Hm. Thanks, I’ll be using this and other instances for historical/other important posts that are only on Reddit for now.

does the ||reddit.com^$header=referer: fix still work? I can’t seem to get it this way

I tried without uBlock Origin on my end and it did indeed work. I incorrectly assumed it was my vpn without properly verifying. Though CactusEcho said there were problems without the adblocker so it may be inconclusive.

Woaha. Why didn’t anyone think of this before you?

I wasn’t aware of Qwant. It seems to build its own index instead of relying on other providers (great), and has proper backing to be a viable competitor in something so big (the French government seems to endorse it; along with institutional use in EU parliament?).
I just tested it and unfortunately got a 403 however (FORBIDDEN). Though I was behind an endpoint of a very popular VPN for some testing, that sucks regardless.

Actually, before I could post this, I tried the search refresh and it worked somehow.
To test again I switched to another server of the same VPN provider (same selected country) and tried searching. Same error, which didn’t go away after doing the refresh. So they might have some sort of spam prevention measure which eases itself automatically, but I feel like it could definitely be implemented better if that’s the case.

Edit: Yep, if you sit on that 403 page for 5-6 minutes without doing anything and then hit the relaunch your search button, things work as intended afterwards.

I just tried Ecosia again after a long while (I last tried it around sometime in early 2020/21) and it seems a lot nicer and better than before. I’ll use it for a little bit then :$

I had thought this too, but in the article they mentioned speed sensors that track the speeds of vehicles in one (maybe two?) of these cities. So I think it’s a mix of both of those things, with them probably preferring the preferential approach.

Same tech they’ve used to try and arrest a woman from Texas for getting an abortion.

Seems like I just got hit with it too today or yesterday, and it was being rolled out since about a month ago. Sad.

Here’s a hackernews post on it (3 days old):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49326106