Thing is that searx.be has been remarkably good for my use case since a long time. With other instances YMMV.

The mentioned server side changes (e.g. A server move you mentioned but could also be server settings, provider settings, etc).

I guess that is the case. According to https://searx.space/ the searx.be server is in Austria but might use some proxy to talk to Google and similar to avoid quick blocking. The maintainer of searx.be also maintains yewtu.be and that one uses proxies (The proxy names can be seen when blocking auto play of videos in Tor browser).

Also getting results in Russian here since a few days. Usually it is either Swedish or Dutch. Never German.

deleted by creator

👏 Fireworks! 🎆

“helped” is very misleading. Companies can’t refuse to provide information they have when served a search warrant / court order. These companies DID NOT choose to provide the info on their own.

You are suggesting all these companies are completely helpless against legal requests. That is not correct. A company should first make clear that the legal request is actually completely legitimate and correct. After that they can look at whether they should provide the information or not.

See the data here :

• https://restoreprivacy.com/protonmail-discloses-user-data-leading-to-arrest-in-spain
• https://cdn-resprivacy.pressidium.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Proton-Mail-logs.png

Kind of agree. Though there is pi-hole and several others. And there’s i2p, Freenet (now called Hyphanet) and GNUnet, and similar.

The deal has always been that targeted advertising is how you pay for a free service.

Always is a heck of a long time. Decades ago when ads on websites slowly became popular it was just ads. But no personalized targeting.

This isn’t exclusive to Facebook.

Offering an ad free experience for a subscription fee is an extremely common practice. Do people really expect to be able to use an entertainment platform for free?

Extremely common practice does not make it good nor does it make it a good reason to normalize or ignore these things. For example exploitation in labor and in housing is also extremely common practice. No reason to make exploitation on the Internet seem like a fair game and expand it further. Sustainability should be a key word here in my point of view.

Dear VLC, in your download section there is the F-Droid app store option which I consider a good thing. p.s. Why are you still posting on Twitter ??? On your website I see two buttons Facebook and Twitter. Time for a change ?

By the way, archive.is and archive.ph are Tor unfriendly. Another link : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39798565