by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Sunday January 24, 2021 @01:41PM (#60985990)
This is dead-seriously my experience with the modern Internet as of 2021:
I keep hearing and seeing paid shills insisting on obvious lies such as "Microsoft/Mozilla cares about your privacy". This insanity has got to stop. They don't. Not one bit. Google is not unique. Their so-called "browsers" (actually spyware) are just as user-disrespecting and privacy-raping, and Microsoft doesn't even make their own engine anymore, having turned Edge into yet another Chrome skin. They just phone home all your data and keystrokes to slightly different initial entities, but this is ultimately sold off to the same giants, in turn owned by those behind Google and every other major corporation.
Have you noticed how insanely unhelpful error messages have become in recent years? It seems to be a disgusting new practice to actively and consciously make every error message as useless as possible, frequently downright lying, and to only show these at the very last step, to maximize the amount of time and energy you steal from the person trying to register. The excuse given (if any) is to "stop bots", but since I'm not a bot yet keep getting these BS messages everywhere, they clearly very much affect humans trying to use these trashy services. It's beyond insulting to get some worthless gibberish about "username is already taken" when the real "error" is "you are not using your home connection directly so that we can track you uniquely and know you by name and address and see exactly which pages you load from us even if you filled in zero personal information".
My ancient Hotmail e-mail account, created in the late 1990s and mostly kept around for nostalgic reasons, has not allowed me to log into it for ages. It's frozen at the "verify with phone" screen, which is impossible to get past. The account was like 15 years old when they suddenly decided they need to "verify" it "for my protection", forever locking me out from it.
I was told to use Telegram, so I went to their site, surprisingly found an actual desktop application, downloaded and ran it... only to be immediately told to "enter my phone number". No "dismiss" or "skip" button. Next course of action? Uninstall.
PayPal are literally thieves. I had a very old account, with "Premium" (I believe that's what they called it) status even, which they one day locked me out of. No explanation. No responses whatsoever to my questions about what they were doing or why. Total, utter silence. They kept all of the money in the account and I could never again use it in any way. (To add insult to injury, they have kept sending me regular automated spam e-mails ever since.) Years later, when I tried to buy some software which happened to use PayPal as their card payment processor (that is, not their normal accounts), I was denied by their system because they had permanently banned my Visa card as well from ever making any transactions through their system...
I now regularly get a nag window on Insult Exchange saying: "Are you a human being? [...] Check the CAPTCHA box, and we'll be out of your way."... But there is no "CAPTCHA box", or any kind of form element anywhere for me to click/submit. Just an empty void. I wish I were making this madness up...
I tried numerous times to create an account on Plenty of Fish (dating site). Every single time, no matter what information I inputted into the registration form, it would give fake error messages about how the "username is already taken" (even when trying impossible, ridiculous ones full of random alphanumeric characters).
I heard of this Mastodon decentralized network. Then I read this on their website: "We only list servers that are committed to active moderation against racism, sexism and transphobia." It never ceases to baffle me how the few "decentralized" services that exist all seem to explicitly demand the exact same kind of tyranny which was the purpose of decentralizing in the first place...
Want to contact any random company these days? Expect an e-mail address on their site? Hah! What a joke! You will only be allowed the privilege of e-mailing them if you send all your data to Google (reCAPTCHA). And most force you to use their awful, broken form on top of that, with an absurdly low limit on the number of characters you can type. (Not that they ever read what I ask/tell them anyway...)
More and more companies/services are starting to force this vile, idiotic concept of "two-factor authentication", as always using "security" as a bullshit excuse to track you and prevent any kind of privacy. It actually does nothing but remove security and puts you at far worse risk, and its actual purpose is for them to get your surveillance unit number, be able to lock anyone who values their privacy out, and force you to not only own a surveillance unit in the first place (yeah, you try buying a "burner phone/SIM card" anonymously these days...) but also to constantly keep it around and ready just to be able to log in. Having the actual password to "your" account means nothing anymore in this new world of absolute stupidity and constant lies.
When logging into GitHub one day (2019), after discovering that my issues all returned "404 Not found" errors, and after being forced to enter a code sent via e-mail: "Your account has been flagged. Because of that, your profile is hidden from the public." When you see that message, nobody will ever hear or see you on that site ever again...
The conclusion? The Internet, and computers as we know them, are over. I see no signs pointing to a brighter future.
