I wish this could be blamed on current or recent (or right wing) governments. The progressive demolition and/or privatization of welfare (from healthcare to social security nets) is a process that goes on for at least 20 years now, carried out by all the main parties.

But bringing it down is 1)illegal, 2) costly (DDoS cost money), 3) not guaranteed (CDNs can be very resilient) and 4) doesn’t show the collective support that not visiting the site does.

FWIW, my partner is Ukrainian and I asked what’s the general mood in the Ukrainian circles. Apparently the unpredictability of Trump is seen as a potential positive. There was quite a lot of disillusionment about the fact that Harris would have continued with the Biden’s approach focused on soft politics and weapons given drop by drop.

In fact, the general public was quite unhappy with the cautious american support. If some of the weapons were given much earlier and all at once, the war could now be going very differently.

I don’t know if this is now building a narrative that doesn’t make you lose hope or if it’s the reality. For sure the vibe was for Harris before the elections, but it was definitely as clear cut (due to the above).

For browser, there is a webapp that can be selfhosted. See here https://github.com/logseq/logseq/blob/master/docs/docker-web-app-guide.md

I think you need chromium browsers due to the API they use, but it should work.

I read the post, hence my points. I am not really looking for answers, because I don’t have questions, I had observations. You on the other hand seem to have your whole opinion formed on this inaccurate post, and I would expect someone in your position to look for more perspectives, when you clearly are not. You seem instead on a crusade against the company (good for you), and even if all the post was true, because they spent too much on t-shirts, invested too much in AI products (that I repeat, are opt-in)? Because they don’t comply with a technicality of GDPR? Lol Ok, more power to you.

Also, what I mean by a subscription is that I cancel it and I am done. I didn’t invest in it in any shape or form, what I paid I consumed already, there is no feeling of wasting previous investment in a running subscription.

Judging from your attitude, your lack of content, your very annoying “homie”, your inability to address any point against the content of the article, I am guessing either you are the author and you are butthurt that is not taken as gospel, or you just have ulterior motives and you are here just to stir shit (instead of “spreading awareness”). Either way, I have already invested too much time writing responses to your silly comments. I will show you how good I am in avoiding the sunk cost fallacy and block you, despite the time invested in the conversation.

Cya

I answered with more stuff in other comments, but you didn’t address any of that anyway.

I personally have no brand faith, I am a happy customer and the moment the company doesn’t adhere to my principles I will dump it. There is no sunk cost as it’s a running subscription (you keep mentioning this, so I though I will say it).

That said, if I see someone claiming they have a “blase” approach to privacy or they don’t care about it, I will point out that this is complete bullshit. Using the missing “download my data” feature to support this claim is outright pathetic.

To be even more precise, as a socialist I don’t like many of Vlad’s ideas that tend towards libertarianism. That said, the company has a good amount of worker ownership, it operates on principles I currently respect and that are miles higher than the standard tech company. I am absolutely in favour of supporting positive business in a field where companies are disgusting on average, and in cases evil.

Now, if you have anything else than childish arguments I am happy to discuss them. I have pointed to a number of inaccuracies in the article, there are outdated data (like the number of employees) and subjective views from the author. You are posting this article everywhere like it’s some kind of holy grail of gotchas, when it’s not. There are some good points (financial reporting exists, is not 100% transparent - which is not due, the amount spent for the t-shirts was IMHO not a great idea, etc.), but the fundamental points against the company are shacky at best. As I said elsewhere, all the shpiel about AI etc. is fully addressed in kagi own site where they clearly explain what they mean, for example. The features are actually pretty nice, even for someone like me who is not a fan of LLMs, and the results are quite accurate (the post author claims they are almost always wrong) from my experience.

BTW my searches are unlimited :)

They don’t own the T-shirt factory. It is a simple sentence, they used a small Serbian (I think) company. The business entity is to import goods.

It’s a formal difference but shows how sloppy that post is.

So, again, sorry for trying to point out that the CEO of Kagi does NOT care about privacy, GDPR, or transparency!

Privacy != anonymity. They satisfy the most important aspects of the GDRP, like data and scope minimization, clear explanation of what data they collect and why, a fantastic privacy policy. They don’t let you download a file with your email address in it, woah.

That article is quite dense with inaccurate information (e.g. they own a T-shirt factory), and a lot of guesses. There is no need to listen to a random guy idea about kagi’s AI approach when they have that documented on their site.

