DuckDuckGo hosted by Amazon!!??
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I am a translator!
I've been using duckduckgo alongside lxquick for years.
Today I've read this article and several others dealing with the same topic.
http://techrights.org/2014/05/11/duckduckgo-no-no/
This made me sad.
Can anyone confirm if DDG is indeed hosted by amazon?
First off, be very skeptical of anything Techrights says. In my experience, it's the Natural News of libre software. Also, the article mentions Will Hill, a pretentious guy who hangs out on Google+ and Diaspora. He constantly boasts that proprietary software is failing, calls Windows 8 "Vista H8" (referring not to freedom problems, but to the silly drama about the interface change in this version of Windows), and thinks that compiling binaries of libre software for popular proprietary systems somehow encourages people to switch to those proprietary systems.
With that being said, it really doesn't matter. Entrusting your privacy to DuckDuckGo, Ixquick, Google, or any other server would be a mistake, regardless of what their privacy policy is. You should do your searches with Tor, or on a computer that many different people use, so no one can connect the search to you.
The founder of DDG, Gabriel Weinberg, described the website's infrastructure in this article, http://ur1.ca/cn9c2 saying they now run on Amazon AWS. I know this link is legit. It was linked to from DDG's website. https://duck.co/help/company/architecture
name at domain wrote:
> The founder of DDG, Gabriel Weinberg, described the website's
> infrastructure in this article, http://ur1.ca/cn9c2 saying they now run
> on Amazon AWS. I know this link is legit.
http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/28/duckduckgo-architecture-1-million-deep-searches-a-day-and-gr.html
is the URL without the ur1.ca redirector/tracker.
There's a section called "Out of the Basement and into AWS (mostly)"
which includes "DuckDuckGo used to run out of Gabriel’s basement. Most
components, including all front-end components, are now on AWS." where
"AWS" means Amazon Web Services.
This page also lists an audience question of "Latency management?" and
lists replies in bullets including "Limited by Amazon’s network, but the
main thing was to split things up into different regions.".
It's not clear to me that this is Gabriel Weinberg speaking so much as
someone's notes about what Weinberg may have said. Perhaps I overlooked
something? Direct quotes from Weinberg would be appreciated.
Thanks.
At the top of the article it says "This is an interview with Gabriel Weinberg,".
That article was linked to from DuckDuckGo's help page, (see the above link) so I'm sure it is accurate as to what the founder said.
I am a translator!
I've been researching this a little bit more. DuckDuckGo is indeed hosted by Amazon. I had no idea. I will not use DDG anymore. I have no respect or trust for anyone doing business with Amazon.
I'll use exclusively ixquick from now on.
onpon4 - I am pretty aware that privacy is not guaranteed nowadays no matter what search engine you use. Personally I don't trust Tor much. It seems to me very probable that a lot of tor nodes may be controlled by freedom opponents..
ixquick is based in Netherlands which is not a freedom eldorado but it is certainly better than the United Swines of Avarice
They don't do business with Amazon, a corporation very well known for its privacy and freedom abuses.
Tor doesn't depend on trust. It depends on encryption and having a lot of users.
DuckDuckGo is hosted in Amazon. There is no need to check the news or similar that to confirm information. You can use the “whois” command on GNU/Linux. There is a public database that make this information available. Both the database and associated protocol is also called “whois”. For instance, you can consult it in http://bgp.he.net/dns/duckduckgo.com and under the pages linked from both A records you will see that this is the autonomous system of Amazon.
Do you (generic you) think that this jeopardizes our privacy and contradicts or voids DuckDuckGo privacy policy?.
name at domain wrote:
> DuckDuckGo is hosted in Amazon. There is no need to check the news or
> similar that to confirm information. You can use the “whois” command on
> GNU/Linux. There is a public database that make this information
> available.
I'm going to guess that lots of people reading this understand how the
whois database works.
But whois won't tell you about intention; whois won't tell you why DDG
thought it right and proper to host their ostensibly privacy-respecting
service on top of a service run by people known to collaborate with the
NSA. For that we need to read statements given by people in control over
such decisions at DDG, hence a natural place to turn are interviews with
DDG's managers.
