Depends how good the search is. Google doesn’t seem to want to provide me proper results anymore, even very basic image search tasks on google now net you only about 20 results all of which are wrong or useless. Yandex image search actually works.
If you don’t want me to use the Russian tech that helps me get my job done then roll back the Google Search codebase 10 years to when it worked as well as Yandex does today. (Only partially joking)
Today though I find myself using it daily. The results are far from perfect, but I've never suspected them to be randomly hiding or suppressing search results like many of the popular Western alternatives.
I don't use image search much, but yes I completely agree with you there. Google image search is completely unusable to me at this point, so I always default to Bing and Yandex for that (still need to try Brave). And Yandex imo is the only search engine with a functional reverse image search anymore.
To be fair, that is not Google's fault.
It always cracks me up that when you see the DMCA note on the bottom and you click on it, you get to see the hosts anyways:
the word 'random' must be doing a lot of work in that sentence given that they are subject to Roskomnadzor's regulations and are thus forced not just arbitrarily but systematically censor content: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/01/a-window-into-yandex...
No offense but the fact that someone on HN could get to this conclusion is rather shocking to me. Western Europe has plenty of russian corruption and I'm afraid the ongoing war has unearthed only a fraction of it.
Some recent parts of the government welcome the corruption.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-citizens-and-russian-intel...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/us/politics/election-inte...
Russia has an asset in British goverbment, in the hoise of lords!
Have you neber heard of Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation??
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evgeny_Lebedev
Current Government was taking political dotations from Russian oligarchs, officially, but somehow thos gets postes
Brussels, Vienna, and many other European capitals are full of Russian "lobbyists".
A lot of Ukrainians suddenly found themselves on Russian [claimed] soil and under Russian jurisdiction just a few months ago.
There are certain nations before which I'm not going to incriminate myself, out of precaution, Russia and China among them.
Yandex Images also possibly going away or becoming heavily censored is also an issue for journalists and researchers, since it is the best performing publicly available reverse image search engine.
(answering to the OP) Yes, there is nothing the Russians can do with my data that my government hasn't done.
>Depends how good the search is. Google doesn’t seem to want to provide me proper results anymore, even very basic image search tasks on google now net you only about 20 results all of which are wrong or useless. Yandex image search actually works.
Same, google is either doing this on purpose to then launch the "saving" LLM or they're just forgetting how to do it, google images is unusable and when it is everything is a .webp. And google search is a pay to win, you type "official python documentation" and the whole first page is full of geekforgeeks and other sponsored websited, and don't even get me started on facts/news where it just shamelessly turns into a propaganda machine.
Yandex is at least gives you 5 or 6 good results before it starts showing things in Russian.
I understand anti-government sentiment but whenever I see a statement like this it makes me devalue anything that comes after it. You really think there is nothing a foreign government might do with your personal data that your government hasn't already done? You really feel like there's a similar level of accountability at stake?
If I have to share my data with someone, I'd rather it be someone distant, and with limited capability. Sharing my data with Google is effectively the same thing as sharing my data with the FBI. And the FBI can stick guns in my face and lock me in a steel cage for anything they don't like in said data.
While I'm no fan of Putin, his regime can do precisely nothing actionable with my data, so long as I don't set foot in its territory.
Wired has a good summary if you want something more like a mainstream press article: https://www.wired.com/story/yandex-leaks-crypta-ads/
Well, either that or the west has decided that Russia is the enemy. I honestly don't buy the saying "Russia has made themselves the enemy of the west". Why would anybody want to be the enemy of the global superpower?
[0] https://kz.kursiv.media/en/2023-08-07/co-founder-of-yandex-e...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/ukraine-crisis-yandex-volozh...
Would you issue such a statement in his position? Think carefully. If you don't, you will probably have twitter brigades trying to smear your name. If you do, your family back home might be at risk, and you will probably never be able to visit them again.
Personally, I cannot in good faith demand anyone condemn the war, if to do so, they are putting family and friends freedoms at risk.
While some people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasyl_Makukh ) sacrificed their lives in protest of Soviet Russia invasion into Czechoslovakia, timely public statement is the least he could do.