Also, the “blase attitude to privacy” is because of a technicality of GDPR? (Not having the ability to download a file with your email address) I am a big fan of GDPR, and their privacy policy is the best I have seen (I read the pp of every product I use and I often choose products also based on it), so really I don’t care about the technical compliance to GDPR (I am not an auditor), but the substantial compliance.

All-in-all, the article raises some good points, but it is a very random opinion from a random person without any particular competencies in the matter. I would take it for what it is tbh

EDIT: To add a few more:

• They achieved profitability (BTW, 2 years of operation and being profitable with 30k users, they really don’t know what they are doing /s)
• Their price changed twice. It was raised once, and the change was reverted later on, with unlimited searches. For me that is a great sign, especially considering the transparency of telling exactly how much each search costs for them.

Source: see https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi (published ~1 month after the linked post).

An article full of inaccuracies, but the most interesting bit is, all these conversations are possible because they clearly explain their views, which are publicly available on their website (for example, the philosophy behind the use of AI - which BTW is opt-in).

How is that an example of being opaque is beyond me.

FWIW, the default “programming” lens works quite well in Kagi, you can also create your own lens if you have a set of websites from which you routinely search info, and there are tons of bangs already (which can also be mapped to lenses BTW). In addition, you can downrank AI/SEO stuff when you find it (it is downranked by default in kagi), so that over time your results are quite clean.

As someone from Rome, I feel you. Pickpocketing is somewhat an issue. In more than 20 years living in the city (before I moved) I never suffered from it, but it’s very common among tourists (especially in the underground and certain bus lines). It sucks and often police does nothing because by the time they catch the people (if they do), everything is gone anyway.

That said, beside pickpocketing Rome is very safe (or at least most of the places where a tourist would go, except maybe the surroundings of Termini station).

Yes, you could run it in LAN only. You could access it via VPN only.

Obviously this adds friction in addition to security, but if that’s fine with you, you can.

Thanks for the head’s up!

Usually when hotels close past a certain time you can use a secondary entrance with your keys/card or at most call. Most hotels have a desk open 24h so this doesn’t even apply.

Also, I really don’t think Italians are generally rude. People are friendly, but also loud and warm, which often can be misunderstood. Assholes exist, obviously.

In cities car sharing works OK (no time for paperwork etc.), but it still is relatively expensive.

At least in Europe is quite common I believe.

To be honest, I have never even heard of anybody who sued a service provider for failing to mitigate DDoS, or for letting an attack through a WAF, etc. I am quite positive that the contracts/T&C you sign when you subscribe to the services are rock solid, otherwise cloudflare would be under extreme liability. Also, usually you have the ability to customize the DDoS settings, choose thresholds etc. I really can’t imagine a company having any real chance of getting the provider to reimburse you. The only service that usually has SLA is the uptime of the CDN, which if breached should be compensated. I am quite sure that in the cheap plans the SLA is probably not very high.

Also, what you say about a customer that someone might want to take down is true for all customers that require DDoS protection. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t pay for the service on the first place. Cloudflare serves a bazillion customers who are much bigger targets than a casino, I don’t think they were afraid of the exposure. Also, when cloudflare receives a high DDoS attack, for them is awesome marketing. Imperva, Akamai, Cloudflare are basically identical and the selling point is exactly “how big can they tolerate?”.

Honestly rather than speculating on what we don’t know, I propose a simpler option: cloudflare plans are designed to get customers one foot in the door with a super cheap plan, to them each individual customer has basically no marginal cost. However, once the customers are in they can identify the ones they can squueze and find reasons to push more expensive plans. If they bump 1/30 of them, even if they other 29 will leave, they are in plus (250x29 < 10000 x 1).

To me this seems simply a business strategy. They specifically say “Unlimited & unmetered DDoS attack mitigation” in the cheapest plan, afterall.

I am in no way using this definition right now, I am using the definition you provided (established businesses) and I generally use it interchangeably with “licensed”, because to operate you need at least a license.

So it’s not a tautology.

There are enough illegitimate online casinos to create a problem for the whole industry.

Incorrect. Also creating a problem for is not defining the industry itself. There are phishing bank sites to create a problem for the banking industry, but only an idiot would answer “they steal your identity/card details” to the question “why are online banks bad”.

They don’t have enough users so they need to squeeze their regular punters harder.

Incorrect. You forgot to address “how”. I will also add another item to the “you have no idea what you are talking about”. Players losing is a sure way to lose even more customers. In fact if you knew something about the industry you would know that new companies operate on much lower margins that established ones. Bet365 might operate on a 7-9% margin, a new company operates on 1,2,3%. The idea that squeezing more existing customers, besides being technically impossible, is absurd. It’s a huge business risk (you lose your license and then you will have 0 customers).

