Well, in the past it was owned by various groups, including but not limited to:

- Millionaires

- Publicly traded Corporations

- Trusts built around the interests of journalists. ...etc...

Right now, ABC/Disney and NBC are the only two major media groups not owned by billionaires more or less directly. Even they have to deal with billionaire-owned TV networks who they're reliant upon to franchise their content - hence the temporary cancellation of Kimmel. And despite 30-40 years of propaganda claiming otherwise, corporate media like ABC/NBC is not really a second voice. It parrots the same talking points as CBS and Fox, the Bezos Post, and so on, 90% of the time, because the interests of big business and billionaires are usually aligned. The main difference is that NBC and ABC at least recognize that treating sections of society as anything but human beings is... bad for business, and that some level of truth is needed to ensure their output commands some respect, while Fox and CBS know they'll only get funding if they repeat their master's basest prejudices.

We're not living in the 1990s any more. Hell, the 1990s weren't the 1990s, but consolidation and the emergence of uncontrolled, psychotic, billionaires, has really fucked things up, the media included.

WebAssembly is technically an answer as it first appeared about nine years ago, but it was widely discussed before that. WebRTC dates back to 2011. Can't find a date on flexboxes but I see blog articles from 2013(!) on that. CSS grid is more recent, as are CSS variables - long after SCSS became standard because everyone got fed up of waiting - but I agree with the GP, is any of the actually more recent stuff actually necessary?

Of all of the above, WebAssembly is kinda useful, (and WebRTC fills a hole but is pretty old now.) The rest? They're just different ways to achieve things you could already achieve.

I think there's a case for arguing the core web standards went wrong at some point in the late 1990s, and became more and more bloated without adding significant functionality with each generation. A web browser has roughly a subset of the functionality as Microsoft Word - it's a rich text viewer with scripting and network connectivity. Yet Microsoft Word requires a maximum of tens of megabytes of RAM per document. And arguably Word is more powerful.

Maybe it's time we reset and started again. Freeze the standard for HTML, and create a new format (WPDL - web page description language?) that's lighter and less confusing to render. Browsers might even start being consistent if we did that.

Thanks, yeah, I'd seen that before, but I also know it's heavily reliant on everyone else's engines. But is definitely worth supporting even if it's not quite where I'd want to go (which I'm not sure of yet.)

> I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen some form of cooperative / community driven web search alternatives pop up.

This is what I was originally getting at. I've been trying to figure out a way to think of some kind of semi-selfhosted/federated/etc technology that could be an alternative to Google, but right now I'm not finding anything that's practical. And the usual alternatives people who aren't idiots like the one who thought I'd never heard of webcrawlers (WTF?) come up with are things like "Just use DuckDuckGo! They're not evil!" - because apparently Google was "evil" from the start ;-)

It'll be a complicated project, especially as anything public domain can be examined for ways to game it. Every time I think of something, it ends up being "Sure, but this relies upon webmaster cooperation", or "Sure, but this involves trusting people that can't necessarily be trusted". But there has to be a way!

What exactly are you proposing here that I'm too "dumb" to know? That every single person who wants to get away from Google should run their own webcrawler to populate a local database?

Do you seriously think that this is practical in any way at all? Do you know how large the world wide web is right now?

It's not "AI search", it'd be useful if it was. One genuinely legitimate use of LLMs would be to filter search results so that when, for example, I search for something like "Linux DAAP client" it doesn't give me a list of DAAP servers and pages on how to set up DAAP servers and so on because webpages that talk about setting up servers inevitably include the word "client" in them for obvious reasons.

What Google have been doing instead is more LLMsplaining. You ask it for help finding something and instead of helping it inserts its annoying and frequently inaccurate opinions in and only reluctantly will actually give you access to the things you actually asked for.

Google have decided that that really loud guy in the office who insists on giving you - well, everyone - his opinion on everything is a role model, not an annoying useless tosser.

Their search engine has been steadily decreasing in usefulness ever since Google+, but for some reason their competitors just keep copying them.

