Re: revenue sharing agreement with DuckDuckGo
Dear Paul,
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 11:04:16AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> > Ah, I miswrote. What I meant was, that if you use vanilla Iceweasel,
> > you can already tell that that hit was from a Debian machine. You do
> > need a user-agent swticher (or equivalent), as you rightly say, to
> > switch what is sent as user-agent.
>
> AFAICT, that isn't true, unless you think that Iceweasel will never be
> available on non-Debian platforms.
You are right.
> > Currently, if I use Iceweasel to search on Google using it's default
> > home page, it appends a "client=iceweasel-a". Do you imply that this
> > setting should be reverted?
>
> This thread is about DDG, so your question is OT. I don't use the
> Iceweasel search widget, so it doesn't affect me, but I would think
> the User-Agent HTTP header is enough to let Google know which web
> browser users are using. If the client= parameter has some affect on
> money, it really should be named properly.
Well, I'd disagree here. The question is whether we wish to have
settings which reveal to a webmaster what settings are being used. By
default, Iceweasel in Debian does provide an indication to Google that
the query is likely from a Debian machine; whether Google is using
that or not is a different matter, but that information is being
provided anyway. One way to look at this would be to ask why this
could not be repeated with DDG (adding a client= or the like). Or, an
alternate way to maintain consistency would be to remove the client=
for Google as well (without loss of functionality?).
> > In other words, are you not strictly opposed to them looking for these
> > strings and finding them, but it should be up to the user to decide
> > whether or not they would like these strings identifying Debian to be
> > sent. Is that correct?
>
> No. Whether or not browsers should identify the OS they are running on
> is not part of my point (I think they should not). My point is that
> where the money goes should be a choice of the user, with the default
> suggested to the user determined by upstream. Debian should exert no
> influence over that choice, except maybe asking upstream to add us to
> the choices available to the user.
I agree with this. Thank you.
Kumar
--
"...very few phenomena can pull someone out of Deep Hack Mode, with two
noted exceptions: being struck by lightning, or worse, your *computer*
being struck by lightning."
(By Matt Welsh)
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