r00ty

OK guys, guess it's time to upgrade to Windows 8. I bet it'll be great!

I have a better idea. Let's drop climate conservation, use a load of fossil fuels to fire him in a rocket directly into the sun! Then, resume climate conservation.

I think this is one of the things that ech is meant to solve. But ech/esni is still not widespread on smaller sites yet I think.

But you can see the ip address, which will id the bank. They can derive other information by ip addresses or leaked data and there's still things using unencrypted connections even today. I generally just connect to my home vpn so at least it's inly my isp spying on me.

Well, I would say bittorrent with a good vpn or, usenet with a good indexer and depending on how much you download, block account vs monthly.

Personally I top up all my block accounts whenever I see a sale. With priority set from cheapest per gig to most expensive (so the pricey ones are only used as fillers).

But that does involve paying some money, but then doesn't really require a vpn. In the long term I don't think I'm paying that much though.

On public WiFi I just vpn into my home network. The issue with public WiFi is that it can be sniffed by anyone in range since there is generally no encryption.

Although pretty much everything we do is over tls these days, and DoH helps protect against even dns sniffing. There's still at least some risk to working in the clear over a public WiFi network. At least in information gathering, what bank you use, etc.

But, there's no real benefit in using a paid vpn over one you own unless you're downloading illegal content, want to watch another Netflix region, or are in a country with heavy Internet monitoring/filtering.

AOL did, and the others that were easy (compuserve etc) provided their own limited interface to a curated Internet.

Most providers (at least here in the UK) that provided actual tcpip did so using slip and a login screen. Which generally needed a script to login and then chain on slip to connect it to the local stack.

It wasn't until 1998 or 1999 there was widespread use of ppp and the windows 98 dial up networking could get you straight in. Then in the UK we had services like freeserve which provided simple ways to connect.

Well. I think it might be worth checking again what I wrote. I was quite clear in that I said there's a not lot to like, not that there's nothing to like. If I didn't get anything from the modern internet, I'd not be here posting these comments.

I'd like to pull you up on the point about free e-books. Project Gutenburg was in its second decade by the time most home users got online. So that's hardly a contemporary internet exclusive, it's almost as old as the internet itself. Also, communication about weird hobbies is certainly not unique to the contemporary internet. We just did it on open services not controlled by corporate entities. Corporates that only run the service in order to sell your data.

As for a few of the things I don't like? Well. Ads everywhere (including those containing malware), constant hacking attempts for anyone running a server (ssh/sip/www very commonly hit with some protocols getting 100+ hits per second), AI crawlers scooping up the whole internet without any care about how they impact transit fees or user experience, licensed purchases (streaming services, games, etc that can be taken away at a moments notice with zero recourse for the user), terrible user agreements for EVERYTHING especially regarding privacy with no way to reject since ALL companies offering similar services have the same damned agreements, subscriptions on everything everywhere and increasingly so, having to click to reject cookies everywhere and knowing they're still building a profile about me whether I like it or not just in order to throw more adverts my way.

I loved the old BBS community. I used to run an Amiga based BBS (also on Fidonet, I would say my node number, but it can still be looked up today, and we used real names so...). One day I had a drive failure and lost pretty much everything. No problem, said another Amiga BBS operator in my city. Bring your new HDD over and we'll copy over my downloads folder.

I feel the same about the early (home) internet (years 1994-1999). Adverts if they even existed on a page were just a few lame gifs on a page. IRC and usenet were the "social media" of the time, except no-one called it that. Almost everyone online was as much of a geek as you (except AOL users), because the hoops to get online were significant enough to keep most normal people away. Businesses were convinced it was a fad, so didn't get too involved.

It was basically universities, students and a handful of modem owners that could get a TCP/IP stack to work and write a login script (ppp was quite rare in the beginning).

Rose-tinted glasses? Maybe, but there's a lot not to like about the modern internet.

No, you just stop telling everyone else about it.

Technically, no. The last few have been significantly below either measure of inflation. So in real terms, I've had a wage cut!