The list includes Ukraine! I've tested Edge with Ukraine as a Region on my MacOS, and it no longer appears to set it to Yandex.
But it still does for several other countries. Which includes Moldova. Moldova is a country that Russia has repeatedly threatened. While advanced users may try and remove Yandex as default, non-tech savvy users likely leave the defaults.
Meaning Microsoft Edge shares data with Russia by setting Yandex as a default search engine for their users, which is really bad.
Please upvote this story to give it visibility. Many thanks!
For MSFT, this is a huge embarrassment, reminiscent of Google's infamous "project dragonfly".
And they deleted your inquiry on their forums for "violating the community guidelines"! Not exactly PR geniuses, are they?
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/moldova
Microsoft Edge is the default web browser on Windows 10, Windows 11. [2]
Meaning at a huge amount of population will see Yandex when they search for something at least for the first time. Unless they install another browser immediately or change the default search engine.
And yes, I wasn't expecting to see my inquiry deleted on their forum. I'm posting again without the screenshot. In case they didn't like what Yandex returns as results (which is weird, as it is their "business partner").
I'm also very humbled by the support of the hacker news community. As a long time lurker, it warms my heart a lot to see so much support. I hope it reaches Microsoft.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/d...
For the decade that Internet Explorer sucked basically all computer users got programmed to treat it like a Chrome/Firefox downloader. Most users don't know that Edge is Microsoft flavored Chrome now, so they continue to use Edge to download other browsers and move on with their lives.
This is an unpopular opinion, but IE4 and especially IE5 were significantly better than what Mozilla/Netscape were putting out at the time. This is what grew their marketshare more than the bundling that everyone focused on. Then Microsoft sat on IE6 for years and let it fall way behind everyone else. IE7 was basically IE6 with tabs. By the time they began investing in their own browser again it was largely too late.
Are you aware of Bing doing anything like this? (I think it's bad enough that they take part in censorship, don't get me wrong.)
It's <5% (and decreasing, still pretty quickly).
How many tens of millions of irrelevant users does that represent?
That they would still be participating in this deal is even worse.
Yandex has been banned in Ukraine for some time now, so no point for MS to still have it as default search.
> "As founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation and is responsible for supporting actions or policies which undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine," the EU's listing states.
> The document also accuses Yandex of "promoting State media and narratives in its search results, and deranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin, such as content related to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine."
from: https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/06/yandex_ceo_arkady_vol...
Yeah and they are going to change the formals too - Yandex NV(based in Netherlands) is considering turning the main part of the business into a separate Russian group https://newsunrolled.com/economy/132317.html
https://ain.capital/2023/01/27/yandex-developers-used-racist...
Between integrating predatory BNPL, the microsoft-edge: overriding default browser nonsense, injecting ads on the Chrome site, and now this ... one has to wonder, is this all some joke?
Either Satya and friends are asleep at the broser wheel, or the whole subject is too annoying/toxic for them to address directly.
https://meduza.io/news/2022/03/01/yandeks-segodnya-klyuchevo...
Not sure if that's what you mean, but Yandex is great for piracy and otherwise illegal content.
A simple example would be a search for 'russia usa war'. It's the sort of search that's REALLY annoying using something like Google for because, predictably, it gave me nothing but results about Ukraine from large US media outlets. Yandex gave me this [1] pretty informative Wiki entry as the #1 result, and then three pages describing a hypothetical Russia USA war including this [2] interesting looking video (and channel) on YouTube.
Continuing on further down the results you get ever more interesting things like this [3] that suggests Russia was involved in the US Civil War, on the side of the Union! As is always the case for anything, just because it's published - doesn't mean its true. But in this case it does seem to be, which is something I had no clue of even as a history fan! So I just had a TIL in "my" domain, while spending 5 minutes writing this post (and another 30 exploring Russian involvement in the US Civil War). That's why it rocks. Basically it kind of makes the internet feel like the internet again. And that's nice.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_during_the_Russo...
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woD6RYptp58
[3] - https://www.stolenhistory.org/articles/1863-russian-involvem...
https://www.itpro.com/security/data-breaches/369966/yandex-d...
This is sadly probably a draw for a lot of 'Russian is the only country maintaining traditional western values' types.
says who?
Having said that, I always chuckle at Americans who are so suspicious of RT given that they platform people like Cornell West and Chris Hedges who are absolutely blacklisted in western media.
I have no idea what the point of this comment is, other than everything sucks. :sigh:
Virtually everyone with any remotely anti-war view is completely blacklisted from corporate Western media, which is basically the propaganda arm of the DC blob. This is not an endorsement of RT or non-Western media (which is riddled with their own biases), simply a statement of objective fact. The purpose is always the same, to form a consensus view that if you are not gung ho for attacking (insert current foreign bad guy here), then you are either secretly sympathetic to (current foreign bad guy) or somehow a disloyal American. It is quite an effective propaganda strategy. If you are an older person, like myself, and against all foreign wars regardless of the rationale offered by the war machine, you were first "Pro Saddam" in the early 90s. Then you were "Pro Milosevic" a few years later. You then became "Pro Saddam" again in the early 2000s before becoming "Pro Gaddafi" and "Pro Assad" a decade later. You are now "Pro Putin". Because you cannot simply be "anti-war" - it is a position that the people in power simply cannot afford to let become legitimate, as it obstructs the primary of agenda of the DC war machine.
Yep, RT is aimed primarily at the "traditional" West (ie the US and Western Europe). Russia has other propaganda organs aimed more squarely at the former Eastern Bloc.
Specifically Russian disinformation. 'Rus' is a much more neutral term which refers to the shared heritage of the Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian people.
The horror!
I know US media, like Voice of America, would never do something like that.
/s — the pearl clutching about things the US does because Russians is bigotry; the world isn’t a better place due to hating a certain ethnicity
