chri

                  • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                    What Christian logic? I'm using logic. No religion involved in the process.

                    But thanks for sharing that you just have irrational hatred of christianity. Goes with the whole "I'm islamophile, genocidal maniac and I have a drop of jewish blood".

                    • you just have irrational hatred of christianity

                      Hatred of Christianity is not irrational. It comes from a very rational fear which in turn is because of its history. Anyone who does not fear Christianity is frankly either ignorant or unexplainably apathetic.

                      There's also the simple fact that the core message of Christ from which we get the name Christian is to love and help your neighbor, and oh yeah, people who aren't your neighbor as well... But that is not how Christianity primarily manifests itself in our world.

                    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                      I've rarely seen someone openly admit to christianophobia this openly. It's very visible in the fact that you don't even understand that that which you deny is in fact it's primary manifestation. You can see this on billion-grade policy level where it's only the Christian nations that opened themselves to the suicidal immigration of the civilization that spend almost a millenia and a half trying to invade and exterminate Christendom with varying success. And still continues to defend it to this day, even a

                    • I've rarely seen someone openly admit to christianophobia this openly.

                      That's because they are afraid to admit it, if only because they will get some garden-grade psychological bullshit from some chucklefuck.

                      It's very visible in the fact that you don't even understand that that which you deny is in fact it's primary manifestation.

                      Its primary manifestation is control, guilt, and theft.

                      it's only the Christian nations that opened themselves to the suicidal immigration of the civilization that spend almost a millenia and a half trying to invade and exterminate Christendom

                      Opened themselves? I think you mean began to receive refugees from countries they economically dominated, creating more refugees.

                    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                      >if only because they will get some garden-grade psychological bullshit from some chucklefuck.

                      This is the popular "my truth" within your cult. Objective look at the reality on the other hand tells you that Christianity is a dying religion that has largely surrendered to its faith, mocked everywhere from Western upper class parties where it's looked down as unfashionable relic and down to its churches being burned down and converted to serve the upcoming great faith of islam across the globe.

                      Overall, ther

                    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                      >dying religion that has largely surrendered to its FATE

                      Effn autocorrect.

                  • by hawk ( 1151 )

                    >You know that Hitler was a Christian, right?

                    You know that hitler was not a Christian, right? That he promulgated a state church to get away from those pesky Christian notions of right and wrong, and to promote race and state, right?

                    or are facts just too inconvenient for your paranoid fantasy?

                • "All humans have a party of their psyche that is specifically for religion."

                  That seems true to you because you have religious beliefs like that one, but [citation needed] for the rest of us.

                  • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                    See, this is projection of the man of faith who doesn't have self awareness to comprehend himself to be a man of faith.

                    I'm an atheist. Jesus was a pathetic weakling who's ideas are suicidal. Mohammad was a child raping goat fucking warlord. Buddha was the worst kind of nihilist. Hindu gods are the way they are because they're backwards and not finished transition from Animism and Shamanism into more complex religious structures, though they are close to finishing that transition making them a proper modern

                    • See, this is projection of the man of faith who doesn't have self awareness to comprehend himself to be a man of faith.

                      Faith? In what? I have faith in people being shitty to one another.

                      Jesus was a pathetic weakling who's ideas are suicidal.

                      Jesus is most likely a composite. The idea of mobilizing the poor is rational, but in the story, Jesus fucks with the bankers directly and that never turns out well.

                      My problem is that there are genuinely utterly self unaware people who don't understand that they have a very strong religious impulse

                      And then you go on to describe a bunch of things that aren't religions as things people belive religiously. What you call a religious impulse I call desperation.

                      It's an expression of how you live your life, like the massive majority. Driven by faith

                      You still haven't explained what you think I have faith in. Until you can get there, you're just flailing around lookin

                    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                      Funny part is that I outlined both the core tenets of your specific faith above. But your lack of self awareness made you gloss over it.

                      A common problem with adherents to modern Western Marxist/Gnostic cult. As one of the core tenet of your faith is that you cannot believe your lying senses, only the expressed consensus of your peers determines reality. And cycle of Pavlovian punishment is then handed out to train the adherent to adhere to the rules of the cult.

                      We have records of your faith going back to la

              • by mmell ( 832646 )

                It is the point of every religion I've ever encountered - "we're the only ones who are right, we're right about everything, and anybody who doesn't think so is subhuman filth to be killed on sight." The very essence of two of the three major monotheistic religions and at least a primary element of all the other theistic belief sets. Notice that Buddhists are totally not part of this; but then again, they're not quite theistic, more philosophical.

