Gross

There’s a reason they removed “Don’t be Evil” from their corporate tenets. The almighty dollar comes first to them and they refuse to risk angering The Orange One.

Actually they just removed the “Don’t” part.

Don’t be evil to our shareholders or President Grump.

Assuming they changed anything about their ideals and didn’t just think “hey does having this here reduce suspicion as intended or raise it when it begs the question of how a tech company could even be evil when they aren’t named ‘Microsoft’?”

No, no no no no. They’re not afraid of angering him.

This is the Nerd Reich and they had front seats to his inauguration. THEY are the evil.

What is utter horse shit is that they care about compatibility except for this.

The fact that it broke tons of Canadian websites and Google neither cares nor bothered to investigate shows their priority of sucking up to the Trump admin over everything else.

Change your default search engine, delete Google apps that you can (I need fucking the Google app for authentication…), create a non-gmail account and start migrating to it (yes this sucks, yes it takes a long time to finish, there’s lots of degoogling info on this out there now).

Aegis authenticator work just as good as Google authenticator and you can transfer all your keys.

Aegis is tits and it makes it easy to transfer TOTP codes back and forth between Aegis and KeePassXC.

I have to authenticate in the Google app sometimes though, not Google Authenticator, TOTP, or a passkey

I’d guess the calculus was something like:

Our users don’t want this thing

Fuck em, we’re a monopoly

the famously petty would-be dictator wants this thing

Do what he says, he could really hit our bottom line if he wants to

“Fuck em, we’re a Monopoly.”

• https://www.openstreetmap.org: Google Maps replacement, more detailed
• https://www.comaps.app/: Replacement for the mobile app, lets you pre-download them so you don’t need to have mobile connections. Perfect for when you’re out in the Stix.

And while we’re at it.

• https://DuckDuckGo.com: Google replacement, respects your privacy, AI features turn-off-able and completely optional.
• https://proton.me/: gSuite replacement, Email, Cloud Storage, Docs, Calendar, Video Calls, Authenicator. Actually worth paying for.

I’d personally suggest Tuta over Proton simply because of the sketchiness of the Proton ownership and their conservative, business-first, citizens-second views.

Instead of recommending OpenStreetMap.org, I would suggest Cartes.app as the Google maps replacement (uses OSM data). It contains most features that Google Maps users are used to and will feel familiar to them. OpenStreetMap is more of the backend for mapping apps rather than a direct replacement for Google Maps.

Cartes for most features (satellite view, reviews, shareable links that work for anyone, etc.) and CoMaps for offline/driving directions.

Honestly, what about traffic aware navigation? In cities, that can make your commute take 1hour instead of 2 by knowing where the traffic jams are. And they are not super predictable on my commute.

I really hate how people keep trivializing this point. I use Magic Earth (OSM data + proprietary traffic data) and I woukd have been cooked many a times without it providing traffic. Literal 40-60 minute differences in routes.

Boot licking fascist cowards.

Today is GrapheneOS day for me.

And if they ever try to take that away, I’ll get a fucking dumb flip phone and that’ll be that.

Open source is critical to our future.

Mine arrived today. Ironic.

Also ironic that I had to buy a pixel, but i needed a new phone so I wanted something that gos and other distros could run on

Oh don’t apologize for buying their subsidized data collection devices and then completely disabling the reason they subsidize the devices 😂

It’s a kick in the nuts to Google every time GrapheneOS is installed.

Single source hardware is a security liability. If Google does something to the hardware or firmware, the GrapheneOS project would be screwed. Google has already hobbled AOSP.

We cannot overly depend on Google’s or any one company’s good will.

I think GrapheneOS should think about gradually steering the project toward a basket of hardware companies. Shifting to Motorola is necessary in the near term, but the whole situation with Google’s behavior needs to be a wake up call.

They might be stuck with single source hardware from Motorola now, they announced recently there’s a good chance they can’t support the Pixel 11.

Already, the pixel 11 line is out for graphene

i just got a pixel 10 pro… kinda wish i had got a samsung instead now

I’m excited to see what they do with Motorola as it would be nice to pick up something newer and have my current Graphene device for backup/travel in case prices ever go wild like they seemingly have for every other piece of tech. Honestly, there’s not much reason not to run Graphene because, privacy aside, the user experience is significantly deslopified and much better than stock.

