The Great UnGoogling: First Steps

Google pays Apple around 18 Billion every year for their search engine to be the default in the Safari browser. For perspective, that’s roughly NASA’s annual budget. Bear in mind, this isn’t some exclusivity deal. You can change the default search engine in Safari with just a little spelunking into the menu system. Like most things with Apple, the solution is simple, just not obvious.

If you’re on an iPhone:
Go to Settings. 

Scroll down to Apps.
Find Safari.
You’ll see an option for Search Engine.
Tapping on it reveals a list of options with Google at the top.
Take your pick.
You’re all clear, Kid. Now let’s blow this thing and go home.

The desktop environment has fewer steps, but works much the same way; it’s neatly tucked away in settings, far from hidden, but not calling attention to itself. Like I said, simple, not obvious. As for that list of options, it may seem like slim pickings, and it kind of is. Once upon a time, it was kind of the Wild West. There was Yahoo! and Google, of course, but there was also the likes of Excite and Lycos. Those two are still technically around, but they’re very much shadows of their former selves and not selectable on Safari’s shortlist. In fact, the only search engine I know of that came on the scene with a lot of hype and died almost as quickly was Cuil (pronounced “cool”), lasting only from 2008 to 2010. As to how we came to have one big slice with many rail-thin slices that would blow away in a gentle breeze if you tried to serve them on a plate, that’s a discussion people have earned degrees investigating. So, let’s just call it (Un)Natural Selection Meets The Law of Averages and carry on.

Touching back on those thin slices, they all stand a very good chance of becoming bigger pieces of the pie with the recent backlash Google has gotten for failing to uphold their founding mantra of “don’t be evil”. There’s been too many issues to cover in great detail here, from exploiting behavioral economics to legal troubles to policy changes contrary to earlier promises. Speaking only for myself, I’ve been making moves since the start of the year to slowly but surely de-Google my life, a kind of unintentional New Year’s Resolution. I don’t plan on quitting Google entirely, mostly because of my blog here as well as my YouTube channel, Gmail, and maybe Google Drive (which I'm considering moving to an external drive). My first real step in this direction was eliminating instances wherein I use my Google account to log in to a service. That took a very long time, but was ultimately painless and now I log in to those services through other means.

My next step was choosing a new default search engine, which brings us to that list of options. Yahoo! was an outright no from me. I closed my email account there some time ago and the only real attachment I have to them is Flickr, which I almost never use, at best serving as a plan B if I decide to give up on Instagram. Bing is okay; it’s by Microsoft, a company I have very mixed feelings about, but overall it’s a perfectly competent search engine. I don’t know a lot about Ecosia, except that it’s some kind of nonprofit that plants trees. I simply don’t see a gimmick like that being sustainable, which makes me sad as it’s a very noble cause.

In the end, I chose DuckDuckGo, and I’ve been using it for a few weeks now. It is partly built on Bing and primarily emphasizes privacy. What this means is that when you search something, DuckDuckGo doesn’t keep track of where you’ve been and what you’ve searched for, and does not use this data to target ads to you or otherwise tailor your search results to consider your browsing habits. I’ve never used Google without logging in to my Google account, so I don’t know what the search experience is like for everyone else. The consensus of late is that the search results feel fundamentally broken as they push AI features that are hit or miss at best as well as giving special favor to companies that buy advertising space on the platform rather than emphasizing relevance. Few things in this world irk me more than someone saying, “Just Google it!” as it exposes their ignorance to just how Google works. Put simply, my search results are not going to look like yours because of our different browsing habits. Google tracks what you look for and tries to find results that fit, often creating a kind of echo chamber.