I am a translator!
marioxcc - thanks for the whois input. The matter is, as I already posted- I don't respect nor do I trust anybody doing business with Amazon.
DDG's privacy policy is pretty good. Thing is - I suspect there is a fair probability, being that the servers belong to Amazon, that the key for the decryption of DDG's SSL is well known to Amazon...
Maybe I am wrong here.
I am a member!
I didn't read up on this, but essentially all web sites you interact with are trusting multiple third parties.
This includes co-location facility, likely another middleman (company you actually “host with”), the certificate authorities, etc. Amazon is acting as both the co-location provider and host.
It gets more scary though. The way the system works you are actually trusting hundreds of entities to properly verify the sites you access. If even one of them screws up you could find that your not interacting with the true web site that you thought you were-and/or your encrypted information is actually being harvested by a third party.
Now think about the thousands of developers your trusting every time you use your computer.
I'm not a fan of Amazon for so many reasons. They censor the books they sell (physical books, they've pulled politically undesirable books, refusing to sell them, but technically legal), they violate users rights by pulling content sold, they push digital restrictions on users, and much more.
That said I'm not sure that DuckDuckGo's use of Amazon (it sounds like it is though) is risking users privacy. It's possible DuckDuckGo's using Amazon in ways that it doesn't. My understanding is if your going to compete with Google, Bing, and ???, then you need significant infrastructure to make it happen. I doubt DuckDuckGo has the financial resources to build its own data centers and maintain them. They might not be able to afford that, but they may be able to afford to rent a data center from Amazon if Amazon will let them rent it by the hour. Now all of a sudden it becomes cost effective and feasible to compete with Google, Bing, etc.
If I was at the helm of DuckDuckGo's operations I'd have fought tooth and nail to avoid Amazon, if any other solution was feasible, but I don't know what other options exist, and am not in a position to criticize. Unfortunately in many cases there are no good solutions.
SuperTramp86: I'm glad that I have been helpful.
Chris: I don't think that there's a justification for DuckDuckGo use of Amazon. There are probably more than 1000 companies offering hosting. Most of them are not concerned with ethics, but some are. Anyway, from what I read (I just began reading about this recently) Amazon is one of the worst of them in this regard. See my thread where I ask for companies that are, specifically, about the free software philosophy (and if you know of another one please post).
When the free software pioneers started to write a free OS there wasn't one to use as development environment, so using proprietary software was acceptable, but we're not talking about the same here. I'm very skeptical of the assertion that the DuckDuckGo staff had to made a choice between hosting in Amazon and not providing such a service at all.
I am a member!
Yea- as I said, it didn't sound like it to me either. However- not having experience with systems of this scale I wouldn't know. I'm not even entirely sure how Amazon's specific services compare to other “cloud” services. I've been under the impression Amazon's service makes scaling things easy. I wasn't sure if these particular features were widespread (particularly at the time of DuckDuckGo's transition to them).
I am a translator!
trinux - I just saw that link after posting the previous comment.. That is exactly the reason why I hate Amazon.
There's a whole lot of anti-DuckDuckGo talk (rightfully so), but not a whole lot of talk about solutions. How does Ixquick/Startpage and Privatelee and others hold up to scrutiny?
tkmantz625 wrote:
> There's a whole lot of anti-DuckDuckGo talk (rightfully so), but not
> a whole lot of talk about solutions. How does Ixquick/Startpage and
> Privatelee and others hold up to scrutiny?
I did a WHOIS and traceroute of DuckDuckGo and Startpage IP addresses.
As expected, packets to DuckDuckGo.com are routed to local AWS servers.
Packets to StartPage are routed through "Peer 1 Inc." via the United
States. Apparently Peer 1 owned by Cogeco Cable Inc. Peer 1 specialises
in "managed hosting, dedicated servers, cloud services and colocation"
according to Wikipedia.
If you use Tor then it doesn't matter anyway, providing the Tor network
is secure.
Andrew
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