                I'll reiterate that I don't see much meaningful difference

            • Mix Commie Red and Coward Yellow, you get Agent Orange. Somebody should've warned you, exposure to pure orange Christianity is neurotoxic. Donald Trump and the entire Make America Genuflect Again movement have blended the best elements of Christianity, Communism and Nazi philosophy to create MAGA. Folks like yourself dedicated to destroying anything that's not white, christian, male and gentried. We all see you now, thanks to that orange dye.
      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        If you had ever lived in Indonesia you would understand how wrong this characterization is. Indonesia is indeed the worlds most populous Muslim majority nation, but Islam is layered on top of other elements of cultural identity, including Buddhist and Hindu religious roots.

        Indonesia officially recognizes 6 religions. They are Islam, Protestant Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. 87 percent of Indonesians identify as Muslim, followed by Protestantism (7%), Catholicism (3%), Hinduism (2%), other (1%) and unspecified (<1%).

        This in it's entirety is a good post, Luckyo knows nothing about that part of the world, I suspect he knows nothing about his part of town, let alone the world.

        What should be noted is this kind of Puritanism isn't exclusive to Indonesia in South East Asia, it's the same in (majority) Buddhist Thailand and and (majority) Hindu India. I wouldn't be surprised if Catholic Philippines had something similar but I don't know for sure. Lets not even mention China as they don't even pretend do be a democracy (plu

    • Indonesia being the biggest islamic country on the planet has been increasingly implementing sharia-style legislation into its national laws.

      This is about executing Communications Ministry's Ministerial Regulation 5 from 2020, which requires all "Electronic Service Operators" to register with the government and accept obligations in things like content blocking. It's a part of their "healthy internet" program, which itself is a part of slow strangling of evil freedoms that are inherently anti-islamic.

      Those ESOs that didn't register and accepted obligations are now getting blocked by the government one by one. They already banned reddit, paypal, steam, epic games, yahoo and vimeo among many others. Majors like alphabet, meta, microsoft and amazon have all registered and accepted their legal obligations such as content censorship and user monitoring for the government.

      So the problem here is that bing is censored and monitored by Communications Ministry in Indonesia, whereas DDG is not. Hence it's getting banned and bing isn't.

      Um, duh. "Indonesia, with the world's biggest Muslim population, has strict rules that ban the sharing online of content deemed obscene."

      So maybe importing lots of Islam isn't such a great idea after all? I mean, do you want this in your country too?

      (I remember seeing the original "Handmaid Tale" movie way back, and thinking "um, what? This is actually Islam being portrayed. Did the author and the movie makers really not know that?")

    • by hawk ( 1151 )

      >This is about executing

      Oooh, it's about time Microsoft saw some executions.

      >Communications Ministry's Ministerial Regulation 5 from 2020,

      oh.

      never mind.

      but you had my hopes up . . .

      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        If you want islamic executions, you should look into shit happening in Indonesian side of Papua today. But that has been locked to foreign observers for a long time, so you'll have to do with some rare old pictures from times when unvetted foreigners were still allowed to land on the island in meaningful numbers.

        That said, current Bangladeshi muslims love to put their ongoing genocide on video and put it online for all to see. So if you want excitement, go look at those. Telegram is choke full of them.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    ... on "General & Pervasive Douchery" concerns
  • Bribery is a real problem in our world.
  • by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @06:52PM (#64683680)

    If it weighs the same as a duck, it must be made of wood and therefore a witch - burn^WBan it!

  • I can just picture it
    Indonesian 1: OMG (PBUH) have you seen what's on DuckDuckGo?
    Indonesian 2: That's terrible. I'm going to complain to the Communications Ministry right now!
  • I've been using DDG for years and never noticed any search results that relate to on line gambling or porn, unless I specifically search for something that I know is going to end up with mature or otherwise explicit results.

    Makes me wonder what those Indonesians are searching for that is returning the results they are complaining about.

  • Welp, good think duckduckgo is available via Tor.

    • It's easy to be brave here in the Land of the Free, but any one person defying any one government anywhere is basically a mouse messing with an elephant. It's adorable in cartoons but in real life in ends badly for the mouse.

      Courage is amazing - but paranoia has a longer life expectancy.

  • so let's take away the telephone books

  • I recently visited Indonesia for 6 weeks. Couldn't access Reddit so I opened a VPN, which worked. However I discovered that all Indonesia are doing is redirecting DNS queries for these banned sites. So I used the free Cloudflare app "1.1.1.1", which allows you to change your carrier's DNS on an iPhone, and this worked just as well as a VPN, if not faster.

  • ... pricacy and critisism agains your government you ban the shit out of all privacy respecting applications. Next VPN ban?
    Read this carefully between the lines and try to get your head around the phrase about the socalled complaints. Complaint fro who? I can only think of the militairistic regime that makes a mockery of Indonesia's 'democracy'. It's a dictatorship no less. "Usman Kansong, a communications ministry official, told Reuters that DuckDuckGo had been blocked "because of the many complaints mad

  • They are just living like I did as a teen in the 80s before the internet. Every bathing suit ad, hot tv mom, etc was a starting point for "entertainment".

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'Informatique. -- Bosquet [on seeing the IBM 4341]

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