So fwiw, the change was made official and updated in GNIS the day it changed on Google Maps, which uses GNIS behind the scenes. That same day, USGS said the name had taken effect in GNIS but that it was waiting for its maps to visually update.

I think this is a product of Google’s infrastructure being faster to automatically update with GNIS changes. The fact they didn’t step in to override it already shows that they’re willing to go along with this; I don’t think the fact it changed before USGS adds any significance to that bootlicking.

That is, I don’t assume Google manually intervened to make this happen faster.

Still, fuck Google Maps. I’m glad people are waking up to how this level of hegemony over maps gives corporations too much power.

I wish this was talked about more. So much hay being made about this on the assumption that Google maintains their own database of locations instead of pulling from sources like GNIS like they actually do.

Fuck Google, but we don’t need to make shit up to hate them. In fact, making shit up makes us seem crazy and hurts our position. These companies do enough real evil shit, we don’t need to piss our time away on this non-issue.

Where’s this fucking energy for Google removing sideloading from Android, for example. I’ve seen way more mainstream news about this one item on a fucking map than I have about the loss of sideloading and the loss of actual ownership of the devices we purchase.

It reminds me of this conspiracy that was circulating a few months back that Apple Maps had “deleted” cities and places in Lebanon to culturally erase it for Israel’s invasion.

In reality (which you could see by e.g. looking at Reddit posts from a few years ago), Apple Maps’ coverage of Lebanon was absolute unusable dogshit the entire time. There were complaints about how it wasn’t even usable for basic navigation in Beirut. The city of Tyre (which was misspelled “Tyr”) was still there despite being one of the hardest-hit cities by Israel’s invasion.

Which was, to be fair, staggeringly incompetent, but it was provably true. Apple Maps’ coverage sucked so badly that, at a surface level, it looked like somebody took an erase tool to a competent map.

I think a lot of people don’t realize how automated corporate maps applications are. Which can be a weakness for crowd-sourced data like OpenStreetMap when there aren’t enough contributors, but that democratization is also a huge benefit that anyone can see and fix issues. The main parts of Google Maps that aren’t automated are points of interest, and those are kept up-to-date thanks to the network effect where e.g. business owners see value in maintaining their information or users feel like they’re helping out (read: doing free labor for a trillion-dollar corporation).

It’s just a bit silly considering how these companies have been leveraging publicly available information and how automated most of their systems actually are. It’s part of why customer service at many of them (not Apple so much I guess) is absolutely abysmal and they basically do their best to try to avoid to having a human being in the customer service loop at all. Automating almost all software and removing the human element has literally been the name of the game for 20 years at least.

I mean the original Google ranking algorithm itself was partially made by checking the publicly available information (via web scraping) of how many times a site had been linked to from other sites. And to keep it accurate, they had to keep scraping constantly to keep updating the publicly available data for their own purposes. All of which was automated as well, by the way.

Where’s this fucking energy for Google removing sideloading from Android, for example.

To be fair, the average person doesn’t know what sideloading is, while everyone will look at the map and see the changed name

You are obviously correct on that but we could also grab pitchforks about the term ‘sideloading’. Everyone knows what ‘installing’ is and ‘sideloading’ (in this context) is just a bullshit term to make it feel like something mysterious and/or dangerous. Installing software from play store is no different than installing from f-droid.

They could have easily made the effort to not change the name, don’t defend them. This isn’t some nothing change, they are very aware of what they are doing or not doing.

I wish this was talked about more. So much hay being made about this on the assumption that Google maintains their own database of locations instead of pulling from sources like GNIS like they actually do.

I think this gets mentioned every single time one of these stupid name changes comes up.

More likely, they have their own DB, or data lake, or whatever repository it might be, but it ingests the data from multiple sources.

I keep seeing this around. I’ve got friends at Google who have shared screenshots about the manual pull request (code change) that was made to update the name. They even have an internal shortlink pointing to that manual change since it’s so dumb

Why is a lake name stored in code versus a database?

I think they must mean an override to the name in the db?

Weird. The local (german) version still shows as it should. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: For now

They're only changing it in the US.

Well…
Not quite. For the Gulf of mexico it shows “Gulf of America” as a subtitle.

I believe that only applies to the Gulf of Mexico, though.

