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Under pressure from rightsholders, Google makes pirate sites harder to find in search results. As a result, pirates are increasingly advising each other to use DuckDuckGo instead. Surprisingly, in response to a very popular ‘pirate’ search term, Google appears to agree its rival is the best option.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
In an ideal world, search engine users would be presented with the most authoritative set of results in response to a specific search.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world but companies like Google, given the scale of the task, do a reasonable job of helping us find what we’re looking for, with some caveats.
By design, Google and other search engines have been deciding what’s ‘best’ for us for years. After all, it’s their own algorithms that decide which sites appear in response to any kind of search. Precisely how these decisions are made are closely-guarded secrets but in more recent years and under pressure from copyright holders, we known that Google has been heavily tampering with piracy-related searches.
The general line is that Google voluntarily demotes and downranks sites for which it receives large numbers of valid DMCA notices. The theory is that sites are punished for continually infringing copyright so when users search for a particular movie, for example, torrent and streaming sites aren’t presented as the top options.
As a result and unless searchers use a considerable amount of ‘Google-Fu’, Google is no longer a good place to find pirated content. In fact, people are more likely to find scammy and dangerous sites instead, as they bubble their way to the top to occupy the vacuum.
With The Pirate Bay the ‘proud’ receiver of millions of copyright complaints, searching for the site by name in Google is almost pointless. Even though the search term clearly shows what the user is looking for, the site doesn’t appear in the first few pages of Google’s results, unless people search for its precise domain.
However, with the site blocked by ISPs all around the world, what millions of people are actually looking for these days is Pirate Bay proxy services that facilitate access to the site. Over time, these also receive millions of complaints so Google downranks these too.
DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, produces exactly what one might expect as a result of these searches – ThePirateBay.org on the top and a list of Pirate Bay proxies respectively.
Search engine DuckDuckGo has a tiny 0.5% of the search market but with its pro-privacy stance, is increasingly favored when it comes to seeking out pirate content. The results that appear in response to searches tend to feel much more authentic when compared to those presented by Google, a suggestion perhaps that less or even no ‘tampering’ is taking place.
While this might not please copyright holders, DuckDuckGo’s relative obscurity doesn’t make it a prime target for them right now but in a bizarre twist we noticed this week, it appears Google has somehow determined that its rival is the most authoritative option when it comes to a particular ‘pirate’ search.
This week it was revealed that in Australia, Google will voluntarily block proxies and mirrors of pirate sites without being presented with a court order. This followed a similar agreement in 2019 which saw Google de-index more than 800 pirate sites.
This move piqued our interest so we carried out a simple Google search for “pirate bay proxies”. The screenshot below reveals what we were presented with.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this top result is that Google is promoting a rival’s service. This is interesting since whenever it reasonably can, modern-day Google has a tendency to recommend its own product. Had it done that here, however, users would get caught in an infinite loop of finding little of value.
The other interesting thing about this valuable top-spot placement is that it promotes a custom search on DuckDuckGo when indexing internal searches of other sites is usually discouraged by Google itself.
All that having been said, Google has arguably done its job here to perfection. Either by design or otherwise, its algorithms have determined that DuckDuckGo is the best place to find Pirate Bay proxies. And they have got that absolutely spot on.
It’s worth noting that if we look at the history of piracy on the Internet, it existed long before Google was founded. In fact, most early online piracy didn’t rely on today’s searchable web at all, with locations of file dumps mostly spread via word of mouth, early chat technologies, and newsgroups. But back then, of course, a whole generation was yet to be born, with most parents still unaware that the Internet existed.
The point is that while mainstream piracy arguably began with Napster, it only exploded when the content of eDonkey and BitTorrent networks became searchable on the web. Search engines, rightly or wrongly depending on viewpoint, played a massive role in that. What we will probably see in the next few years, however, is that role diminishing again.
By choice or by force, Google will undoubtedly clamp down further on piracy and its rivals will eventually have to follow suit. It may take a while but basic searches will no longer prove useful to pirates and they will have to find other ways to educate themselves on where to find content.
Most large file-sharing discussion communities – and there were many – died out years ago, partly due to waning interest, partly due to the rise of social networks. But mainly because piracy was no longer niche and presented on a plate, often via search engines.
These communities may have to rise again because (and you can quote me on this) Reddit, Facebook and similar platforms will eventually go the same way as search engines when it comes to piracy.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
They’re in pigs already, and the company is planning for human testing.
