The U.S. government has asked Google to fork over granular data on how its search engine works and is monetized, seeking to prove that the internet giant is a monopoly.

The U.S. Department of Justice and several state attorneys general are seeking comparable data on U.S. search results and related ad from Feb. 2, 2015 to Feb. 8, 2015 and from Feb. 3, 2020 to Feb. 9, 2020, according to a legal filing Monday.

The U.S. government alleges Google’s exclusive deals to distribute its search engine on browsers and phones, including Apple Inc.’s iPhones, violates the Sherman Act’s prohibition on monopolization.

Indeed, it grew so successful that an entire new generation of searchers seemed to have no idea there was anything other than Google to search with.

Perhaps if Yahoo or Microsoft had understood the desire for better search that the demand for Google was showing, either of them would have purchased you early on and allowed you to thrive.

For those reading, and wanting more, I highly recommend John Battelle’s “The Search.” It’s an outstanding history of the early days of search, and how Google rose during that time, but it covers the other players as well.

Previously, he worked as a reporting fellow for the digital magazine Rest of World, covering the intersection of technology and culture in China and neighboring countries.

He has also contributed to the South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asia, Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications.

In his spare time, Zeyi co-founded a Mandarin podcast that tells LGBTQ stories in China.

Now, before you start screaming at the screen, I know what you’re thinking: Safari is awful.

All the extensions are hidden, home icon is obviously gone but other than that it looks pretty much like a normal Chrome installation.

I don’t use Firefox a lot to be honest with you even though has got much better lately and I quite like it as a browser.

First of all, the PermaTab Browser is based on Blink, the same rendering engine that powers all the best browsers, including Google’s ubiquitous Chrome.

So the PermaTab Browser will work on any website, even those created by developers who use all the latest, non-standard features, and know there is no reason to test their sites on lesser browsers—because monopolies are better than standards.

You install a fresh copy of the PermaTab Browser, or one of the many competing browsers that will have licensed our PermaTab technology.

Automatic text summarization helps humans to efficiently process the growing volume of information.

It turns out that this task teaches the model a lot about natural language, so much so that it is now common to take a pre-trained BERT model and then fine-tune it your desired task.

This is usually a good starting point when trying out neural networks for NLP and most NLP research is now focused on how to improve Transformer models and their variants by either tweaking the architecture or inventing a new pre-training objective.

Dark mode - The brand new intelligent adaptive algorithm can make the dark mode present better visual effects to further protect the eyes and power saving, for every web sites.

Full screen mode - True full screen without distraction for browsing content.

Any unused portion of a free trial period, if offered, will be forfeited when the user purchases a subscription to that publication, where applicable.

Neither Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Chromium, Brave, Waterfox, or several of the other recommended browsers truly respect privacy.

Mozilla are promoting Firefox as a product to support user privacy and freedom, yet at the same time they make Google the default search engine in the browser because Google pays them and Cloudflare the default DNS over HTTPS resolver.

This is much easier said than done, because website developers have gone crazy, but once you eliminate JavaScript from running in the browser you no longer need a complex browser like Firefox or Chromium and once you don't need a complex browser you no longer have to worry as much about privacy issues - at least not from the browser point of view.

A new extension for Google Chrome has made explicit how most popular sites on the internet load resources from one or more of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon.

Defabio made the point, though, that the companies behind public cloud have huge power, referencing Amazon's decision to "refuse hosting service to the right wing social app Parler, effectively shutting it down."

By default the tool gathers statistics, but there is an option to block sites which request data from any of these four companies.

Gamestonk Terminal is an awesome stock market terminal that has been developed for fun, while I saw my GME shares tanking.

Feel free to request features, I'll be happy to work on them on my spare time.

If you like this project, and would like me to maintain it and keep adding features, feel free to buy me a coffee!

User agents will attach the header to every secure outgoing request by default, with a value that includes only the significant version (e.g. ).

The user agent can make reasonable decisions about when to honor requests for detailed user agent hints and first-parties can use to decide which third-parties they'd like to privilege with detailed user agent information.

Restructuring the User-Agent string could have addressed some of the compatibility concerns with today's use of the User-Agent string, and potentially discourage its abuse.

As you browse the internet, Big Tech Detective will alert you if the website you are on is exchanging data with Big Tech by identifying and measuring connections to internet protocol (IP) addresses owned by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.

This tool may also alert you to the role that Big Tech plays in hosting some of your favorite websites on their servers.

Big Tech Detective tracks our best guesses about who controls the content you interact with as you browse the internet based on domain ownership.

It is still under early development and you can use it for free.

I was looking for a service where I would be the first user, it is useful for others that would be awesome too.

Not yet, maybe in the future, now I am focus on implement some basic features for an RSS reader and other more experimentals, like the recommender feature.