EDIT: I was wrong, it turns out the US is supposed to see Lake America, Canada is supposed to see Lake Ontario, and the rest both.

I’m fucking done with Google Maps and their brown-nosing bullshit. Disabled it (can’t uninstall easily, otherwise I would). MapQuest from now on (or one of the other alternatives that has a spine).

Now to find a good alternative to Gmail (and go through that migration hassle). I’ve tried Proton Mail in the past. It was okay, but didn’t blow me away.

I like the Yelp integration with MapQuest. FlockHopper is good for finding routes that avoid flock cameras.

I use Organic Maps and CoMaps mainly. Sometime Kagi Maps and FlockHopper (not sure what I under the hood of that one though). I prefer OSM generally.

Shizuku, activated with USB debugging (if you can’t/won’t root), and Canta will let you fully remove Gmaps (and any other google shitware) pretty easily.

I even used it to remove that Android System SafetyCore app that apparently keeps reinstalling itself if you uninstall via normal methods and it hasn’t come back after roughly a year since removal so I’d say it’s a pretty effective and simple method to set up, just make sure to read the notes the Canta dev added for certain apps to make sure you aren’t going to break something you may still want.

Good info, thanks.

Shizuku is on the chopping block. One of the change requests being made to AOSP is blocking adb connections on the loopback interface, “for security”.

FWIW,

wp:Category:Map websites

which includes,

wp:List of online map services

Lake Ontario was named after the indigenous Ontario tribe. You know, native AMERICANS.

Renaming it was a stupid and unnecessary thing to waste time and money on.

i wonder how many canadians that were sitting on the fence about de-googling are no longer sitting on that fence…

1. start by changing your default search, google ai overviews made it useless anyways. check out duck duck go or startpage

2. stop using google spyware browser (chrome and all chrome builds) and switch to firefox (or preferably a privacy focused fork, i.e. waterfox, librewolf

3. learn linux… quit windows

4. self-host your own server and run your own localized, private apps, immich instead of google photos, vaultwarden instead of password manager, jellyfin instead of netflix, etc.

5.???

6. profit!!!

The problem is, “who wants to be a computer admin?” To which Google says, “I’ll be yours (and I’ll narc on you too for ads and IC).”

Yeahhhhh… I was actually just thinking about this the other day, and kinda realized that a lot of people in my dad’s generation cosplayed as lawn maintenance landscapers in their spare time, I larp sysadmin

Duckduckgo is backed by microsoft/bing which they have a contract with.

Startpage is the duckduck alternative that uses google, its unknown wether they have a contract.

These places are still better then google/bing themselves but people often wrongfully assume that they provide a privacy oriented service.

If you really want to go anticorporate you can host your own searxng, which still by default uses results from google and bing but can be configured to use any on your preference and its code open to verify that they do not give exclusive permission to certain paying corporations.

Using searxng it can happen that some google result could not be retrieved because of api limits… one has to wonder why Startpage does not have those limits.

qwant together with ecosia are working on establishing a fully independent search index but at this point it is really in its early days, with focus on France and Germany.

Guess they need time to fig-ure it out.

But even just getting off the main Google search page is huge. So much of this is about adopting a posture of flexibility and taking responsibility for your data to some extent, and which companies you can and can’t tolerate. So just rejecting the convenience of using Google as search is great.

Because now you don’t feel so totally helpless—you’ve got an example of exercising your agency over your “digital life” and you can keep doing it as needed/desired with greater ease.

Main thing to realise is you’re not going to find a drop-in replacement for Google that is some giant centralised search and auth platform strangely super-motivated to reduce friction between you accessing products online.

I did say there still better then the main page but i guess i should have put more emphasis on that.

I know many people irl who are are into computers and use ddg, blindly trusting that there search is fully private while there current search terms are directly used to serve them ads (somehow that does not count as personalized)

Its shades of grey, i am very happy they took agency to get rid of google but I really wish people, at least in the computer sector, where more aware of how far corporate reach goes.

You’re good, I just wanted to make the point for anyone who might just give up and stick with Google because they can’t decide on a perfectly virtuous replacement.

Any change from the mainstream is a good change. But for anyone who wants to dig even deeper, oooo boy is that something you can get into.

people often wrongfully assume that they provide a privacy oriented service.

What do you think they provide then? DDG sits between me and Bing, the latter doesn’t get my data.

