voytec

> Google shall not enter or maintain any agreement that

> (1) conditions the licensing of the Play Store or any other Google application on the distribution, preloading, or placement of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or the Gemini app anywhere on a device;

> (2) conditions the receipt of revenue share payments for the placement of one Google application (e.g., Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or the Gemini app) on the placement of another such application;

> (3) conditions the receipt of revenue share payments on maintaining Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or the Gemini app on any device, browser, or search access point for more than one year; or

> (4) prohibits any partner from simultaneously distributing any other GSE, browser, or GenAI product

> depositing a significant amount of electrical charge

Unsatisfying description but I guess we don't yet know if it's any close to 1.21 jigawatts.

With Netflix you pay for licenses and ongoing costs like bandwidth and maintenance.

A better analogy here is having to pay Microsoft for unlocking Windows NT/Server's ability to use more CPUs. Paid-for OS is already capable of it but this ability is "paywalled" due to greed.

> the country is the recipient of a huge amount of EU funds

What shaped Poland into something acceptable as a NATO member was USAID - the program Musk and Big Balls axed.

USAID allowed Poland to join NATO and later the EU. I've snatched the 188-pages long PDF[0] (English/Polish) before it was publicly erased.

[0] https://sysartist.com/usaid-and-the-polish-decade.pdf

> Taiwan, Japan, Poland, Canada, Spain, Australia, many others (...) have a great political and economic relationship with the US, and are currently at 0% risk of attack or invasion

I'm sorry, are you from the past? You literally listed Canada which Trump threatened with invasion.

The U.S. has no stable economic relationship with any country under the current administration and won't regain the trust for years or decades to come.

There's just these two quite different non-economic relations - not relationships - Israel and Russian Federation. The latter may even be Trump's hallucination but I'm giving him a benefit of the doubt. He finds common language with warmongering dictators.

> What's the alternative here? Do you want them to replicate their infrastructure

Cloudflare adverises themselves as _the_ redundancy / CDN provider. Don't ask me for an "alternative" but tell them to get their backend infra shit in order.

Weaseling out of SLA/SLO payments.

> outage of a 3rd party service that is a key dependency.

Good to know that Cloudflare has services seemingly based on GCP with no redundancy.

Yeah. This service was presenting charts likely probed from inside GCP. I was on a call with a Google rep, someone pointed out that "AWS is also down" and I foolishly said something about "possible BGP attack" out of spite, before checking AWS availability myself. Shame on me.

> Why can't companies be honest with being down

SLA agreements.

It's not about living like a caveman. You can enable 1st party JS without JS from 20 ad/tracking hosts.

> NoScript is indeed very effective at blocking tracking, but it also breaks a lot of websites.

Sure, images may no be present without JS lazy-loading them. Accidentaly, NoScript also fixes a lot of websites. Publishers are often paywalling posts via JS and initial HTML is served with full articles.

Zen Browser works well for me. It's a Firefox fork but privacy-focused whereas Mozilla recently became an ad company and published hostile TOS changes. No issues I had when I was evaluating LibreWolf.

> The lack of cartels are perhaps a reflection of the lack of the international supply chains etc.

No. Most of Europe (apart from Scandinavian states, Belarus and Russian Federation, I believe) has access to legal LSD prodrugs. Not analogs but a LSD-25 molecule with attached [it changes] something group which is detached after ingestion, making the ingested substance "the real thing". These do not pass the LSD/DMT Ehrlich test[0]. AFAIK citizens of at least a few US states can as well fully legally obtain such compounds from up north.

So no - lack of LSD cartels is not a result of the lack of international supply chains. As GP stated - it's because these substances have a very low addiction potential.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrlich%27s_reagent

Fair. I apologize for my poor choice of words. I however stand by my point in general.

> Mods: Consider adding to the title: A privacy focused search engine

@dang No - please don't do it. This request is plain stupid.

Apple and Google being "privacy-focused" is a silly buzz-phrase at this point. Mullvad is tied to Alphabet/Google.

EDIT (2025 05 28 16:45 UTC): great to see how my recent comments were raided <3

Who the fuck have I annoyed? :)

> Venture capital didn’t kill Arc. It gave us the chance to see what Arc could be. That’s more than most products ever get.