The Internet has stopped being useful. (Score:0)
This is dead-seriously my experience with the modern Internet as of 2021:
I keep hearing and seeing paid shills insisting on obvious lies such as "Microsoft/Mozilla cares about your privacy". This insanity has got to stop. They don't. Not one bit. Google is not unique. Their so-called "browsers" (actually spyware) are just as user-disrespecting and privacy-raping, and Microsoft doesn't even make their own engine anymore, having turned Edge into yet another Chrome skin. They just phone home all your data and keystrokes to slightly different initial entities, but this is ultimately sold off to the same giants, in turn owned by those behind Google and every other major corporation.
Have you noticed how insanely unhelpful error messages have become in recent years? It seems to be a disgusting new practice to actively and consciously make every error message as useless as possible, frequently downright lying, and to only show these at the very last step, to maximize the amount of time and energy you steal from the person trying to register. The excuse given (if any) is to "stop bots", but since I'm not a bot yet keep getting these BS messages everywhere, they clearly very much affect humans trying to use these trashy services. It's beyond insulting to get some worthless gibberish about "username is already taken" when the real "error" is "you are not using your home connection directly so that we can track you uniquely and know you by name and address and see exactly which pages you load from us even if you filled in zero personal information".
My ancient Hotmail e-mail account, created in the late 1990s and mostly kept around for nostalgic reasons, has not allowed me to log into it for ages. It's frozen at the "verify with phone" screen, which is impossible to get past. The account was like 15 years old when they suddenly decided they need to "verify" it "for my protection", forever locking me out from it.
I was told to use Telegram, so I went to their site, surprisingly found an actual desktop application, downloaded and ran it... only to be immediately told to "enter my phone number". No "dismiss" or "skip" button. Next course of action? Uninstall.
PayPal are literally thieves. I had a very old account, with "Premium" (I believe that's what they called it) status even, which they one day locked me out of. No explanation. No responses whatsoever to my questions about what they were doing or why. Total, utter silence. They kept all of the money in the account and I could never again use it in any way. (To add insult to injury, they have kept sending me regular automated spam e-mails ever since.) Years later, when I tried to buy some software which happened to use PayPal as their card payment processor (that is, not their normal accounts), I was denied by their system because they had permanently banned my Visa card as well from ever making any transactions through their system...
I now regularly get a nag window on Insult Exchange saying: "Are you a human being? [...] Check the CAPTCHA box, and we'll be out of your way." ... But there is no "CAPTCHA box", or any kind of form element anywhere for me to click/submit. Just an empty void. I wish I were making this madness up...
I tried numerous times to create an account on Plenty of Fish (dating site). Every single time, no matter what information I inputted into the registration form, it would give fake error messages about how the "username is already taken" (even when trying impossible, ridiculous ones full of random alphanumeric characters).
I heard of this Mastodon decentralized network. Then I read this on their website: "We only list servers that are committed to active moderation against racism, sexism and transphobia." It never ceases to baffle me how the few "decentralized" services that exist all seem to explicitly demand the exact same kind of tyranny which was the purpose of decentralizing in the first place...
Want to contact any random company these days? Expect an e-mail address on their site? Hah! What a joke! You will only be allowed the privilege of e-mailing them if you send all your data to Google (reCAPTCHA). And most force you to use their awful, broken form on top of that, with an absurdly low limit on the number of characters you can type. (Not that they ever read what I ask/tell them anyway...)
More and more companies/services are starting to force this vile, idiotic concept of "two-factor authentication", as always using "security" as a bullshit excuse to track you and prevent any kind of privacy. It actually does nothing but remove security and puts you at far worse risk, and its actual purpose is for them to get your surveillance unit number, be able to lock anyone who values their privacy out, and force you to not only own a surveillance unit in the first place (yeah, you try buying a "burner phone/SIM card" anonymously these days...) but also to constantly keep it around and ready just to be able to log in. Having the actual password to "your" account means nothing anymore in this new world of absolute stupidity and constant lies.
When logging into GitHub one day (2019), after discovering that my issues all returned "404 Not found" errors, and after being forced to enter a code sent via e-mail: "Your account has been flagged. Because of that, your profile is hidden from the public." When you see that message, nobody will ever hear or see you on that site ever again...
The conclusion? The Internet, and computers as we know them, are over. I see no signs pointing to a brighter future.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
^ Serial killer.