Enlarge / Elon Musk shows the latest version of his company's implants. (credit: Neuralink)
On Friday, Elon Musk gave an update on what's probably his third-most prominent company: Neuralink. Neuralink had been pretty low profile (especially in comparison to Tesla and SpaceX) prior to this time last year, which is when Musk first went into detail about the company's goals and progress. And the goals were striking: a mass-market brain implant that could be installed by a robot via same-day surgery.
With this year's update, little has changed about the overall plan, but plenty of little details have been tweaked in the intervening 12 months. And progress has been made, in that Musk introduced his audience to a group of pigs who were already carrying what he suggested was version 0.9 of his implants, with human testing set to follow shortly.
One of the big differences between this year and last is the overall design of the implant and its supporting hardware. The original goal had been to keep the surgery simple in part by minimizing the size of the hole that needed to be made in the skull. This meant a small-diameter implant that wouldn't necessarily be placed near the neurons it interacted with and would require a connection to separate hardware placed behind the ear. All of this added to the level of complication and would necessarily require running some wires across the surface of the brain.
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Sale could value DirecTV at much less than $49B AT&T paid in 2015, reports say.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | ljhimages)
AT&T is reportedly trying to sell DirecTV to private-equity investors just five years after buying the satellite provider. The negotiations with potential buyers come after millions of customers ditched DirecTV over the past two years, and could value DirecTV at much less than the $49 billion AT&T paid for it.
"AT&T is seeking private-equity investors to buy the majority of its DirecTV satellite-television business, helping it cope with a major drag on its operations, according to people familiar with the situation," Bloomberg wrote yesterday. AT&T and its advisers at Goldman Sachs "have been in talks with private-equity suitors about the satellite TV unit," with potential bidders including Apollo Global Management and Platinum Equity, The Wall Street Journal reported.
AT&T could end up selling DirecTV for far less than it paid five years ago. "Any deal for the satellite TV service would be sizable but likely a far cry from the $49 billion AT&T paid for it in 2015," the Journal wrote, quoting sources familiar with the talks as saying that "a deal could value the business below $20 billion."
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Boseman, 43, never discussed his colon cancer publicly, continued to work during his illness.
Enlarge / Wakanda forever! Chadwick Boseman's rising star shot into the stratosphere when he took on the role of T'Challa in Black Panther (2018). (credit: Marvel Studios)
Actor Chadwick Boseman, best known for his starring role in Marvel's blockbuster movie Black Panther (2018), has died from complications related to a four-year battle with colon cancer. Reactions on Twitter began with shock and disbelief and quickly progressed to a collective outpouring of grief and heartfelt condolences to Boseman's family.
One reason the news came as such a shock is that Boseman kept his illness quiet since his diagnosis in 2016—the same year Captain America: Civil War (which introduced his character) was released. Principal photography for Black Panther began in January 2017, just after his diagnosis. It was a physically demanding role, but you'd never know it from Boseman's performance. He continued to work—filming Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, 21 Bridges, and Da 5 Bloods—between surgeries and chemotherapy treatments, as his Stage III colon cancer gradually progressed to Stage IV. His final film will be the Netflix adaptation of August Wilson's play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, currently in post-production.
“A true fighter, Chadwick persevered through it all, and brought you many of the films you have come to love so much,” Boseman's family said in a statement. “From Marshall to Da 5 Bloods, August Wilson's Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and several more—all were filmed during and between countless surgeries and chemotherapy. It was the honor of his career to bring King T'Challa to life in Black Panther.”
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Demo der Corona-Maßnahmen-Gegner von der Polizei aufgelöst
Westdeutsche Kommunisten von 1945 bis heute
Services to include spotting racial bias, developing guidelines around AI projects.
Enlarge (credit: Yuchiro Chino | Getty Images)
Companies play cloud computing providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google big money to avoid operating their own digital infrastructure. Google’s cloud division will soon invite customers to outsource something less tangible than CPUs and disk drives—the rights and wrongs of using artificial intelligence.
The company plans to launch new AI ethics services before the end of the year. Initially, Google will offer others advice on tasks such as spotting racial bias in computer vision systems, or developing ethical guidelines that govern AI projects. Longer term, the company may offer to audit customers’ AI systems for ethical integrity, and charge for ethics advice.
Google’s new offerings will test whether a lucrative but increasingly distrusted industry can boost its business by offering ethical pointers. The company is a distant third in the cloud computing market behind Amazon and Microsoft, and positions its AI expertise as a competitive advantage. If successful, the new initiative could spawn a new buzzword: EaaS, for ethics as a service, modeled after cloud industry coinages such as SaaS, for software as a service.
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