Good Lord people. Get on with your lives!

It could possibly be worse. The typical response is something like yours, but there's the outside chance they'll pile on more charges for a longer prison sentence. That's good for the economy because the US has many privately run prisons to fill.

Thanks for sharing that. Absolutely fascinating and chilling.

Medium is for writers who don't know how to brand. Medium essentially takes all the credit, traffic and recognition. And the writers seem to like that, weirdly enough.

I'm not so sure. If Germany doesn't get honest information on the true scale and intention of US spying, they know Snowden will have answers. This is a matter of national security for Germany.

For Germany, this is like discovering their "friendly neighbor" across the street is a peeping tom. The relationship is already compromised.

Exactly. Most Germans accept nearly everything, except if it comes to their privacy. And I'd strongly support such a move.

Snowden is a symbol and a sign of the future.

If the US government gets their hands on Snowden, and gets their way, I am absolutely certain America will plunge into an even darker era of deception and thought control.

Even now, most Americans are too brainwashed to care.

Yes, everyone who disagrees with you is brainwashed. That's a real healthy attitude to take.

That's unfair. Wikileaks got involved because they wanted to help. Things haven't worked out as planned.

HN readers are so fickle. The biggest wafflers on the internet. You will find no loyalty here.

I'm not fickle - I started having doubts on December 24, 2009 when they shut down the website to beg for money. I started wondering if their goal was money for the founder or leaking things.

My doubts grew larger on September 25, 2010 when Daniel Domscheit-Berg aired his complaints.

And dislike was finalized on October 22, 2010 - not because of what they released, but because they shut down the archive.

It turned from WikiLeaks to AssangeLeaks after that. Instead of releasing anything, they released only what Assange wanted to release.

They have done nothing since to regain the name "wiki". Assange has made himself into the story.

You're making some pretty serious assumptions regarding WikiLeaks' intentions, and even if you're right, assuming whatever advice they offer is good is about more than their intentions, it's about a very difficult international situation that's not going to be simple even if you know the ins and outs of traveling without the US government chasing you.

Yeah, HN readers are fickle. Suggesting we/they should be "loyal" to anything, though, is ridiculous; loyalty is, depending on your point of view, either a way to trap suckers into shitty agreements or something you should only grant to people in whose intentions and abilities you have absolute confidence. I personally don't see either of those as good.

I personally value my privacy and liberty over a few additional nanoseconds of waiting, or what might be not as refined results.

This article isn't insightful or original, only pathetic. The attitude shows you how many in the US are unwilling to make even the tiniest sacrifice to preserve a human right like not having all you information surveyed, recorded and stored for Big Brother to use against you.

Sad.

You seem to be overly focusing on certain parts of the article to make your point. The fact that DDG is terrible at searching for error messages (showing sites experiencing the errors rather than explanations of the errors) is a pretty non-trivial minus for developers.

One guy making a point in a blog post doesn't make a fact.

In my own experience, google is now offering poorer results to the point of being useless. I've been using it to search for error message for about 15 years now. While on the other hand duckduckgo very often nails it with a relevant stackoverflow result in instant answer.

I guess ymmv according to how much you're inside the bubble.

I'd like to see something more factual to show how much ddg sucks at fulfilling queries for info to fix error message vs unfiltered google.

I've never had a problem with technical searches on DDG, since I use bangs to narrow them down (!so, !msdn, !mdn, etc.) Having DDG as the main search engine allows entering these bangs in the address bar just like the browser's search shortcuts. Google has gotten too smart for me lately.

The odd person - or even every geek on the planet - working around tracking, etc makes bugger all difference to anything. If you wish to complain about an abuse, write to advocacy groups, protest and / or write to your democratically elected representative. Anything else is the equivalent of signing an online petition or changing your Facebook profile picture.

In regards to Snowden, these aren't leaks but whistleblowing on worldwide privacy and human rights violations.

Agreed. I just used both terms interchangeably. English isn't my first language :)

"You're gonna want this" said the spider to the fly.