• The internet is no longer useful in 2021

    From plateshutoverlock@21:1/5 to All on Mon May 31 15:51:21 2021
    The dystopian nightmare continues to grow inside the internet and spill out into the physical world.

    - On slashdot, I read this: "Amazon Devices Will Soon Automatically Share Your Internet With Neighbors", forcing users of those devices to "opt-out" if they don't want to be part of this experiment. Aside from the possible prison time this puts
    unsuspecting users of those devices at risk for should illegal material be transmitted, Amazon said "fuck you, oh well, we are going to mess with your stuff". Remember, you only LIE-SENSE those devices you paid for, you don't actually own them.

    Expect every other company under the sun to follow suit, like with every bad idea.

    - It's frightening how much abuse people are willing to take for imaginary price-cuts. Such as OS's that update themselves whether the user wants it or not, and having to spend a fuckton of money to not be abused in this way. Of course, the army of
    useless idiots chant "free market" like the stupified zombies that they are. Until a forced update "bricks" their hardware, then their tune changes very temporarly.

    - Kids are growing up damaged and addled, in huge part because of the modern Internet. They have also reverted back to oogs and ugs (textspeak), and cave paintings (emojis).

    - Adults are increasingly becoming heartless and machine like, with no empathy in large part due to the same.

    - Gaslighting seems to be the brand new trend amongst websites. You click on a link expecting it to be what it says it is. However, something else entirely opens instead. I thought I was fucking up or misclicking somehow, but it is really another tactic
    for companies to trick users into viewing more ads. A form of "cooking the books".

    - And related, the amount of fighting I have to do with websites to just get the tidbit of info I need keeps increasing over time. It often gets to the point I drop the phone or keyboard, say "fuck it", and just give up. User-friendliness is "sooooo
    1990s". Now it's user-hostile that is the aim of all companies (ad revenue comes first, no matter what).

    - The trend amongst major web sites is to remove features that are useful and valuable, and replace them with crap, worthless baubles. The hordes of user protests are of course always ignored.

    Imagine finding your big tool box full of Craftsman tools replaced with Playskool pretend versions. It's very much like that.

    - Ditto for forced software/firmware updates. Imagine if Maytag broke into your house in the middle of the night, and tore out parts from your washing machine, and replaced some of the circuits with useless lights and noisemakers?

    - Forget any semblance of a normal user experience if you are using any 'mobile' device. It's all "GET THE APP!""GET THE APP!" "GET THE FUCKING APP!". And many sites will redirect you, trick you with fake expand buttons, place holder boxes in place of
    text, ad nauseum. Never mind the security risks and extra privacy invasion this introduces, users should be able to use the fucking web browser to browse web content.
    The only work around is to use a browser that lets you spoof the User-Agent string, but expect Javashit to rat you out (which I suspect is already happening).


    - Javashit interferes with normal web operations on mobile _EACH AND EVERY TIME_. Just now, I was trying to copy+paste into a field by long pressing into it, only to have it promptly disappear. "YOINK! No C&P for you!". Expect more and weirder 'bugs' to
    follow as time goes on.

    - It used to be 3D AAA games forced users into a hardware upgrade treadmill. Now it's bloated, disgustingly huge websites that provide no more content and features than HTML/php based sites did 15, 20 years ago. Of course, if you are stuck with an "Obama
    phone", with a measly 2GB data cap, and need to access critical, life saving services, you are SOL.
    'Not that it matters' because a phone like that is "socalism", and as all Americans have been monstered into thinking, will cause us to be under the hammer and sicle and addressing one another as "comrade".

    Even those of us with All American 100% Capitalist phones feel the sting, because every mobile company has (slightly higher) data caps as well.

    - According to the book of Slashdot, expect more invasive advertising in vehicle "infotainment" systems that cannot be disabled, with the cameras used for the drive system being used to scan roadside billboards and "provide more info"

    - Websites are getting bigger and bigger and bigger, loaded up with MEGABYTES of Javashit frameworks, bloating up pages to an extreme size.

    What would've been 20 kilobytes text only, ballooning to maybe 40 kilobytes when HTML formatting is in use, 20 years ago, is now a WHOPPING 5 megabytes or MORE. And the byte size only goes up while actual useful content is actually DECREASING. Add that
    to the increasing number of companies that are implementing data caps, and it's clear this is ripe for abuse by ISPs and websites who are likely in cahoots with each other to profit off of this scheme (in addition to the Javashit ads that are a big
    attack vector for malware).

    - The general web experience has become much more and more combative to the point using the web makes me feel stressed and exhausted.


