This same Home Office served Apple with a secret order, a Technical Capability Notice, demanding a backdoor into end-to-end encrypted iCloud backups, first for every human on the planet and later, after Washington threw a tantrum, for British users alone. Secret being the operative word, since the law gagged Apple from so much as admitting the order existed.
Apple’s answer was to rip its strongest encryption out of the UK entirely rather than build the thing, sniffing that it has “never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services,” and the fight is still grinding through the courts. That is the track record of this government, one that asks one company, in the dark, to dismantle encryption for an entire nation is not a government you hand a camera-side scanner and trust to use it gently.
As some people said here, you can just use a password manager or a physical security key (Yubikey, Nitrokey) to store the passkey. Absolutely nothing to worry about then. But either way I don't see any reason to be concerned .
Go to https://ecosia.org/ in a private browser window. It says “AI that answers to the planet”. Search something and the AI Overview on top is enabled by default.
For what it's worth i've been using them for like a year and I clear my cookies often and never got this AI overview thingy you're talking about. I actually have no clue how it even looks like.
I was thinking the same thing recently. It's not the place it once was. But in general the internet has changed a lot. And it's not just AI.
All sorts of paywalls especially in news sites.
Everything is getting centralized into a few sites and they're usually eithe poorly indexable or not at all (Discord, facebook, X, Instagram and so on)
Fediverse (Lemmy, Mastodon) also struggles with search engines.
People trying to sell you shit, create a brand even more than before. Because of this all sorts of SEO optimization crap is done like writing BS articles nobody cares about.
AI slop.
Search engines have gotten better of getting rid of "illegal stuff".
A lot of sites are just presentational bloat with no substance. Very cool looking landing pages with all sorts of cool animations but when you need to actually find the information that you need... the same UI usually gets in the way.
Oh and now we're getting into age verification crap also yay
Thanks for sharing. This might be the push I needed to give them a try. They do seem to be using Google indirectly:
Serper: Based in the UK (Europe but not EU) and using anonymized Google results, we skipped adding them for a while, but the reality is that a decent percentage of customers wanted a result experience similar to “old” Google (before all the AI stuff) and DuckDuckGo.
So I would imagine search quality should be good enough.
Oh yeah, now that you mention it and I zoomed in ... some letters are a a bit differently spaced. Might have something to do with the particular font that i'm using or font settings on linux?
At the end of the day a company must comply with the laws of where it's based. Most controversies I remember reading about Proton were a bit overblown, probably because they're so popular.
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I don't think they went through with it.
I remember reading a related article reclaimthenet