One of the criticisms of DuckDuckGo and to a similar extent Bing is that the search results aren’t as “good” as Google. What is meant by this is that the results are less tailored and require a little more heavy lifting on your part. This isn’t the best example, but you’ll get the idea: when I put “flip a coin” into Google, it loads an applet that flips a virtual coin. When I put “flip a coin” into DuckDuckGo, I don’t get an applet. Instead, I get a list of websites that offer random number generators with coin-flipping options, along with articles detailing the history of the coin flip as well as the mathematical probabilities of using different currencies in the flipping. In other words, it’s not flipping the coin for me, it’s directing me to where I can get help with flipping a coin as I don’t have one on me and need to decide where I’m going to go for lunch. DuckDuckGo isn’t trying to be the answer. It knows it’s a directory. Google is trying to be the answer, at least for simple things like flipping coins or telling me the current temperature in Madagascar or the results of an election. At least, they started with simple things. Now, they’re trying to get AI to deliver more concise answers to more complex questions. I once asked Google which finger types the 6 on a keyboard. The first result was an AI summary that insisted it was the ring finger on the right hand. Needless to say, this is very wrong*. I tried again with different wording, thinking maybe I confused it. The result was the same. Sometime later, when I asked the same question, it did away with the AI summary and gave me a list of websites about learning to type.

To be fair, DuckDuckGo does have some AI features and will occasionally feature a summary at the top, but this is actually a pretty rare occurrence, even when I ask a direct question rather than inputting a string of keywords. Sometimes, the AI summary will only show a blank bar with an option for me to generate the summary. Other times, it’s placed far down the list, sometime after the 5th or 6th result. The point is that DuckDuckGo isn’t trying to force it on me, and I appreciate that. It’s still interested in the technology and wants it to be better, but it knows to make it more or less “opt-in” compared to Google. 

DuckDuckGo also offers itself as a full-fledged web browser. I have it on my phone, but I don't really use it for anything. It doesn't even have a Reader View like Safari, so it's not very practical right now and I don't expect new features to roll out any time soon. It's a small company with few employees that operates under a very utilitarian and minimalist philosophy. Much as I think a Reader View would be a given for a utilitarian and minimalist philosophy, I can still respect their barebones approach to what the browser offers. They also offer this subscription service that includes a VPN, identity theft protection, and a personal data removal service**. It’s about 100 a year, and while I don’t have any real need at the moment for what’s on offer, I am considering it as a way to support the cause. I like what DuckDuckGo is doing and I hope they become a substantially bigger slice of the pie. 

I’ll have further entries on my UnGoogling progress, but I wanted to start it off light and simple, something that most people can do without having to make any serious commitments or disrupt any routines.

* On reflection, I think the problem was that Google was assuming I wanted to use the number pad to the right of the keyboard rather than the number row along the top. After all, if you rest your right hand on the number pad, your middle finger falls on the five, putting the 6 right under your ring finger.

** Basically, they put in requests to data brokers to remove your personal information from their records, kind of like a digital "do not call list". I'd previously tried a service called Incogni to see if it would cut down on the damned robocalls. The results have been mixed, but given the majority of these robocalls are from scam artists, I don't expect them to play nice and uphold their part of the Geneva Convention. Needless to say, if I ever find any of these scum piles in the wild or locate their call centers, I will not abide by the Convention, either. 

They're All Coming Out Of The Network

Preface: I'm currently juggling a few different drafts I've left alone for far too long, but this is still based on all currently available information regarding the implementation of new privacy policies in the wake of Facebook's recent troubles. It is being released on the fourth of July as it relates to freedoms and liberties. 

On the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a quote from John Stossel comes to mind, "I want to say, 'give me a break' but I don't know who to say it to." People were placing a lot of blame on Mark Zuckerberg while also feeling for him when he had to explain Social Media basics to legislators. It's virtually the entire situation in a nutshell, getting mad at someone over something everyone openly resolved to take for granted. Facebook costs you literally nothing to use, as do most social media services, the unspoken contract being that you're there on their terms, renting space for the cost of some number crunching and putting up with a few ads that are minimal compared to what you'd get on network television or print media. In 2018, playing dumb over this exchange is beyond naive. 

