That IA was simultaneously breached and assaulted with DDOS attack is unusual. I do not recall any service simultaneously experiencing both kinds of attacks as they are very different.
I think you mean to say Russia will not accept platforms controlled by NATO/US. Decentralized protocols such as XMPP, Matrix, Simplex, Session.. work fine and are not targeted for blocking.
Aleksei Didenko, a member of the Russian State Duma, has said that Google, including its Android operating system and Apple's iOS, will soon be blocked in Russia.
Didenko advised the public not to cling to services like YouTube, stating, "Soon Google will be blocked, along with Google Android. iOS will also be blocked, and this will not be our initiative."
Google has been blocked in all of China for many years. They mainly use AOSP (Android Open Source Project) and variants without any proprietary Google. Their IOS devices connect to servers in and run by China. Russia can do something similar, but they are giving people some warning and time to migrate. Russia has banned IOS for most government employees after the Operation Triangulation fiasco.
As sibling commenter says, the China model is probably ideal for dictators. In China WeChat is used for everything: communicating, social media, payment (along with AliPay). And it doesn't take much imagination how effective that is for surveillance and control. They already delete posts that are "dangerous to the harmonious living" (i.e. things that are against the government narrative), and if you're afraid you'll get banned and lose your means of contact with friends (as well as a payment app needed for day to day living), you'd probably censor yourself.
And monitoring payments is another method of surveillance, along with the monitoring of communications (even with E2E encryption, just knowing which people are talking to each other, and with what sort of intensity, is useful for surveillance).
And Elon Musk wants to make a similar universal app out of the corpse of Twitter... ha, wouldn't we all like that. Ironically all the people who still defend him overlap with the ones who are yelling "The woke lefties want to control our speech!"
Yes it is one of many metasearch sites and not actually a search engine. Other engines include Kagi, Yandex, Brave, Mojeek, Quant, and something called Google.
As someone who uses Kagi, I think it is absolutely not accurate to say they are a search engine rather than a meta search engine. Most of their results come from the other engines you listed.
As per the first sentence on that page, they do. It's just not their only source, and from my experience it is far from the main source. You can see "% of unique Kagi results" on each search; these are the results from their own index.
Kagi's main results come from Google actually.
(edit: see https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html - Kagi really shows how good Google could be, since it's mostly using the Google index and then doing user-friendly things instead of user-unfriendly things on top)
I could be wrong, but I think they're playing to their early adopter audience, that being tech workers.
Google is terrible at tech searches, without verbatim and now "web" search. Kagi spending work in this area, and indexing this area, might bear good fruit.
Just tried it and it led me to a 403 error page: “Sorry your network appears to be sending automated queries so we can't process your search at this time.”
Are you sure about that? It doesn't completely rely on it but didn't it use bing as one of the search providers? I'm probably completely wrong and my info is outdated but I'm asking because it would be pretty special (in a good way!) if they use their own index exclusively.
Qwant was not usable yesterday during the Bing outage so that pretty much shows they cannot function without Bing (even if they do have some auxiliary indexes of some sort)
IOS AI is also local, but that was exploited in Operation Triangulation to determine which photos to send back to the exploiter. My point is that even if the AI is local, if someone else can get access to the system as your boss and possibly MS or others can due to Windows and MS services already very network connected design, local AI can help them out.
if someone can get access to your system they would be able to do a lot of things AI or not. and yes ms can also get access to your system infact they already do and its not only becuse of some faulty design. its very intentional, i mean its a ms os and they update it like everyday lol they dont need to go through your local ai
I don't know of anything yet on desktop, but I have my own Nextcloud server that is advancing its local AI models quickly. You can run Nextcloud on just about anything, but to take advantage of the full AI capabilities, you need HW capable.
