Stallman was right: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
This is from 1997, mainly about books but it mentions debuggers and “free kernels” (linux and… hurd?). Considering that they also want to force OSs to require their users’ age and some Linux distros won’t do it… illegal Linux distros may be in our future.
That doesn’t solve the problem: it only disables the duck.ai assistant, but doesn’t disable the search results that are normal websites generated with AI (the real issue here). To be fair, that’s not DDG problem specifically but every search engine problem.
The web is now full of these fake websites, which is a real problem because on the search results they look legit and only when visiting them you realize it’s AI crap.
And the funny (or sad) thing is that current AIs are being trained on these fake hallucinating sites, so even they are suffering from false information, which in turn is given to humans and used to make more fake websites and… the result is up to your imagination.
I don’t think Firefox is immune to this, just that because its architecture is different, Anthropic didn’t bother coding a bridge for it (given its market share).
The main issue here is that Anthropic violated one of the most important (implicit) tenets of applications in a computer: don’t touch other people’s shit. Claude.app modified Brave (and others) configuration, adding an extension without user consent. An extension that, by the way, gives full control of the browser to Claude, including reading the DOM for browser tabs unrelated to Claude (for example, the one where you just entered your credit card details).