Dukgo

» see dukgo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 13 May 2011, at 11:24 in the morning UTC, the DuckDuckGo account tweeted that you could now get a dukgo.com Jabber account, and credited the person who built it by handle. That was the launch. A search engine with a few dozen employees at most was now also running a public instant-messaging server for anyone who wanted one, on an open protocol, for free, under the same privacy policy as the search.

The reasoning was consistent rather than clever. DuckDuckGo's whole argument was that the company holding your data is the problem, so it did not hold any. XMPP made the same argument about chat. No single company owns the network, because anyone can run a server and the servers federate with each other. If you already trusted the search engine not to log you, an account on its chat server was the same trade in a second category. The explainer they published said it plainly, that the communication would not be logged or tracked, and contrasted it with the closed clients most people were actually using, ICQ and MSN among them.

I was one of the people still using one of those closed clients. MSN had owned chat here from about 2002 onward, and by 2011 it was emptying out, not toward federated Jabber servers but toward phone apps that wanted your number. The window in which a privacy-minded engineer would go and register a Jabber address with his search engine was narrow, and it was open mostly in places where people had already been arguing about this for years. I never opened an account there.

~ the record ~

~ a search engine with a chat server ~

The service had real reach for something given away. On 20 May 2013 a post called "Our XMPP services at DuckDuckGo" went up on the company's community site, written by the contributor who ran it, and the next day it reached the front page of Hacker News with 267 points. The post walked beginners through getting an account and pointed them at a separate guide for setting up Pidgin against it.

The clearest measure of how far it got is in somebody else's code. ChatSecure, the encrypted mobile messenger, shipped dukgo.com as one of the servers in its account-creation dropdown, so a person installing a privacy chat app on a phone would be offered a DuckDuckGo address as a default place to sign up. Years later a maintainer closed the issue asking for its removal with a single line about having broken off the partnership, and told people to use Conversations instead.

~ twenty-nine days ~

On 10 April 2017 the shutdown notice went up, edited into the top of that same 2013 blog post. "On May 9th, 2017 we will be shutting down our dukgo.com XMPP service." Then four sentences of apology and explanation, and two links to other people's server lists so users could go somewhere else. Twenty-nine days from the announcement to the lights going out.

The explanation is the part worth keeping, because the company stated the mechanism instead of thanking everyone for an incredible journey. Given the strict privacy policy, they wrote, they had not wanted to introduce any feature that might compromise anonymity. As a result they received continual abuse, and that abuse is what wrecked the uptime and finally forced the decision to retire the service. A server that refuses to know who you are cannot throw you off for being a spammer either. They ran it for six years that way and then admitted it does not hold. Today dukgo.com does not resolve to anything of its own, it just redirects to the search engine.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »