That depends on how you define the web

Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.[1]

gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:

https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/

Gopher is a well-known information access protocol that predates the World Wide Web, developed at the University of Minnesota during the early 1990s. What is Gopher? (Gopher-hosted, via the Public Proxy)

This proxy is for Gopher resources only – using it to access websites won’t work and is logged!

I questioned Reddit doing so, and now we’ve got it on the Threadiverse. There are privacy issues unless your home instance is proxying images for you.

How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer?

Gopher predated the Web.

I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I’m not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with <em></em>, <a href=""></a>, and <h1></h1> anymore, for example.

It’s been a long time, but IIRC Windows’s file dialog also remembers your recently-used files for quick access in the file dialog, and I assume that Explorer has a thumbnail cache.

It looks like GTK 3 has a toggle for recently-used files:

https://linux.debian.user.narkive.com/m7SeBwTP/recently-used-xbel

While the guy sounds kinda unhinged, I do think that he has a point — he doesn’t want activity dumping breadcrumbs everywhere, unbeknownst to him. That’s a legit ask. Firefox and Chrome added Incognito and Private Browsing mode because they recorded a bunch of state about what you were doing for History, and that’s awkward if it suddenly gets exposed. There should really be a straightforward way to globally disable this sort of thing, even if logged history can provide for convenient functionality.

Emacs has a lot of functionality, but I don’t think anything I use actually retains state. If emacs can manage that so can oyher stuff. Hmm. Oh, etags will store a cached TAGS file for a source tree.

thinks

Historically, bash defaulted to saving ~/.bash_history on disk. Don’t recall if that changed at any point.

There’s ccache, which caches binary objects from gcc compilations persistently.

Firefox can persistently cache data in the disk cache or for LocalStorage or cookies.

System logfiles might record some data baout the system though they generally get rotated out.

Most of the time though, I don’t have a lot of recorded persistent state floating around.

DNS

There’s systemd-resolved. I don’t know if you mean that it has some kind of limitation.

You can use VoIP if you have a cell data connection.

twitter doesn’t work for me rn)

https://nitter.space/moschino_bunny/status/1457773412957376530

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

David William Plummer (born August 9, 1968) is a Canadian-American programmer and entrepreneur. He created the Task Manager for Windows, the Space Cadet Pinball ports to Windows NT, Zip file support for Windows, HyperCache[2] for the Amiga and many other software products.

2025: The guy that wrote Windows’ Task Manager at Microsoft is creating burner accounts to get the OS installed.

Frankly, this should be implemented with something like a combination of:

https://github.com/QazCetelic/lemmy-know

Lemmy Know (let me know) is a lightweight CLI application / Docker service that monitors Lemmy for reports on posts and comments and sends notification. These can be sent to a Discord channel with a webhook or as MQTT messages (schema), which is useful for more complex setups with e.g., Node-RED.

https://www.home-assistant.io/

Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/mqtt/

MQTT (aka MQ Telemetry Transport) is a machine-to-machine or “Internet of Things” connectivity protocol on top of TCP/IP. It allows extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport.

https://github.com/DevelopmentalOctopus/ha-buttplug

Buttplug.io Integration for Home Assistant

https://intiface.com/central/

Intiface® Central is an open-source, cross-platform application that acts as a hub for intimate haptics/sensor hardware access

Some collection of hardware devices from:

https://iostindex.com/?filter0Availability=Available%2CDIY&filter1Connection=Digital&filter2ButtplugSupport=4

That’d permit for, say, having message events drive a state machine to control devices or something like that.

I would guess that it’s probably not much by way of change — theoretically, maybe just a single line patch — to cause this check not to take place.

I believe that the point of the Czechia situation was that it was a modification to the constitution; this will have a higher bar to change than would be the case for simply enacting an ordinary law. The idea was to entrench the status quo behind the bar for constitutional modification.

kagis

Looks like it’s a 60% supermajority in each legislative house:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Czech_Republic#Amending_the_Constitution

With reference to the provision of the article 39, paragraph 4 of the Constitution, which states that “for the enactment of a constitutional act, 3/5 of all deputies must agree, and 3/5 of senators present”, changing the constitution is a more difficult procedure than changing an ordinary statute, making it an entrenched constitution in the typology of constitutions. Despite the tradition of entrenched constitutions throughout Czech history, some voiced the opinion, during the preparation of the Constitution of the Czech Republic, that this one should be flexible.

So to produce such an effect, if there are laws that would prohibit bans on end-to-end encryption, say, those laws would need to be constitutional law or similar in an EU member state where such a law has a higher-than-ordinary bar to change.

linux phone

I know that given this community, a lot of people are going to be on a Linux phone already.

But there are some very real drawbacks to Linux phones in 2025. It won’t be a practical replacement for most people.