Also, the quality of service is top notch. Not just the procedure execution but in private dental clinics (in Gdańsk) you lay down on a bed and there's a sizeable OLED screen at the ceiling with slow-mo clips sporting waterfalls, beaches, mountains and other "nice views" you'd expect from a deep house music clip. The background music is elevator-like though.

I'm flagging this submission. Look at the author[0], at the "Georgetown students..." (won't backlink again) post linked below stating that Cerca was 2 months old in April, and OP's post from April stating that they hacked this thing two months earlier.

It's some self-promo or whatever scheme/scam bullshit.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=alexschapiro.com

I've also hit this link trying to get any info on "Cerca". It's from April 2025 and praises app created two months earlier. It looks like a LLM-hallucinated garbage. OP's entry mentions contacting Cerca team in February. So either this entry is about a flaw detected at launch date or some weird scheme.

Nonetheless: "two months old vulnerability" and "two months old students-made app/service".

> In most cases the most biometric data is your photo and I guess height?

As I mentioned - Polish id renewals require fingerprints scan and this data was likely shared with the US Office of Biometric Identity Management.

Where it comes to passports, fingerprint scans were required for years and in Poland (and I'd guess all EU passports) there's a low quality black and white photo printed inside, but the card/book has an embedded NFC with a higher resolution color photo. Whenever airport security takes one's passport, they swipe it over NFC reader and compare your face with a higher quality version than you see on the physical item, which usually is low quality photo crossed with anti-forgery Guilloché[0] lines. Feel free to read your passport and id with a raspi/arduino and NFC reader :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilloché

> Where?

At the top, just below[0] the title.

Anyway, great project and worth pushing beyond being a "toy project" imo. But like few other commenters - seeing LEDs you used immediately rubbed me the wrong way.

I tend to seed my peppers in Dec/Jan (in Central Europe), ~1.5-2 months before you would normally do it. Without proper growlights and FANs they would get too tall before releasing leaves and have "leggy", too thin stem, to be moved to windy outdoors in Apr/May. These kinds of plants grow too tall if they don't "detect" proper [sun]light and don't spawn leaves since there's no light required for photosynthesis at given height.

My use-case (leggy, thin stems that break under outdoor wind) isn't translatable to yours but my point here is: having a set of dedicated red and blue LEDs with certain wavelenghts (red 630nm-660nm, blue 450-470nm, depending on plant species) is the key to emulate natural sunglight. Other wavelenghts are cool for decorative purposes but it's still "darkness" for plants. I used to buy small PCBs and LEDs dedicated for soldering together with reds and blues of different wavelenghts ratio one requires but nowadays I'm going mostly with ready-to-use grow lamps as I grow rather not that demanding plants.

Your project is great, shows your dedication and already doesn't at all seem like a "toy project". I'd love to see it extended to different kinds of plants!

[0] https://github.com/blackrabbit17/xenolab/blob/129af07788909e...

> this is not a serious project, it is a toy

You call it "cutting-edge" in the README.

Sadly, I'm unable to find specific documents confirming it. AFAIK, Poland agreed to biometric data sharing with the US Office of Biometric Identity Management in exchange for loosening travel requirements. That said, US seems to be pushing[0] for more such agreements.

[0] https://www.statewatch.org/news/2023/august/eu-and-usa-ploug...

Biometric data is valuable. Assuming that Musk's DOGE crew copied data obtained from US gov agencies, they may have also obtained biometric data of EU citizens. At least some countries have shared citizens' fingerprints with the US. Not just Visa Waiver Program applicants' but as I understand, previous government of Poland made a deal to share all citizens' fingerprints. And these are collected from anyone renewing their government ID card.

Nowadays using Google Search is, since they pivoted from from being a "search company" to "adtech company" which resulted in the degradation of Google Search quality.

"Engines like Bing" is an ambiguous term. There are better options than Bing.

No. The US vs. Google antitrust cases scope are Google's monopolistic practices in the search and adtech markets, not the browser market. The DOJ pushing for Google to sell Chrome is related to the search-related case.

The aggressive marketing of Chrome on Google Search website to users using other browsers was a significant part of Chrome adoption success.

And no - some people didn't willingly and consciously switched to their search engine. It was pushed down their throats by browser vendors being paid-off by Google for setting it as the default one. Mozilla has overwritten user-changed search engine setting in Firefox with several updates.

Non tech-savvy users simply accept changes made in software they use.