Uriel238 [all pronouns]

Because religious fanatics have been fighting over controlling access to the holy sites for centuries now, and show no sign of slowing down.

Making the place an exclusion zone would devalue those sites, except for the most determined.

Wow Microsoft is still a dick… which is totally on brand.

Wikipedia has its own problems, especially now since it’s an excepted fast source, companies and vips often will hire a team to manage their Wikipedia presence, specifically to eliminate controversial and problematic history. If you know anything exciting about the Kellogg family or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or, heck of J. P. Morgan (who was a walking human atrocity) you’ll find their Wikipedia pages scant of details, and sometimes almost hagiographic.

I’m pretty sure here in the states, a site is obligated to identify ad content and sponsored content, so when a big company like Microsoft or Alphabet is doing it (Bing and Google) it makes me wonder if there’s been a recent carve-out or relaxation of the reg.

That makes the return adversarial to the end-user, hence the point of the regulations.

Every search engine I’ve encountered is weird about porn. At first it decides whether or not you’re looking for porn or not looking for porn. If it assumes you are then all the actual porn hits are promoted to the top, where non-porn hits are down-ranked. Vice versa, if it decides you’re not looking for porn.

Once of the fun search engine games is to find out what sets of ambiguous words trigger the porn flag. Pure tended to be one due to a brand name, even when I was looking for pure minerals at the time. Siri created some conflicts, since there’s both a well known LLM digital assistant, rule 34 for the same and a popular porn star.

I’d really like a search engine that let porn sites fall in the hit list without deciding first whether I was trying to look for porn, since I sometimes do metasearching.

As a fiction writer, I do research on espionage, sabotage and even methods of assassination all the time. But I’m not going to make a salted bomb and nuke Jerusalem even though that is an entirely viable evil plot that may even create a net negative death toll.

True poisoners, as Agatha Christie notes, use thallium, not arsenic nor cyanide (though ricin is good if you can get it.) Thallium assassins are also self-regulating, like demolitions experts, killing off those insufficiently careful when handling the stuff.

Modern police are lazy until enough of a stink is made to find a culprit for a specific incident, which is why modern assassins targeting VIPs will find a self-radicalized desperado and point them toward the target. This is the sort of thing FBI is looking for in the investigations of Crooks and Routh. They are likely just blue suicides (or green suicides in this case) but finding a operative pointing them towards Trump would indicate an actual plot. But even if those tracks are found, it would unlikely lead to a specific identity.

I know about this not just to write fiction, but also to understand how things happen, how our fall into one party autocracy and societal collapse plays out. And yes, it means I do a lot of web searches that might excite an onlooking behavioral research agent. Sadly, they’d find I’m yet another boring false positive, though if the nation does succumb to autocracy, I’d certainly write for the resistance. FBI may not care so much about that.

We often look up creepy things just so see if we can, and we do that a lot more than because we’re eager to build a bomb or fast-track our inheritance.

And this is why the NSA is supposed to close exploits rather than harvest them for surveillance.

This is why surveillance backdoors are always bad, and you can’t math around that.