nyan

You realize what this suggests about Trump's hair . . .

I have the cables I might conceivably need again some day sorted into labeled plastic bins (USB, ethernet, etc.) The serial cables and other stuff I doubt I'll ever touch again unless something odd happens are coiled, bound neatly with twine, and stuffed in a cardboard box in a semi-inaccessible corner where I don't have to worry about them.

This is one of the few times I've thought it unfortunate that we have a loser-pays system in our civil courts. That means we can only bankrupt at most one of them. But in this case, SOCAN seems the lesser evil. By a very narrow margin.

So once it's bankrupted you, where does it ship you off to?

I wouldn't put one in charge of a water treatment plant or a set of traffic lights, but even if it stuffed up and killed people, the responsibility would still not be the AI's. The responsibility would lie with those who built it, trained it, and prompted it, just as, if a bunch of people are fried by a nuclear missile, the responsibility lies with the person who pushed the button rather than with the missile itself. It's a piece of software. It does what it's told. It may be complex enough to display unexpected emergent behaviour, but so is Dwarf Fortress. Any destruction it accomplishes is just the real-world version of !!Fun!!, disgusting concept though that may be.

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.