nyan

The short version: Most of them spammed people, except possibly for the one that slept 70% of the time. None of them came up with a product or service anyone sensible would buy even if a human was providing it. Alas, none of them ordered tungsten cubes, either. It was a bunch of particularly boring fails.

All this money, all these resources, to produce artificial con artists. As though we didn't have enough of the natural organic sort.

Startpage uses Google's index, or used to. At very least, it seems to have more and different results than DuckDuckGo.

Given the memory requirement, my guess is that they're not removing anything, just hiding it. And adding more useless crap on top.

I apologize for phrasing things so poorly that several people seem to have missed my actual point, which was: no one else with an auto-update feature requires any information about you, therefore if they claim that's their reason for asking for users' personal information, they're lying. They may have other reasons, which they have not stated. They may even be good reasons, although I'm not holding my breath.

And yes, I have compiled my own copy with that nonsense switched off, thanks for asking. However, it's the job of people who understand that this is overreach to push back against it on behalf of the people who lack the knowledge, time, or energy to investigate it. I don't like throwing even Windows users under the bus.

Why would I want an auto-update mechanism in the software? That's what my distro's package manager is for. And it doesn't care who I am or where I'm from. Nor has any other software I've encountered with such a useless-to-Linux-users mechanism demanded any information about me.

In short, that rationale is obvious nonsense. That may be why they claim they're doing it, but it doesn't hold up.

Also, their website actually works.

[Hits "Zap style sheets" bookmarklet to make it possible to get at least a minimal amount of information out of the page]

Ugh, they still actually think the cloud shite is a feature.

Thus making their vehicles even more difficult to sell outside their own country.

So . . . maybe it's a good thing that Gentoo with GNU Hurd exists? Does Hurd even have an AI policy?

I think you'll find that even distros that are generally anti-AI and don't allow its use in their own projects are pragmatic about not being able to influence other people's software (for instance, Gentoo's AI policy flat-out states that it doesn't prohibit packaging AI-coded or AI-related software, although there's been some discussion about marking it so that the user can make an informed decision).

If a person knowingly goes out and buys an illegal service, they will usually be guilty of at least conspiracy. I can't think of any way this guy could have advanced in the queue that's legally okay, short of offering the people ahead of him masses of money to leave the queue (or, y'know, waiting). Maybe you're more imaginative than me. But I still think he should have been aware that what he was asking for was shady at best.

Is the company that furnished the AI agent also guilty of providing a tool without enough warnings and safeguards? Quite possibly.

Exactly who holds how much responsibility before the law in this specific case can only be determined by a judge, and I am not one. Plus, the details of the law in Australia aren't going to be the same as those of the law where I am.

There's nothing wrong with the language that I'm aware of, but some aspects of the ecosystem seem to have not been thought out with Linux packaging in mind, let's say.