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The Internet Is Kind of a Predatory Cesspit Now (www.stephendiehl.com)
submitted 1 month ago* by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 23 points 1 month ago* (4 children)

Now?

I remember using netgroups and UUCP in the early 90's to piece together files from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica

Back then there were fewer financially/data-predatory websites, mostly because we didn't have payment methods on the Internet yet (we were just getting websites as opposed to news and gopher), and it wasn't yet practical for companies to scrape your data.

So instead we were inundated with viruses. Like every few weeks, somehow, a virus would eat your frickin' files. It was more simply malicious, not even greedy. Not going to try and argue which is worse.

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  • [–] 30 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    I also used gopher, usenet, uucp, archie and all that in the early '90s. And if you were just a little bit careful, catching a virus or trojan was very rare.

    Now, everything is monetized. You're under constant surveillance on a scale it was unimaginable at that time, and being careful amounts to nothing (unless you're super paranoid) because your security depends completely on how others secure your data, assuming that they're trying to secure and not sell it.

    In this respect, now it's much, much worse than it was, even if in some other ways it's somewhat better.

    Peak internet was around 2005-2010, IMHO.

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  • [–] -3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Getting drive-by zero click malware from an Adobe Flash / ActiveX embed banner ad, or JavaScript / CSS vulnerability, had nothing to do with how careful you were. You just randomly got viruses from your computer existing with an Ethernet cable connected. Antivirus were also pretty useless.

    If you never got one, you were either extremely lucky, or just didn't notice and it was sneaky spyware

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Those came later (late '90s-early '00s), and ran mostly on Windows; believe it or not, at that time there were people that used Linux or Mac (I dual booted, Wintendo for games, everything else on Linux).

    And most malware came from shady sites. Again, if you were careful, you rarely got it (rarely, not never). If you were not careful, well, it usually was obvious because even if your Windows was not infected with a virus or trojan, your browser would be full of toolbars and the PC would run like crap.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 month ago

    We're talking about late 90s to early 2000's in this thread. At the end of your comment you say peak internet was 2005, so I'm getting mixed signals here. What year are we talking about again?

    I'm happy for you that you were gaming on Linux back then, but it absolutely wasn't a mainstream thing. Windows dominated the market share. I knew one person with a Mac. Average users weren't using Linux.

    I really think you're misremembering or blinded by rose tinted glasses, because almost every website had dodgey ads. Banner ads were basically Russian Roulette whether or not you got infected, and almost every site had them. Flash games sites, news sites, random user-hosted websites, yes porn sites, sometimes even MySpace pages, really almost every site was a risk and eventually the dice gave you malware. Unless by "being careful" you mean you stayed on Wikipedia and never actually used a web browser properly, you were getting exposed to these ads eventually.

    Even the original article we're commenting on mentions this, so I'm not sure why we're all pretending that the internet was perfect back then.

    I’m a kid of the 90s, and I still remember the early internet. It was slow, ugly, unreliable, and full of cranks, a strange world of wheezing dial-up modems, Usenet flamewars, <marquee> tags, and dancing babies. [...] None of this was entirely innocent. There were scams, viruses, Nazis, pornography, and chain emails from deposed Nigerian princes.

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