Even your beloved “legitimate” casinos do “rig” games by offering different odds at different times to different people.

First, I don’t like casinos, despite having worked for one, I have played on less sites than you did. I like even less bullshit though, hence my pleasure in clearing the world from yours. Second, that is not rigging at all. You know it, I know it, it is absolutely not what you meant, and I am embarrassed for you for trying to use this terrible rethorical trick to now bend the word rigging. Rigging means that you expect the odds to win are X but instead behind the scene are Y (<X). Offering odds first of all is not a casino thing, it’s a sportsbook thing, and second of all is transparent to the user. Finally, odds obviously change over time, as estimated probability does…

Listen, you are just a guy on the internet with a big mouth and a family supply of bad faith. I showed you multiple times that your claim are bullshit and that much smarter people than you took care of the problems you claim affect casinos (rigged games and money laundering).

You failed to provide any argument from any of your claims and now you proved to argue in bad faith. As promised, I will make you a favour and block you, so you don’t have to keep embarrassing yourself. Take this as a chance to reflect on maybe not arguing on something you don’t understand fully, and maybe to learn from someone who knows more than you, as I try to do in the many occasions where I make mistakes or know little about something. Your claim at the moment is false. It’s a conspiracy theory that you repeat and might believe, but it’s false. Deal with it. You can use the very real and many reasons to consider casinos bad, do that.

Indeed I want to make a distinction. Because thinking legitimate casinos rig games is completely different from thinking scammy ones do.

In fact, you had no argument whatsoever to prove those do, including your external sources that recommended basically in all cases to stick to licensed sites, proving that there is a difference (duh). On the other hand, having worked in the industry and understanding both how casinos integrate games and how compliance works, I have explained to you why there are generally not technical means AND no economic incentive for legitimate casinos to rig games.

I will repeat the points for you:

• legitimate casinos undergo certification and audits. Every piece of code change is analyzed periodically and so does the functionality of basically everything on the sites.
• most importantly, casinos don’t develop games, they purchase them from providers. They don’t have access to the code, as games are served directly by the maker, so they can’t change the code to tweak odds.
• the game makers don’t have any incentive of jeopardizing their whole business to let a customer earn more money illegally.

The above applies to essentially every licensed casino, every legitimate casino.

You failed to acknowledge any of these points, and you argued for 15 comments about scammy websites, bringing now the conversation back to where we started.

The reason why I want an agreement that legitimate (not some!) casinos don’t rig games is specifically because I provided arguments (technical and economical) for why that’s the case. So your refusal to make any distinction while also refusing to provide any proof to support your claim just results in a vague and messy discussion, exactly like your insane definition of “online casinos” that includes scam websites. You refuse to be accurate :)

But a problem very much related to “what’s wrong with online casinos”.

It’s not. It’s something casinos (real ones) can’t do anything about, the same way banks or shops can’t do anything about. This is an extremely tiny problem because official means exist to recognize legitimate ones since there are trusted authorities that certify them. In fact, given the existence of central national authorities it is much easy to be sure that a casino is legitimate than a shop, for example. I will tell you more: rigged games (and therefore fake casinos) are a MINOR problem in the industry in general. It is absolutely a terrible argument to say what’s wrong with casinos, because it’s something the vast majority of the people will never even encounter in a life of gambling. However, there are plenty of reasons why casinos can be considered bad based on the regular operations of legitimate casinos, not based on your fairytales.

So yes, I am stuck on wanting an acknowledgement that legitimate casinos don’t rig games because I know how that works, unlike you. Here is how I conclude this conversation, since we are at a moot point:

If you fail to acknowledge tha rigging games is very very unlikely (I will keep the theoretical possibility in case there are suicidal CEOs) in legitimate casinos, then I will call your argument bullshit until you have any proof. Specifically, you should explain what economic incentive do legitimate casinos (licensed) to rig games, and how do you think they can do that. If you fail to provide any argument in support of this while also refusing to make a distinction in your original claim, then I know you are arguing in bad faith, so I will simply block you and move on.

I give up. You refuse to engage in good faith.

What user can tell is irrelevant, we are talking about your “taxonomy” and the properties that carries being in one or other category.

You might not be able to distinguish a legitimate casinos by a fake one, but if in your opinion legitimate ones also rig games, this is irrelevant. If they don’t, then what users can tell is a completely separate problem.