Way back in the 1990s, I was writing lab software in my spare time, and I was working with a company in California for a while. I was coding exclusively on a Mac, but they mainly did PC stuff, so they bought me a cheap PC just so I could see the software they were developing. I think it was a Dell or something like that, and I set it up at my house. First thing that horrified me was that the computer was covered with stickers. Why? What are you advertising?
Then I tried running the thing, and had to wade through all the crudware that came pre-installed on the computer. Ads popped up. There were all these off-brand applications installed, and they didn’t want me to remove them — just cleaning up all the garbage took me several days before it was functional to run the tech software I had obtained the machine for.
That was 30 years ago. I guess the situation has gotten even worse, if you’re buying the inexpensive mass-market computers. Ed Zitron got one just to see what the average users experience was like. Now we’ve got the internet layered on top of everything.
The picture I am trying to paint is one of terror and abuse. The average person’s experience of using a computer starts with aggressive interference delivered in a shoddy, sludge-like frame, and as the wider internet opens up to said user, already battered by a horrible user experience, they’re immediately thrown into heavily-algorithmic feeds each built to con them, feeding whatever holds their attention and chucking ads in as best they can. As they browse the web, websites like NBCnews.com feature stories from companies like “WorldTrending.com” with advertisements for bizarre toys written in the style of a blog, so intentional in their deceit that the page in question has a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying it’s an ad.
As their clunky, shuddering laptop hitches between every scroll, they go to ESPN.com, and the laptop slows to a crawl. Everything slows to a crawl. “God damnit, why is everything so fucking slow? I’ll just stay on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube. At least that place doesn’t crash half the time or trick me.”
Using the computer in the modern age is so inherently hostile that it pushes us towards corporate authoritarians like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Meta — and now that every single website is so desperate for our email and to show us as many ads as possible, it’s either harmful or difficult for the average person to exist online.
This is our world now — the wealthy have control, and they’ve engineered everything to grow and make more money for themselves, and they’ve wrecked everything they’ve touched. I remember the early 2000s when Google was just a barebones text box that you typed things into and it bounced back with a list. It was clean and easy. But not any more!
The biggest trick that these platforms played wasn’t any one algorithm, but the convenience of a “clean” digital experience — or, at least as clean as they feel it needs to be. In an internet so horribly poisoned by growth capitalism, these platforms show a degree of peace and consistency, even if they’re engineered to manipulate you, even if the experience gets worse seemingly every year, because at least it isn’t as bad as the rest of the internet. We use Gmail because, well, at least it’s not Outlook. We use YouTube to view videos from other websites because other websites are far more prone to crash, have quality issues, or simply don’t work on mobile. We use Google Search, despite the fact that it barely works anymore, to find things because actually browsing the web fucking sucks.
The algorithm was never for you, the user. It didn’t make your interactions with the internet easier or better, it made it easier for companies, both legitimate and criminal, to sell you stuff. That has become the primary purpose of computers and the internet. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to even imagine using a computer for anything beyond convenient shopping…although it is becoming increasingly inconvenient as all the garbage piles up. One of the best examples of a growing obstacle to using the internet is all the “AI” trash being inserted.
The onslaught of AI-generated content — facilitated, in no small part, by Google and Microsoft — has polluted our information ecosystems. AI-generated images and machine-generated text is everywhere, and it’s impossible to avoid, as there is no reliable way to determine the provenance of a piece of content — with one exception, namely the considered scrutiny of a human. This has irreparably damaged the internet in ways I believe few fully understand. This stuff — websites that state falsehoods because an AI hallucinated, or fake pictures of mushrooms and dogs that now dominate Google Images — is not going away. Like microplastics or PFAS chemicals, they’re with us forever, constantly chipping away at our understanding of reality.
These companies unleashed generative AI on the world — or, in the case of Microsoft, facilitated its ascendency — without any consideration of what that would mean for the Internet as an ecosystem. Their concerns were purely short-term. Fiscal. The result? Over-leverage in an industry that has no real path to profitability, burning billions of dollars and the environment – both digital and otherwise – along with it.
