Not OP, but there is value in having competition. DDG is just a bing front-end. The big search engines have a major problem with the quality of results going down, as the internet is SEOd to death. The companies behind these engines don’t seem to be very eager to fix it, they are just hoping to replace them with AI. We’ve also seen how these engines have been turned into ad platforms, which changes the incentives… Instead of ranking quality, they are ranking who pays more.

Taking a different approach to ranking results that isn’t ad driven, that can punish AI generated content and low quantity results would bring a huge value.

You can find a password checking utility on haveibeenpwned.com (the tool doesn’t send your password to the server, but only the first 5 characters of the hashed password, which is very safe). There are CLI tools on GitHub you can use to bulk test passwords. They also provide a downloadable list of hashes.

Alternatively, check if your password manager has a built-in tool for checking for passwords in known databases.

Android is not privacy respecting by design. Your best option is to use a normal PC running Linux. However that has its own drawbacks, like lack of HDR support, no Dolby Vision or TrueHD, incompatibility with streaming services DRM.

And the bad part is that it is being forced upon us. You can’t even find non-smart TVs to buy anymore.

I wouldn’t be surprised if appliances come with their own data plan, because the data they collect is valuable.

So let me get this straight. You buy Phillips Hue devices because they work offline. Then they change how the devices you bought function making them only work online forcing you to create an account and allow them to collect data.

This should not be legal. This is a breach of contract, they modified the contract after you already signed it (by buying the device). If they want to do this, they should offer full refunds to anyone that wants to exit the contract, or only apply the changed to new devices.