Web services written *by* the 419 scammers! Now they won't have to phish because every bit of private information you enter is automatically sent to a centralized cloud service in Nigeria.

I know this is going to come as a surprise to some of you, but news is starting to come out confirming that Google is evil.

All publicly traded companies, regardless of size, is evil by definition (all hail the stock holders!). It's just a matter of how evil scales with size.

Me? I don't recall saying that. I do recall saying they were *least* evil.

March on Google cancelled due to credible threats of violence.

Me? I don't recall saying that. I do recall saying they were *least*

evil.

Was that addressed to you or me? Either way I think we are in agreement.

When Google was touting "don't be evil" it was said and heard as "don't be like Microsoft" and at the time it was true. Also the company was not politically connected to anyone at the time.

Now ... the idea that Google, Facebook, and Twitter now have the power to be "thought police" and have made it clear that they're actively interested in abusing that power ... that takes things to a whole new level. Any wrongthink is labeled "hate speech" or "not advertiser friendly" or whatever, and either removed or demonetized.

Beware the savage jaw ... of 1984

Every now and then I get pissed off at Google (who are Hitler now) and try another search engine, only to be disappointed with the results a few days later and switch back to Google (who, as I mentioned, are Hitler).

Surprisingly, over the past two weeks I have been using DuckDuckGo and I haven't switched back to Google (yet?). The quality of their search results has improved greatly. I recommend giving it a try.

(Those who have been paying attention might remember that this was my experience with T-Mobile as well ... at some point they turned the corner from "unusable" to "usable" and eventually they got to "pretty darn good")

2017-09-in-the-next-day-or-two from Ragnar Danneskjold

I have tried them all and they all suck.

Well yes, everything sucks at some level, but if you're trying to balance the quality of search results with the level of non-Hitlerianism, you may be pleasantly surprised at how decent DuckDuckGo has become.

DDG is a pretty good search alternative. They're not perfect, but I've been using them at least 20:1 versus Google.

As long as evil Microsoft/Google don't capture the ad revenue I'm ok with it :)

Really though, the thing that irritates me most about Google is the doodles.

Well, here we go...

[ https://www.axios.com/google-hit-with-gender-pay-discrimination-lawsuit-2485288066.html ]

Google, a left-wing lobbying firm which also runs an Internet search engine, just got hit with a gender pay discrimination lawsuit.

It seems that they are talking the talk but not walking the walk. Whodathunkit?

I think these "real-time" voip/videophone apps are completely overrated. Bandwidth and user experience are significantly improved by simply bringing back the good old "push-to-talk" button, like on ham radios.

Skype is owned by Microsoft now. So, evil all around.

I've tried Duo, mostly because it does work on both iPhone and Android. Seems to do the job. Haven't used it for anything beyond testing. I'm not against it... it drastically simplifies everything... but I haven't had a need to chat with people like that much.

I experienced something rather unusual today, that will sound like a fabrication to you, I suspect.

I needed to look something up for Python, so I googled it (as I've googled countless other things for Python, Java, C/C++, and all the other various and sundry languages I've had to use over the years). There wasn't anything special about this particular search, but... it got weird. The search results, within the browser, tilted back, revealing a black background behind the results, and a question appeared at the top of this back-backgrounded mystery: "It looks like you speak our language. Would you like to play a game?"

Intrigued, I clicked the button indicating that I'm interested.

The search results then fell into the black background, disappearing, to reveal what looked like a terminal desktop within the browser. From there, very terse instructions (something like 'type [help] for assistance') on how to work this environment were made available, and that was that. 'ls' showed the contents of the folder I was in. I could log in, which would make it possible to return to this environment later if I wanted (so I did). I could also type in something that would give me a programming challange.

So, I did. And it created something like a folder in which my challange was made available. I had 48 hours to finish it... a simple Java or Python programming challange that only took me a few minutes (it showed as 2 hours, because I had to walk away to do some other stuff before I could finish it, since this all happened at work after all). Ran it through their verifier... passed... then submitted it to them. Challange complete... and I can pick up another one if I want (which I haven't done yet).

I thought, cool, I guess I stumbled into an easter egg. So I went to our intern and said, 'try this', and gave him the URL.

It wouldn't let him in.

I think it's a game that requires an invitation.

Has anyone else experienced this?