He could've left russia long time ago along with family and friends.
But he enjoys russian money even though he has more than enough for 100 lifetimes.
So yeah, I can in good faith demand from him and most other russians to condemn the war. Because the reason it happened is precisely that everyone does nothing in russia.
Most of them flee the country because they don't want to get into army, and even when they are abroad and in safety - they still don't condemn the war.
So fear has zero to do with their position.
Do Twitter crowds actually do that? Do they keep track of anyone more or less prominent, and write in their comments "Have you spoken out against the war yet?" "I haven't seen you denounce the war"?
More news at eight?
He is jewish. Just like the rest of the "yandex talents" that moved to work at Israeli office. They all get to be jewish when if suits them.
UPD.
Also, yandex news was (and still is) the pinnacle of russian putin propaganda. And the person in question was complicit with it. Even, given the fact he wasn't living in russia since 2014. He tries to whitewash himself because he is a sanctioned individual. And the protocol to get desanctioned is to publicly state he disapproves the war.
Where in the world is there any "Russophobia"? The far-right in the West and around the world loves Russia and Russians.
Israel cares a lot about what happens in Ukraine because it is in a similar position, a highly-militarized vanguard of the West. If Ukraine falls despite backing from Washington, what does that say about possible outcomes should a (full-scale) war break out between Israel and Iran/Arab states?
So this helps us understand Volozh's motivations.
> Do we want, at a time when Russia is considering the UK as an enemy, to be providing all our personal details to a server in Moscow?
Not "at a time when the UK considers Russia as an enemy". There is something of a Russell conjugation here.
Like sure its leading you but imo its leading you to consider the actual issue rather than unrelated questions
I think this is the inflection they actually used when they talked about Huawei routers.
> jdangu on Aug 4, 2015 > We (ClarityAd) do this for major ad platforms. We use a mix of static and dynamic analysis to assess risk.
Fuck off. And since you here, you might tell us all how much you get incentive by aligning with U.S. owned Ad platforms, that also align with U.S. national interest to smear foreign tech giant Ad business?
I see nothing unsettling, unless one considers Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple.... unsettling too (which I do, but then I don't act surprised and unsettled by a non-US company doing what everyone else is doing).
I think I am safer with Russian govt having access to my data vs my local govt having access to my data.
Now hand over $800 billion dollars for 'defense'. And $368 billion for AUKUS. And the European bill will be interesting to watch over the next few years.
Just don't think about that F word - fascism.
In EU, it's registered in Amsterdam so the responsible authority is Dutch data protection authority, who should force the service to shut down.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/telegram-russia-ban-lift-...
Please, let's all just get rich together. Governments democratize over time - the UK wasn't a democracy when it started out but over 1000 years of governance transitioned into being one. I suspect it will be much faster nowadays, but in the meantime - please no war.
Surely hashing something can't add entropy? Assuming the hash output is smaller than its input, in the general case I'd expect the hash to have less entropy than its input.
The term "oligarch" has a specific meaning and, surprisingly, Western media uses the term correctly about the subset of corrupt Russian and Ukrainian businessmen who got rich in the 1990s by buying billions worth of state monopolies for pennies.
I have never seen Russian tech billionaires like the JetBrains founders being called "oligarchs".
It's a blasphemy to capitalism to conflate those bandits with Western entrepreneurs that founded and built their own companies from scratch, even though they have their own set of issues.
While GDP may be lower than Italy and per capita is weak, a nation like Russia can probably accomplish an order of magnitude more large scale projects, and also sustain a certain economy climate for much much longer than we think.
So don't underestimate Russia, even though we'd like to think they're soon running out of steam to continue the war in Ukraine.
My search threw up a few.
So “Russian [x] giant” really means “Putin’s favored [x] company”.
???
No, this is nonsense. The normal meaning of the word "lobbyist" is an _employee_ who uses political connections to push corporate interests. The normal meaning of the word "oligarch" is someone with large wealth. These two are not similar at all.
So the phrase you're looking for is probably "And billionaires are not billionaires, they're oligarchs".
US and EU: guaranteeing user privacy