• The hardware is not remotely-competitive with high-end hardware that Android can run on.

• Everything I’ve seen has suggested that power usage isn’t as good, probably because Android has had shit-tons of engineers working on cutting power usage for many years.

• Some of the reason that I’d want to use a phone in the first place is for access to the Android app ecosystem. Like, that one app that your employer or bank insists you use or you want to use to update firmware on some Bluetooth device because the vendor doesn’t support fwupd. Maybe it’s possible to use Waydroid and a Linux machine for some of that; I don’t know about all.

• GNU/Linux has a large software library, but a lot of it is not designed around a touch UI.

• One major benefit of Android is that it does a lot to help eliminate a couple things that the general population has had trouble with. The harm from installing malware is mitigated by more-or-less isolating apps. A lot of users just don’t understand the concept of managing memory usage; Android just suspends apps transparently. A lot of users apparently don’t have a great understanding of a filesystem, and the Android app ecosystem tends to hide the filesystem.

And you may not care for your own use, but without scale, it’s hard to get support from hardware vendors and such.

That being said, I remember 25 years back or so when Linux was “never going to be a real server OS”, when it was never going to have games, when it was never going to make it big in the embedded world, and so forth. It often took time, but it inexorably showed up. And the kernel, at least, made it big on smartphones. GNU/Linux can be pretty hard to stop in new markets. But…it can also take a while to get there.

That’s actually a really interesting question.

I understand that Apple takes issue with packages that can themselves “take packages”. But historically, I don’t believe that Google has. Of course, Google also hasn’t done the registration thing historically, either.

I don’t see why it would need to be affected.

The constraint to require a valid signing isn’t something imposed by the license on the Android code. If you want to distribute a version of Android that doesn’t check for a registered signature, that should work fine.

I mean, the Graphene guys could impose that constraint. But they don’t have to do so.

I think that there’s a larger issue of practicality, though. Stuff like F-Droid works in part because you don’t need to install an alternative firmware on your phone — it’s not hard to install an alternate app store with the stock firmware. If suddenly using a package from a developer that isn’t registered with Google requires installing an alternate firmware, that’s going to severely limit the potential userbase for that package.

Even if you can handle installing the alternate firmware, a lot of developers probably just aren’t going to bother trying to develop software without being registered.

Hah! In a world where everyone’s hot topic is heavyweight, highly-parallel-compute chips, there’s a lightweight, serial-compute chipmaker making the news.

The Czechs got upset at EU-level efforts on gun control — Czechia has permissive firearm law — and passed an amendment to Czechia’s constitution in 2021 guaranteeing certain firearm rights in Czechia. If the EU passed a directive that conflicted with it after that point without getting Czechs to approve an amendment to their constitution, Czechia would immediately begin violating the directive, which raises the stakes for people who wanted additional restrictions EU-wide.

One imagines that the same tactic could be used in other areas; if one or more EU members prohibited restrictions on end-to-end encryption or the like, it’d create a legal bar that would first need to be undone to create a restriction EU-wide.

That being said, if this sort of hardball tactic gets done too frequently, it’d make it really difficult to legislate at the EU level, because you’d have one state or another creating legal landmines all over.

And any other individual member could still impose their own state-level restrictions on end-to-end encryption in such a scenario — it’d only create an impediment to EU-wide restrictions.

I wouldn’t put it entirely outside the realm of possibility, but I think that that’s probably unlikely.

The entire US only has about 161 million people working at the moment. In order for a 97 million shift to happen, you’d have to manage to transition most human-done work in the US to machines, using one particular technology, in 10 years.

Is that technically possible? I mean, theoretically.

I’m pretty sure that to do something like that, you’d need AGI. Then you’d need to build systems that leveraged it. Then you’d need to get it deployed.

What we have today is most-certainly not AGI. And I suspect that we’re still some ways from developing AGI. So we aren’t even at Step 1 on that three-part process, and I would not at all be surprised if AGI is a gradual development process, rather than a “Eureka” moment.

I’m not familiar with the software situation there, but on the hardware side, if you don’t mind permanently disabling it, you can probably just open it up, find the LED, and snip the lead that runs to it. Or, if you don’t mind soldering, swapping in LEDs is possible. I once swapped an infrared LED in on a trackball that used a translucent ball and a red LED when I used the thing in a dark room.

I haven’t been using instant messaging programs much for some years, but checking https://old.reddit.com/r/xmpp/ I see:

https://www.glukhov.org/post/2025/09/xmpp-jabber-userbase-and-popularity/

This has an estimate of 13–20 million users globally for 2023, but warns that because many servers don’t publish information about their userbase, there’s necessarily uncertainty. According to it, Germany is the country with the largest userbase, followed by Russia, followed by the US.

jabber.org is a major server.

https://jabberworld.info/servers/