[AdrenalinMd]

Microsoft signed a deal in 2015 to set Yandex as the default search engine in several countries close to Russia. The article mentions "Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Ukraine". The list is not exhaustive, as I know about Moldova and Georgia. https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-partners-russias-ya...

The list includes Ukraine! I've tested Edge with Ukraine as a Region on my MacOS, and it no longer appears to set it to Yandex.

But it still does for several other countries. Which includes Moldova. Moldova is a country that Russia has repeatedly threatened. While advanced users may try and remove Yandex as default, non-tech savvy users likely leave the defaults.

Meaning Microsoft Edge shares data with Russia by setting Yandex as a default search engine for their users, which is really bad.

Please upvote this story to give it visibility. Many thanks!

[jaynetics]

Thank goodness edge's market share is very low in these countries. About 2% for Moldova [1].

For MSFT, this is a huge embarrassment, reminiscent of Google's infamous "project dragonfly".

And they deleted your inquiry on their forums for "violating the community guidelines"! Not exactly PR geniuses, are they?

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/moldova

[AdrenalinMd]

I wonder how accurate those numbers are about Edge. As 79.48% of desktop users in Moldova are on Windows 10 and Windows 11. [1]

Microsoft Edge is the default web browser on Windows 10, Windows 11. [2]

Meaning at a huge amount of population will see Yandex when they search for something at least for the first time. Unless they install another browser immediately or change the default search engine.

And yes, I wasn't expecting to see my inquiry deleted on their forum. I'm posting again without the screenshot. In case they didn't like what Yandex returns as results (which is weird, as it is their "business partner").

I'm also very humbled by the support of the hacker news community. As a long time lurker, it warms my heart a lot to see so much support. I hope it reaches Microsoft.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/d...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Edge#Features

[lockhouse]

Defaults don't matter as much as we all pretend they do.

For the decade that Internet Explorer sucked basically all computer users got programmed to treat it like a Chrome/Firefox downloader. Most users don't know that Edge is Microsoft flavored Chrome now, so they continue to use Edge to download other browsers and move on with their lives.

This is an unpopular opinion, but IE4 and especially IE5 were significantly better than what Mozilla/Netscape were putting out at the time. This is what grew their marketshare more than the bundling that everyone focused on. Then Microsoft sat on IE6 for years and let it fall way behind everyone else. IE7 was basically IE6 with tabs. By the time they began investing in their own browser again it was largely too late.

[sidibe]

It's bizarre that the nixed Project Dragonfly is a considered a bigger embarrassment than Bing working continuously to this day in China.

[jaynetics]

I made the comparison with Dragonfly because they had special features planned to make users more easily identifiable for the PRC government, thus the similarity with this MSFT/Yandex situation.

Are you aware of Bing doing anything like this? (I think it's bad enough that they take part in censorship, don't get me wrong.)

[sidibe]

Whatever Google was doing with Dragonfly was to comply and gain re-entry to China, we can assume Bing has to do whatever Google was supposed to do.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Edge is so irrelevant, that you have to wonder why everyone's obsessing with MS's recent moves with it.

It's <5% (and decreasing, still pretty quickly).

[pessimizer]

> It's <5% (and decreasing, still pretty quickly).

How many tens of millions of irrelevant users does that represent?

[onlyrealcuzzo]

5% and shrinking is 5% and shrinking.

If you start with a gigantic number - even 0.1% of is going to still be gigantic.

It doesn't make it really matter in the grand scheme of things.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

And once you go to Yandex search page, it will spam you to death to install Yandex browser, which will automatically install Russian government CA certificates, allowing them to spy on all your web traffic!

[dmitrysvd]

If I understand correctly, they can only spy on you if they have full access to your traffic, including the ability to modify it, in order to carry out a MITM attack.

[IYasha]

They can only spy on you if you use these certificates e.g. visit government sites.

[thesmok]

You've chosen a wrong place to disinform. Tech people understand that having russian CA certificates installed allows russia to MITM all your traffic, if they can access it.

[mabbo]

Incredibly damning of Microsoft if they were making deals after 2014 to help the Russian aggression against Ukraine.

That they would still be participating in this deal is even worse.

[perfect_kiss]

Ukraine banned yandex in 2017 for mass data harvesting of Ukrainians, probably that's the main reason why gp did not find it in Ukrainian Bing. It's still possible and perfectly legal to access yandex or other data harvesting engines/disinfo websites over VPN or Tor, so the ban main objective is to protect non-tech-savvy users from the interference of hostile foreign criminals.

[somethingreen]

Not sure why the downvotes, as, yes, Yandex along with several other russian internet service companies is blocked in Ukraine and it is almost certainly why it is not being set as default, because doing so would straight up break search altogether.

[IYasha]

what aggression?

[prometheon1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Ru...

[caskstrength]

> The list includes Ukraine! I've tested Edge with Ukraine as a Region on my MacOS, and it no longer appears to set it to Yandex.

Yandex has been banned in Ukraine for some time now, so no point for MS to still have it as default search.

[smsm42]

I love it how Russians paid Microsoft to make Russian search engine default in Ukraine, without asking Ukrainians, and nobody in Microsoft thought there's anything wrong with that.

[yakireev]

Unitedstatians from Google pay Unitedstatians from Apple to make Google default search engine for all of the world, without asking anyone, do you consider this a problem too?

[Dandy3556]

Russian government != Yandex. They did business in Ukraine and worldwide. Don't see the reason why Microsoft or any other enterprise would need to consult the nation as a whole on which business decision to take.

[elkos]

To my understanding, Yandex is nowadays based in the Netherlands.

[itwillnotbeasy]

It's the same thing as company being based on Cayman Islands, it's mostly on paper really. Most of their offices, and human force are located in russia, in 2009 they sold golden share for 1 eur to the russian goverment(which allows to temporarily suspend the head of Yandex among other "benefits"), yeah and CEO(was resigned in dec 2022) and several other people from the board members are sanctioned by the West.

> "As founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation and is responsible for supporting actions or policies which undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine," the EU's listing states.

> The document also accuses Yandex of "promoting State media and narratives in its search results, and deranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin, such as content related to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine."

from: https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/06/yandex_ceo_arkady_vol...

Yeah and they are going to change the formals too - Yandex NV(based in Netherlands) is considering turning the main part of the business into a separate Russian group https://newsunrolled.com/economy/132317.html

[ROTMetro]

Not after the war. Yandex had it's parent company which was headquartered in the Netherlands removed from operations and instead a new company headed by Aleksei Kudrin, a longtime confidant of President Vladimir Putin was put in charge.

[ROTMetro]

Love the down votes. Sorry about reality guys. You're probably just supporting innocent/aligned in thought Russian programmers:

https://ain.capital/2023/01/27/yandex-developers-used-racist...