I've been wondering for a while (and not come up with any solutions) if we could at least create a practical "self hosted" (quotes because obvs it'll be impractical to do that literally) search engine technology so we can start getting Google et al out of the equation if we don't want it, even if everyone else just slavishly uses the big corps systems. It doesn't have to be a one for one match, just something that spits out a list of useful websites when you ask it a question. But... no idea how to make it work, at least not without the cooperation of a whole bunch of groups who won't cooperate.

That should be "<subject> wikipedia" in that last bit, Slashdot ate the brackets.

> So? The Linux kernel folks patched within hours or days.

Thank God that's all that's necessary and means we immediately get the updates to our computers without even having to reboot. There are no middle men between those plucky fast acting Linux kernel folks and me too, which also helps. Unlike Windows where... oh wait, no, it's the other way around isn't it?

Seriously gweihir, I'm sure you have your heart in the right place, and I run GNU/Linux (Debian) myself, but stop with this fucking nonsense that GNU and Linux people are somehow the only ones who "care" about security and Microsoft doesn't care at all. There are clear reasons why Windows has vulnerabilities more frequently than GNU/Linux, and they aren't because Microsoft doesn't care about it.

Likewise the GNU/Linux folks, especially the kernel people - a sizable number of which have conniptions when you just ask them to maybe work with people who are trying to introduce better security and use more solid programming languages than C - are not far more security focused. They benefit from having more eyes on their work, but most are just trying to get a device driver to work or make something a little faster. The userland people aren't much better - these are people who don't see the problem in throwing out wholesale decades of well tested code in order to "improve" security because they don't have the brains to figure out how to graft a security layer onto X11 when it's never been easier to do so.

We're going to be picking through Wayland related CVEs for the next 20 years.

The GNOME/Wayland people in particular are more unserious about security than Microsoft is.

I did. I didn't find anything. But Google is crap these days, so I'd rather ask experts. Have you used Google recently? It's even worse than it was 5 years ago, and it was pretty fucking close to useless back then for anything except getting celebrity news or " wikipedia".

The Linux kernel has had multiple major vulns lately. I don't think you can put it down to Microsoft not caring about security so much as it's a hard job and getting harder with every line of bloat Microsoft adds.

I'm curious if anyone's found an OpenBSD vulnerability lately?

> YouTube maintains its very nebulous Medical Misinformation Policy and continues the censorship to this day. Facebook's core health misinformation rules still target vaccine skepticism,with automated systems and human review carrying forward pandemic-era frameworks despite 2025 Community Notes shifts: they still do it. Apple Podcasts continues hosting and algorithmic promotion decisions that deboost or limit visibility for episodes questioning COVID narratives, as seen in ongoing complaints and selective removals of skeptical medical podcasts

And? Private entities don't want their users killed via misinformation. How is this either a bad thing, or an example of government censorship?

You're not arguing that the elites are tying to "control" anything, you're arguing the large powerful amplifiers of user generated content should be completely irresponsible and knowingly host content that could kill people.

There was a moment where the press coverage seemed to shift with COVID that made me think "No, this is real". That never happened with Hantavirus.

The Ebola thing... still not getting that sense that it'll end up being an emergency in the US. But with this clown-show in charge, anything's possible I guess.

I think the OP was trying to say they don't use it due to lack of section breaks, but because they put that part of the post in the Subject it was easily missed.

People, Subjects are just Subjects, they are not the start of your posts. They help clarify what you're talking about, but if your words could just as easily be applied to the main topic of the discussion, you're going to cause confusion. Be explicit!

You're not really comparing like with like. When we talk about vulnerabilities in Windows we're talking about the entire operating system. The bugs that have come up the last few days were in the Linux kernel.

Basically if all those 167 vulns were in KRNL386.EXE (or whatever the Windows kernel is called these days) it'd be comparable in terms of stats.

I don't doubt there are fewer vulnerabilities in, say, Debian than there are in Windows (which is more of a like-for-like comparison) but you undermine the argument by comparing a kernel to a full blown operating system.