This is why i wrote that comment.

Read the wikipedia entry. Microsoft and ddg have a long standing openly known about deal.

Microsoft allows ddg to block bing trackers since 2022, ddg has always allowed them till then. but they must be getting something else to change that policy. No way microsoft is just giving api acces out of being good.

Its getting tired to repeat myself, which are verifiable facts.

Microsoft does get your data

they must be getting something else

which are verifiable facts

“My source is that I decided it must be true.”

You realize that DDG is a commercial company and they use part of the revenue to pay for third-party services they use? Or did you think they just run the service for shits and giggles?

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink.

I think the words of Gabriel Weinberg ( founder of ddg) as recorded on Wikipedia is a reliable source but you don’t have to believe him.

Show me where Weinberg said that DDG continues to allow MS’ trackers to this day, or sends them other data, which is what you claim, continuing to weasel out of supporting it with any evidence except for “I feel that way”.

Besides, you must have missed that the trackers affair was about the DDG browser, whereas this thread is about the search engine.

Again for clarity i think its fine that people use ddg, its betters then bing and google. But the absolute trust people seem to have is wild considering all of this. I occasionally use both ddg and startpage myself

The summary of my evidence is the hyperlink in my first comment.

Back on topic;

Hé doesn’t say that, the trackers are being blocked since 2022 since microsoft agreed to change the policy. Thats also in my original link

I guess you could believe this was unrelated that this happened just after it became a scandal but i am not that naive.

As a response to the scandal the ceo has the following to say.

For non-search tracker blocking (eg in our browser), we block most third-party trackers. Unfortunately our Microsoft search syndication agreement prevents us from doing more to Microsoft-owned properties. However, we have been continually pushing and expect to be doing more soon.

Bleeping computers, who originally ran this story hit the nail on its head with

“While DuckDuckGo has been transparent regarding the advertisement partnership with Microsoft, it is not clear why they did not disclose the allowing of Microsoft trackers until a security researcher discovered it.

This revelation comes at the wrong time, as DuckDuckGo recently went after Google for their new ‘Topics’ and ‘FLEDGE’ tracking methods, saying, “Google says they’re better for privacy, but the simple fact is tracking is tracking, no matter what you call it.”

Especially that last part is something ddg seemed to really want to forget cause after the ceo came with the following.

"We have always been extremely careful to never promise anonymity when browsing, because that frankly isn’t possible given how quickly trackers change how they work to evade protections and the tools we currently offer. When most other browsers on the market talk about tracking protection, they are usually referring to 3rd-party cookie protection and fingerprinting protection, and our browsers for iOS, Android, and our new Mac beta, impose these restrictions on third-party tracking scripts, including those from Microsoft.

Thats a huge leap in attitude from tracking is tracking…

You are allowed to trust this guy, i see no reason why anyone would and i am gonna continue to get people to remain critical.

On the browser, i legit didn’t know there where 2 products but i don’t think that matters regardless trusting this corporation.

Sure, duckduckgo dosent have their own web crawlers. Duckduckgo uses someone elses index in this case Microsofts. This dosent mean they sell your data to microsoft or that your search queries fingerprint you the same way as microsoft. They just use microsoft’s big list of websites

They have a long standing corporate deal with microsoft.

The details are vague but this is not hidden, or kept secret.

Ddg has themselves said that the policy that required them to give exclusive acces to Microsoft trackers no longer applied and now blocks them since 2022. This is on the Wikipedia i shared.

But if you read between them lines. They are following Microsoft policies, if they are now allowed to block those trackers its because microslop allowed them to do so.

Tech companies only do such thing if they have incentives. A more covert way to get the same data, a long term plan to acquire and otherwise for PR.

Searxng also uses those same search querys but without corporate deal. Thats why if you refresh a lot you hit an api limit… any search engine that does not do that while using these trackers is somehow paying or bartering for access.

The wiki referance linked and subsequent article talk about trackers on the DDG browser not about search queries. DDG have a corperate license with Microsoft, sure, but any amount of line reading on or between seems conspirital at best.

Looks like this corperate contract with Microsoft is a secret especially if you have to “between the lines” read about a completly seperate product.