Speaking of naive, what I'm about to say probably qualifies as such and maybe will put my stance on this issue in perspective. For starters and in regards to campaign interference, I can't think of a time when I ever changed my vote based on an advertisement. If you're inclined to that approach to electing our leaders, you may as well not vote at all. Furthermore, I don't know what most people's advertising experience on Facebook or elsewhere is like, but if gathering my information means that all the banner ads I see on sites are for products and services I already partake in (Amazon, B&H, RedBubble...), then I call that a victory. I only wish ads on television were as relevant to me. I stopped watching television because I was sick of 3-5 minute commercial breaks every 10-15 minutes, and mostly for crap I wasn't the least bit interested in. To be fair, it irks me a little when I see the same movie trailer about a dozen times in a typical night of watching YouTube, but four years of film school have given me the critical mind needed to spot all the little tricks and tropes that make some trailers effective and others misleading or downright bad. I make a game of it, is my point. I may not seek it out, but should it rear its head and roar like a mighty beast, I hold aloft my magic sword and say, "BY THE POWER OF THE GRAY MATTER IN MY SKULL, BRING IT ON!" 

Speaking of wielding weapons, let me be clear that none of this in any way exonerates Cambridge Analytica for what they've done. Regardless of what users did or didn't know they were opting into, this is a breach of trust and privacy. They took more information than they were allowed to and misrepresented their own intentions to Facebook. The double-edged sword of having heaps of information about you out there in the ethereal web of clouds is you're not alone, and you're nowhere near as special as you think you are. It's like that "What Happens in Vegas" campaign; it's true that if you're just some desk jockeying yahoo from the mundane midwest, you can briefly lead a double life while cruising The Strip and, barring any serious criminal activity, no one's going to call you on it. Then again, if you're already famous, the city that needs sunglasses at night has no shortage of spotlights to shine up your skirt as you get out of your car. This data breach tried to make everyone famous. 

The silver lining to this shitstorm is that nothing is being left unsaid when it comes to what sites ask of you when you partake in their services, putting the terms of use on more equal footing. People are now more inclined to look into what they're signing up for and the sites now can't simply toss out a wall of legalese and hope nobody digs any deeper than that. It's also caused a very interesting phenomenon in my email's inbox. Sites and social media services I signed up for years ago and virtually forgot about are now reaching out to me to tell me they're going to play nice with my data. It's probably sending them some mixed signals for me to close my account and/or unsubscribe from their mailing lists, like I broke up with someone but didn't say as much until years later when everyone stopped caring and I was already walking down the aisle for the third time. 
"Oh, hey! Yeah, I remember you. Bye now. I'll send for my stuff later." 

Waiting on a Habit

My Arduino-based synth is effectively bricked for the time being. It's not because of technical difficulties beyond the makers of a toggle switch not wiring their own product properly, but because if I'm going to do this, it's got to be done right. Plain project enclosures are fine for starting out or maybe if you wanted to sell your electronic creations. However, instruments should be unique, even if it's all cosmetic customization.
After looking around at some lacquer Bento boxes, which hold promise, pretty much all DIY synth tutorials and enthusiasts led back to the same resource: cigar boxes.
Specifically, the kind I'm looking for is from a company called Cohiba. I like them because the boxes are black (I'll save the wood grain for more Atari Punk Consoles) and, most importantly, their name looks and sounds an awful lot like Toshiba. The first time I saw their name, I did a double-take; even the font is vaguely similar. It's too good a piece of irony to pass up. Of course, eBay is a good resource for empty cigar boxes, but there's a small tendency for markups. Cigars are meant to be savored, so there's not much turnaround. Cohiba in particular seems to be quite popular with collectors (I wonder how many of them are making synths as well), so I thought I'd be clever and try to find some cigar boxes locally. I went to a nearby grocery store to scout out the selection and see who I had to sweet talk into selling me one. Smoke shops have this down to an art form, as I understand it.
When I got there, I discovered something that would have never occurred to me would be a genuine thing people do.

There's a waiting list.

Some boxes have Post-It notes on them with names and numbers, plainly visible. Seriously, the fits people throw over privacy agreements on Facebook and Playstation Network, and here's someone's name and number in a glass case by the checkout lanes at a grocery store. If I want a cigar box from a grocery store, I have to wait until that particular brand is sold out before I get a call, during which time my name and number will be on display. I somehow doubt even the greenest cigar aficionado thinks of the place they buy beer and steaks as their go-to spot for cigars, so I'd be waiting on that call for months on end.

So, eBay it is, then. Harumph.