    - At some point the US joined the EU. Why else are Americans being endlessly haurranged with "This site uses cookies" and "Turning up the volume is bad for your ears" EU nanny state mandated garbage?

    - It's amazing how many applications seem to routinely forget the settings you worked hard to input. If this was one or two shitty, poorly written programs, I'd understand. But for this to be so common nowadays?

    - More and more routine computer programs are becoming dependent on "The Cloud". The real reason is simple and obvious: Total 100% control by companies, and endless data mining "You are the product".

    - Every website wants to spam you with "notifications". Every. Single. Website. (Rant Rampage being one of the very few exceptions). I am to the point now I am ready to look up methods of ripping the notification subsystem out entirely from every Android
    and Windows device I own.

    - I am shocked and horrified that when companies insist on shoving ads through every vector they can find, right down to the _OPERATING SYSTEM ITSELF_ people defend this behavior with "well the companies have every right to make money" and even launch an
    attack on the complainer, accusing him or her of "wanting something for nothing". The fact that most people alive nowadays have been monstered into this kind of thinking scince birth should cause people to vomit out their insides with disgust.

    - Everything is an "app" these days. Every modern computer, every tablet, every phone has a web browser that is 100% percent capable of doing everything these "apps" do and more, but we are expected to fill up our devices' memories with "apps" that are
    nothing more than a stripped down and specifically tailored web browser for the sites that want you to "get the app". But this is not for our convenience (that's just a side effect), but to control content, closing the "disable Javashit right click/long
    press disabler" hole, and add additional telemetry (privacy invasion)

    - Google is the king of the Captcha Cartel. Yes, click on the buses, blue cars, street signs, etc, so they can further enhance their "driverless AI". What a wonderful racket they got going on here- free labor through monstering users who just want to get
    to the content they seek. Of course "iTz fOr tEh sEcUrItY". People will kneel down and suck dick when they are told it's helping to stop terrorism, so why not take advantage of this sheeple mindset? (their thinking)

    - Captchas are everywhere now. If it's not Google making you click on busses and street signs over and over again to train their "driverless AI", it's a bunch of squiggly, hard for a HUMAN to read letters. Often there is no audio version (dyslexics and
    those with poor eyesight are told to piss off at this point), and when there is, there have been numerous complaints from people who tried to use it, but could not decipher what it was saying (using a speech box from an early prototype Speak & Spell?)
    Ironically, AI is getting better at decyphering Captchas than humans!

    - Everything is Javashit these days, offloading the work to the user's device or computer. This gives the benefit to companies of forcing the user to have Javashit enabled to view even text-only content, and thus monster them with abusive overlays,
    notification spam, and every other user hostile experience these companies can dream of. What does the user get out of all this? Slow interfaces, fast draining batteries, wasted metered data, and devices that heat up.

    - Everything needs to be "protected" these days, because every user is seen as a dirty, rotten, filthy content pirate.

    - Recently, Google Groups changed from an interface that was 100% useable on mobile devices. But then they announced that they were "improving" the groups (gulp). I'm sure a lot of you know what "improved" actually means, and feel your heart drop a bit
    into your stomach whenever you hear that word. Predictably, the nags came to "switch to the new groups" which I kept ignoring and ignoring. Of course, the nags came with a little *suggestion box, to make people falsely believe they have any say in this,
    but in reality, anything typed in those boxes gets sent to /dev/null.

    Of course, 'doomsday' came, the change was forced upon everybody, and now what was a clean, fast interface became a total cluster fuck of enlarged text, less useable screen real estate, and of course, everything is much slower. As the icing on this shit
    cake, you now have to use "request desktop site" to actually post anything. And there is the weird jumping around when trying to post through mobile that turns GG into a video game I never wanted to play.

    GG on an actual desktop isn't really much better.

    - * If you believe anybody reads what's posted through "feedback" forms, I have a nice bridge I'd like to sell you cheap...


    - Growing up, I thought the point of computers were to make tasks easier, not to mention computers were not supposed to be able to be impatient. The whole core of computing is automation.
    At some point, that all changed. The amount of clicks required to anything, even the simplest of tasks shot up dramatically over the years. Forget automated scripting of anything, that just makes you a filthy, evil hacker. You are expected to click,
    click, click, click, like a monkey, in order to get your 'treat' (and so they can shove useless garbage into your face while doing so). Time outs have also increased dramatically.

    - It seems epilepsy has been cured in this world, yet somehow I was not informed. The amount of zooming, warping, sparkling, and other useless animated eye candy in even a basic GUI, not to mention the web these days is enough to test the most hardy, non
    seizure prone among us.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)