And i go to a publicly hosted instance of searxng and immediatly get told the past 10 search queries? Dosent seem magicaly private to me. To which your response might be "its designed to be selfhosted. " Sure that maybe the case, but we are just putting extra lines on this social contract to read between now. Not terrible but not perfect, which is the same area DuckDuckGo is playing in so i am prepared to take them at their word.

Shared from Toronto, unsure of source, still funny.

cute meme, but f*ck AI slop

You can say fuck on the internet

I’ll censor if I gddmn want to. 😏😏

This meme would literally be funnier just as a few stickmen, one with an orange face. The AI usage is so unnecessary

Trump's dick cheese must be tasting pretty good considering how many people are going for it

Nah, it will be just as awful as you imagine but those people love to keep punishing themselves by forcing it down their own throats, saying please sir, can I have more, and then blaming liberals for making them ask.

I started deleting all my Google data yesterday

It’s going to take me a long time to De-Google but you have the right idea.

The best time to start was years ago, but good for you for starting.

I started by just using another email as my main, to now I don’t need a single Alphabet product for anything I do.

It’s annoying that it’s not easier. I should be able to go to some European or Canadian competitor and at least know that I am not giving my data directly to US data brokers. Why aren’t there more options? You can’t tell me the US is the only one who has tech knowledge.

A lot of Americans would instantly jump to a Chinese competitor if they offered English support, fully knowing that all their data is going to the CCP to avoid the US surveillance landscape as it already is.

A lot of Americans would instantly jump to a Chinese competitor

I think this is pretty true. To expand:

I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. I have to either run my own email/hosting/storage servers and surrounding infrastructure with the tech understanding required to do so*, or give my data to someone else. Not having an email address is not realistic when it’s the primary key for your bank, school, employer, etc.

*A decade or so ago, running an SMTP server was trivial. Now, it needs DMARC, DKIM, SPF, publicly trusted certificates, and maybe newer things I’m not familiar with in order to be able send email. These are not bad things, but they increase the requirements for self-hosting.

Right now, that ‘someone else’ is generally google or microsoft for most people, and those companies are so big they get to dictate how other tools I need to use work. They also freely sell my data or give it to the government - possibly without any sort of warrant via ‘data sharing agreements’.

US-based data brokers are actively hostile to me. A Chinese data broker is less likely to care, since I’m further from their profit model: I’m unlikely to buy a Chinese cereal or make-up brand or visit a restaurant halfway across the globe. This only matters as long as US and Chinese data brokers don’t share info, but I suspect there’s friction there. If there’s not, then there’s no reason to NOT switch.

If I have to give my data to someone, then I’d prefer to give it to someone who doesn’t directly impact or care about me the way google/microslop and the US government do.

Five eyes disagrees with this sentiment

Where do I even begin with 20 years of emails on their servers 🤦‍♂️

An agent could help, but still tons of work

An agent like Gemini? 🤣

Use free Gemini to move off Gmail, double damage

That’s no surprise. The US government is really slow at getting things done

I know it won’t matter, but you can report something missing in the map and call it out.

Apple took slightly longer but as of this morning it also has the wrong name for Lake Ontario

Don’t be evil Be a cuck

Everyone spam them with map corrections!

Im doing my part .gif

They’ve been calling Palestine “Israel” since they came out, but none of you cared. Selective outrage over a distraction by the pedophile class.

Good. And I hope he signs an executive order to rename some oceans too.

These are marginally impactful in terms of real consequences and easily undone with the next administration, but extremely visible to and unpopular with voters. Every little bit helps.

Yes, I agree. People who otherwise don’t pay a lot of attention generally think it’s really stupid, so it brings more attention to stupid things. It may be a very small thing that can be changed easily, but you’re so right. It brings a lot of attention that is not so positive for Trump and the crew.

Not for users outside the US, though.

OSMaps OpenStreetMap

Just tried the Mapquest app and it worked perfectly. As far as I can tell it doesn’t have satellite view, but I usually just dick around with that when I’m bored sitting at an actual computer, not when I actually need directions.

Wonder if the guy that is super mad that people care about this is around.

You’re so dumb. The US resumed bombing Iran and bombed a wedding, and you’re concerned about this.

Wow, I really do have the power to summon you. It might be the least cool power in the world but I will cherish it, little-asslicker1, you have my word.

You feel good about yourself?

I want you to know, sincerely, that you are exactly why nothing will get better.

Boot licker.