One notable software business professional interviewed by RBC thought that the West’s decision would “adversely affect the life of the developer community, mutual trust within it, and therefore the quality of the product.”

It was Russia and other autocracies etc. that diminished the trust by actually financing developers for multiple years to first earn trust and finally introduce backdoors into open source software, as demonstrated by the XZ utils backdoor.

In open source projects, maintainers need to have some initial trust into each contributor, and let this trust naturally grow with time and contributions. They cannot perform intensive background checks on everyone before accepting a patch.

While it is easier to uncover backdoors in open source software, there is no good way to defend and prevent against this kind of attack in this type of development process. All open source projects can do is trying to take away some trust from people within higher risk groups. This of course might lead to discrimination.

I have nothing against any meta search engine, they are very useful, and I use them primarily as well.

However, they are not a true alternative, because they depend on third-party services. The same as Invidious is a very useful, but also not an alternative to YouTube itself, just a different user interface.

Tesla’s CEO; The Inspiration For Tony Spark

Elon “Baby-Brain” Musk as the inspiration of “Tony Spark” the cheap knock-off Tony Stark.

Which other trustworthy search engines are there? And I don’t mean some different frontend or a meta search engine like ddg, sp, kagi, searx(ng), etc… that mostly just use googles, bings or even yandex and beidu results?

Ages ago I configured and hosted yacy for myself, but that was a different time… Are there any real alternatives? With mayor internet companies like cloudflare, social media sites and many others restricting the access to the net and information, searching becomes more and more impossible if you aren’t a huge corporation…

So you can play a racing game in your car, while letting the autopilot kill you.

And so that the manufacturer can sell you a new car, so that you can play newer games.

In EU there are ways to verify yourself online, for instance if you want to get a credit card, etc. This is normally handled by a third-party, which more or less just checks per webcam if the info they got from the other company is the same as what you show them. I don’t see any privacy issues here, that I wouldn’t have seen in processes of other companies, that already do something like this.

This isn’t something new and I would guess that this is the case with most modern countries.