It’s Italy, there is no chance of that efficiency. This is - as usual - stuff done to prevent pirated sport content. Nothing else has ever and probably will ever be done.

Sure bro, and if you are a lebanese civilian who sees bombs killing your family I am sure you think of all the good impact that those have and thank Israel and the US.

I will close it here, I have no intention to convince you and there is no chance that someone who supports Israel will convince me of any moral argument.

Fair enough, hopefully you can see how someone from - say - Lebanon would see it differently.

Ufff that’s a brave moral stance to have. You do you, I completely disagree with it though.

Thanks for elaborating anyway.

I hope you can at least see how a person from another country might have a similar perspective as you, but reversed, therefore demanding kagi (or other companies) not to give money to US. Not everyone will have this US-centric perspective.

US gives (incl. donating) weapons to Israel with the precise purpose of those being used in the current massacres. Also let’s not forget this is an absolutely momentary perspective. US was invading, torturing and bombing civilians until few years ago.

Now, I won’t claim it is equivalent, because it’s not and frankly doesn’t matter: if your morals say that one is OK and the other is not then I will simply disagree with those morals.

To me a moral argument is based on principles: if I don’t want my money to be spent on killing people, it doesn’t matter much if the killing happens slightly indirectly. Solid principles don’t hide behind thin layers of deniability.

So, I would expect someone with ironclad morals that want to avoid a small and indirect amount of money that to end up to Russia to also recognize that if the money go to the US government they have a pretty nice chance to also to result in people being killed (or right now to fund deportations etc.). However, I am interested in your perspective. You have stressed a lot on the two things not being equal, maybe you can explain how this difference changes everything for you, and makes one okay while the other unacceptable.

So they cancel each other? Do you get a choice when you pay a US company to state that those taxes will need to go to Ukraine and not Israel?

Also there is a quantitative difference:

• yandex is a small % of kagi cost, of that a small percentage will go to Russian government (directly or indirectly) and of those money a part will go into military.
• kagi is US based, and Google is their main cost center. So if you consider a 10$ subscription a much much bigger chunk will go to US companies or people - who also live in US and spend money there, generating taxes. A part of all these money will go into weapons sent to Israel (or to bomb Somalia, etc.). A part will also go to Ukraine, which for the broken watch theory is one of the few times US military expense is used for something good (probably worth some caveats but OK).

Can you please elaborate what causes for you to perceive these two facts as completely different?

What about weapons? Money buy those too. Or that doesn’t count for your moral principles?

So does US one in Palestine. So does UAE, and many more. It’s not a matter of “everyone bad” is the fact that legitimately if the criteria is no paying anybody in a country that is involved in killing people, or that uses services from such a country, you reach everyone. And in this case it would be not using kagi directly as a US company.

The war in Ukraine is much closer to me, but if we are talking principles I need to understand that a person from Lebanon or Palestine, or other places might have different perspective and they would demand that “we don’t do business to X” has a different “X”. So to accommodate most or all of these perspectives, you need to necessarily include more countries, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not the only active war at the moment.

I will give you more data points. I live in Estonia, and just now Estonia is disconnecting the power grid to Russia. It means that just by turning on my light, I might give (have given) some money to an actual Russian company. Let alone knowing which companies use Russian gas or other resources etc.

There are choices that personally make sense, I refused a job at a Yandex spinoff - israeli-russian company, for example. In this case the amount of money is so small, so indirect, that I personally accept the fact of giving money to Yandex - of which a small portion I assume ends in taxes and a portion of that ends up in weapons that will be used to kill Ukrainians is nothing different from buying a product that I am unaware was produced by a company which uses some Russian import. However, using kagi I can at least positively contribute to other aspects that for me are important in the world, like for example the protection of privacy. For this, I even accept to give money to Google and Microsoft, despite they are companies that made incalculable damages to society, and also pay (little) taxes and work directly with the US military, which means some money also ends up in weapons that are used to kill Palestinians (today).

Now, everyone has their own moral scale, so I completely understand if for someone this is unacceptable. That said, their technical reason why they don’t have an easy way for people to choose search backend is reasonable, and if we go to the point where they shouldn’t use X for moral reasons than they wouldn’t be able to use yandex, bing, google, brave (and maybe something else). In fact, using Kagi itself means paying taxes in US.

So to me their current approach is the only reasonable outcome. If for someone the tiny amount of indirect money is worse than the benefit (not personal, but collective) of fostering a healthy tech company, boost privacy etc. then they can reasonably make the decision to not pay for the service. Painting not doing so as “supporting Russia” though is disingenuous IMHO (I am saying in general).

Funny note, my wife also uses and loves Kagi, and not because she doesn’t care about the work or her family (who thankfully is in a safe-ish area).

She doesn’t, but that’s my whole point: it’s a personal perspective. If you ask a person from Palestine, Vietnam, many places in South America, Yemen, Iraq, etc. their gripes would be different from my own, which as an Italian are different already from my wife’s etc.

So which moral claims do you accommodate? The obvious answer is everyone’s, by allowing each user to choose where indirectly give money. However this is apparently technically hard, so either you shut down or you simply decide that you can’t accommodate any, and make good in other areas (I.e. through privacy-preserving services).

My wife is Ukrainian. I will leave it at that.

I have also a colleague from Afghanistan, for example, guess what their opinion is (and the list could be long, I just happen to have a colleague from there).

I remember Yandex being brought up during the Brave debacle, and I don’t remember them claiming anything of the sort. I think they simply stated the position that choosing search providers based on moral claims would simply lead to them being able to use only the niche search providers.

Are you referring to using Yandex?

I think they did explain that implementing turn off and on of specific engines per user is a complete rewrite of their querying system, so it is an expensive and complex change.

Removing yandex is OTOH not a great move as results in Russian language often come from there. Also morally I would generally agree, but then - especially now - you could argue about “giving money to US companies”, and that means they need to shut down, they can’t use bing, google, yandex.

1,2 and 3 are completely irrelevant. 1 is completely normal, 2 missed the point that the wallet (which I don’t use, I never owned crypto) has nothing to do with privacy and 4 is an optional marketing strategy to incentivise migration from google. Nothing is wrong with any of this.