Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

244

We're building a search engine to compete with DuckDuckGo. No JS, no WASM, no spying. Just a statically generated results page. (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

85 comments fedilink hide all child comments

We're (a group of friends) building a search engine from scratch to compete with DuckDuckGo. It still needs a name and logo.

Here's some pictures (results not cherrypicked): https://imgur.com/a/eVeQKWB

Unique traits:

Written in pure Rust backend, HTML and CSS only on frontend - no JavaScript, PHP, SQL, etc..
Has a custom database, schema, engine, indexer, parser, and spider
Extensively themeable with CSS - theme submissions welcome
Only two crates used - TOML and Rocket (plus Rust's standard library)
Homegrown index - not based on Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, or anything else
Pages are statically generated - super fast load times
If an onion link is available, an "Onion" button appears to the left of the clearnet URL
Easy to audit - No: JavaScript, WASM, etc.. requests can be audited with F12 network tab
Works over Tor with strictest settings (official Tor hidden service address at the bottom of this post)
Allows for modifiers: hacker -news +youtube removes all results containing hacker news and only includes results that contain the word "youtube"
Optional tracker removal from results - on by default h No censorship - results are what they are (exception: underage material)
No ads in results - if we do ever have ads, they'll be purely text in the bottom right corner, away from results, no media
Everything runs in memory, no user queries saved.
Would make Richard Stallman smile :)

THIS IS A PRE-ALPHA PRODUCT, it will get much MUCH better over the coming months. The dataset in the temporary hidden service linked below does not do our algorithm justice, its there to prove our concept. Please don't judge the technology until beta.

Onion URL (hosted on my laptop since so many people asked for the link): ht6wt7cs7nbzn53tpcnliig6zrqyfuimoght2pkuyafz5lognv4uvmqd.onion

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 8 months ago (1 children)

we will not open source

Would make Richard Stallman smile :)

pick one.

[+] [email protected] -28 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Our frontend is open, its just HTML and CSS, nothing proprietary client side, which would piss him off.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

He'd be pissed off about the BE being proprietary.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Actually, kind of not. FSF has a weird blindspot when it comes to backend stuff. They care about what runs on your computer, e.g. Javascript, but stuff running on a server that you don't own they don't really care about. The AGPL had to come from an outside third party, not the FSF themselves. The FSF has been pretty silent when it comes to making licenses to regulate the whole "cloud" space.

It's one of the big reason why the FSF has been slowly driving away into irrelevancy. The modern computing world is all about servers and data flowing between them. And the FSF is continuing doing licensing like it's the 1980s. They are so far behind that politics got there first with the GDPR. There is still no "GNU GDPR" that you can slap on your software to give people outside Europe similar rights.