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.

That would be awesome if it prompts the current admin to actually regulate AI.

It won't, because AI is coming from our billionaire overlords, who are too stupid to understand the consequences of... well, anything they do these days. But it'd be nice nonetheless.

Socialism predates communism. Communism is influenced by it, but it's not an "intermediary state", it's not even a "state". It's a simple principle that the people who labor should control (the usual term is "own" but that's a little misleading) the means of production. There's a second component that is usually unsaid that ends up being a principle of the ideology in practice - that cooperation is encouraged instead of competition.

Unions are one example (and go right to the heart of why I said "own" is misleading), because unions seek to increase the power of workers within a business that would otherwise be controlled by its shareholders.

Another is the government owning businesses on the grounds the government and the people are one. But that only works (ideologically) if the country is genuinely democratic, and it still doesn't work well because there's quite a dilution of ownership going on there, leading to a substantial gap between the people doing the job and their control over it.

The purest form of socialism in most democratic countries is the cooperative movement, where businesses are owned by the people who work for them. (Not to be confused with cooperatives where the customers own the company, for some reason.) That is literally the workers owning the means of production.

Basically the author of this piece has probably gotten their terminology from a combination of Ayn Rand and online people who think "socialismism is where the government does it, the more the government does the more socialistismist it is. Like Nazi Germany. Did you know Nazi has the word socialist in it? Clearly a socialist movement! And Unions are bad because they are socialist, therefore must be Hitler and Stalin who are totally the same guy, I mean, they are both famously mustachioed And dictators And had "socialistismistism" in the name of their movements" and repeat this crap all the time.

Anyway, Unions are not some intermediate step towards Marxism. Not even close. Unions, cooperative movements, and, yes, the government owning some businesses, have historically been ways to prevent countries from falling to Marxism by addressing workers concerns, using some socialism to stave off a far more problematic and less likely to leave anyone happy thing. And there's nothing wrong with that. Perhaps if rich people stopped forgetting who made them rich, they'd spend less time worrying at night about regime change.