The detection modules utilize a rating mechanism based on different detection techniques, which produces a rate value that starts from 0 to 100 (No-Maybe-Yes).

This module intended to have less false positive and it's documented in this Wiki link

The analysis and extracted social media information from this OSINT tool could help in investigating profiles related to suspicious or malicious activities such as cyberbullying, cybergrooming, cyberstalking, and spreading misinformation.

• These are best solved with apps like Email, Netflix, Twitter, DTC subscription boxes, etc.

Google and Facebook start sending them more of the traffic that's left, and since domain rank plays a big part in Google's ranking, those that survived assimilate more power and rank better.

That's how your user experience slowly degrades, and that's why we stand to suffer as users if we give up the ability to remix software that the web brought us and closed apps are now taking away.

With the Friends Plugin for WordPress you can now consume content your friends (or other blogs) create, and interact with your friends on their blogs with seamless authentication.

With added parser support through plugins you can subscribe to all sorts of content, also on other social networks, allowing you to see what your friends do across social network borders.

A “friend” in the Friends Plugin doesn’t need to be a real friend, you can also subscribe to any site you like and that for which a viable means exists to retrieve the content.

In his post, Bardin attacks the problematic organizational culture in Google, which led him to the decision to resign from his position.

Bardin wasn’t one of the company’s founders, but he played an important role in turning Waze into a globally significant navigation app and in its sale to Google.

I feel we ended up with the worst of both worlds — the challenges of a startup with the constraints of a corporation all aggravated by the inability to quickly hire and fire,” he writes.

Rewriting a search engine in another language is quite the task, so naturally no library will have all the Lucene functionality available - and that’s fine, no need to blame anyone here.

There are dozens of other products out there, some with a specific use-case like Pilosa (distributed bitmap), cloud-only solutions like rockset with a focus on analytics or even Debian Code Search - Michael Stapelberg has a couple of interesting posts how he improved the code search over time in his blog.

That said, there are still a lot of features, that solely Lucene has, especially when it comes to more complex scoring like rank feature or distance feature types/queries, two phase iteration to optimize query execution independent from the query order or index sorting.

Websites use them to help users more easily identify the pages that are currently open in browser tabs or are stored in lists of bookmarks.

Once it became easy for users to clear browser cookies, websites devised other ways to identify visitors’ browsers.

As noted above, the researchers said Brave has introduced a countermeasure that prevents the technique from being effective, and other browser makers said they were working on fixes.

According to a new report from Windows Latest, the search giant has been busy working on 'PartitionAlloc-everywhere' support for its browser to improve the way in which it performs on Windows 10, Android, Linux and possibly other platforms as well.

Once PartitionAlloc-everywhere has been merged into Chrome's source code, it will allow the browser to start more quickly, load internal pages faster and offer improved resource management which means it will use less RAM.

Google first started working on adding PartitionAlloc support to Chrome last year and it is now rolling out to users in the browser's beta channel for Android and Windows.

Chabani defines lucid dreaming as the awareness of being in one’s dream, “with reflexive thoughts on [one’s] inner world.” For those who’ve experienced one or more lucid dreams, it can feel as if one’s awake inside their dream—consciously aware that they’re dreaming while remaining asleep.

Increased creative thinking may help a sleeping person reach the lucid dreaming state, Chabani adds.

While there is still a significant amount of work to be done in this area, she says, “this study does represent substantial progress toward identifying ways to leverage and gain valuable information from lucid dreams.

“True” should indeed be in quotation marks here—the term reflects the historically contingent tastes of Europeans, rather than any botanical category: The cinnamon of Sri Lanka was valued for its supreme quality as a spice, but various other Cinnamomum species have been, too, and are still used under the name “cinnamon.” But even today, botanists still call the cinnamon of Sri Lanka Cinnamomum verum (“verum” meaning true).

The rarity of cinnamon in the early modern period made it one of the most coveted spices of that era, and European countries without direct access to the cinnamon trade tried to imitate, substitute, steal, smuggle, or transplant the “true” product from Sri Lanka.

Experiments with “cinnamon gardens” (kaneeltuinen in Dutch) led to enormous successes, and the company eventually grew millions of cinnamon trees on plantations in the final decades of the eighteenth century.

In the past, they have used dark patterns to leak user’s information to Google servers (e.g., Chrome automatically logging users into the browser, Chrome sending an user identifying attribute to Google servers, Chrome exempting Google sites from user site data setting).

I’m suspicious that to prevent abuse, the proxy would end up logging more information than just the user’s IP address.

If Chrome wants to earn the user trust, they would hopefully move this feature behind a site or user opt-in.

HN is great for the tech stories, but I'd also like to read non-tech stuff.

I guess my hesitation here is mostly just FOMO, but the coverage on non-political, non-tech topics of The Times are decent and I'll miss it after the cancellation.

I'm curious what tech people here are reading.