Weird, it usually works fine without JS.

I can second this. I have SearxNG running in a docker container by itself and it requires no real maintenance of any kind. I do have a cron job that updates the docker container once per day, but it ran for ages on the same version without issues.

I have a Gmail for less important spammy stuff, but my email for important stuff is with mxroute. Got a $25 Black Friday deal with them last year and have my domain set up with it.

Ah yes, the old parent company with a sole employee and it’s address is a basement in a country where the laws they want to avoid don’t apply.

It’s more like if you give someone random the power to jail someone without due process, we can all cheer as long as they use the power right. But then if we give that person the power, Hitler also gets the power and uses it to jail Jewish people.

If it goes one way, it can go the other way too. Imagine if a political party bribed some T1s with a ton of money to just not carry any messaging by their opponents, and force sites to remove it or go offline.

The thing that sucks about that is the sheer amount of stuff that a modern web browser is expected to do.

Level 0:

• Parse and correctly display the contents of simple HTML documents in a manner consistent with other browsers
• Figure out what to do if somebody gives you mangled HTML in a way consistent with other browsers, because the page will just about always try to show the user something.

Level 1:

• Implement who knows how many CSS properties in a way consistent with other browsers

Level 3:

• Now write a JavaScript engine to manipulate all of the above, making sure that everything works like it does elsewhere no matter how non-sensical it is, because pages rely on that stuff to function sometimes.

Level 4:

• Don’t forget to implement media codecs so you can display video, play audio, and let the user control those via JavaScript APIs, and you have to render/play that in whatever way the webpage specifies.

Basically, writing a browser engine from scratch in a way that is in any way competitive is probably on par for scale on writing your own operating system. You might even accomplish the latter faster, depending on where you’d call your OS “complete”

Since it determines if you’re over the age of 25, maybe instead they could get a more accurate measure by having you drink a verification beer.

Fantastic write up. I first got a real taste of the Internet around 2003 when my parents finally relented and got dial-up from a local power company. We had dialup with the associated drawbacks for around 3 years until we got DSL in around 06. The ability to use the net when I wanted let me start learning how things worked, very slowly.

I do wish I’d had Internet access earlier and been a little bit older to experience the height of BBSes and the like, but I got to see the tail end of a different time in internet history, which I appreciate in itself.