Do you need AI? Do we really want some weird capitalist-created interface in front of everything that babbles and confabulates and tells us even more lies? Again, this isn’t something added for our benefit — we have to ask who profits from these layers of new crap tossed unto our computers. I don’t think it’s the users. We really don’t need ChatGPT for anything, and it literally makes everything worse.
Ed Zitron names names.
- Sam Altman is a con artist, a liar, and a sleazy carnival barker who would burn our planet to the ground, steal from millions of people and burn billions of dollars in pursuit of power, and I believe the same can be said of people like Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft.
- Tim Cook is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, slowly allowing the rot to seep into Apple’s products, slowly adding bothersome subscription products and useless AI features to chip away at the user experience. Apple’s app store and its repeated support of exploitative microtransaction-laden mobile games built to create gambling-like addiction in adults and children alike, making it billions of dollars a year. Because Apple’s products are less shitty, it gets a much easier time.
- Sundar Pichai is the Henry Kissinger of technology — a glossy executive that escapes blame despite having caused harm on a global scale. The destruction of Google Search at the hands of Sundar Pichai and Prabhakar Raghavan should be written about like a war crime, and those responsible treated as such.
- Satya Nadella has aggressively expanded Microsoft’s various monopolies, the most egregious of which is the Microsoft 365 suite — a monopoly over business software that everybody kind of hates that Microsoft prices to undercut the competition, effectively setting the conditions of most business software as either “cheaper than Microsoft” or “slightly better than Microsoft.” Nadella has overseen layoffs of tens of thousands of people in the last three years alone, and despite his bullshit “growth mindset” culture treats his employees and customers as equally disposable.
- Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul that has overseen the growth and proliferation of some of the single-most abusive and manipulative software in the world. Meta has grown to a market cap of $1.5 trillion dollars by intentionally making the experience on Instagram and Facebook worse, intentionally frustrating and harming billions of people.
I’m willing to call these people crooks and corrupters, profiteers and parasites. They are getting rich off of our growing inconveniences. We really need to fight back somehow, and tell these people we don’t want ChatGPT or whatever pointless energy-sucking leech they want to attach to us. Unfortunately they’ve got all the money and power and have monopolized everything.
Computers and phones are Orwell’s telescreens.
To add to the skullduggery:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/meta-ends-fact-checks-as-it-prepares-for-trump-era/ar-AA1x6JBD?
That certainly should be easy to achieve. Microsoft is famous for screwing up even the basic things.
A New Year’s gift from Microsoft: Surprise, your scanners don’t work
New year, new Windows 11 24H2 bug to add to the list: 13 and counting
And on the day Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content hits the headlines too.
I listened to his two-part righteous rant last week on Better Offline and have since recommended it to others. I also recommend Paris Marx’s Data Vampires series.
I like that Zitron doesn’t accept sneering claims that some people are somehow above these harms. The public is being extracted from and abused by powerful corporations and people, and it commonly leads to a sense of powerlessness – people are dissatisfied with and even enraged by how tech treats them and harms society but have an increasingly difficult time imagining what a different system could look like or how we could get there. That’s exactly what these companies want.
You’re right – we should absolutely think of this as a political struggle, or part of a larger political struggle. The tech oligarchy’s willing capitulation to or open support of Trumpist fascism is clarifying. Much of the media is acquiescing to or actively promoting their bullshit propaganda, but everyone else needs to call their pronouncements and projects out for what they are: means of advancing and entrenching their class and corporate interests.
dbinmn @ #1, someone was saying on Bluesky that for any products labeled as “smart” – phones, watches, appliances, etc. – we should replace “smart” with “surveillance.”
I never shopped a lot online and over the years, it has been less and less.
I don’t mind going to real stores in the local area, most of which aren’t Big Box stores like Home Depot or Walmart.
.1. Mostly these days Amazon.com’s prices are usually higher than retail shopping. Without even factoring in paying for shipping.
.2. I’m done with Amazon anyway.
Last week I ordered some stuff that I can’t easily get locally and wanted soon. At checkout, Amazon insisted on bundling in a “Free Trial” to Amazon Prime for 30 days. There was no way to decline it.
They were forcing me to be in Amazon Prime, whether I wanted to or not!
It’s not free Amazon Prime. After 30 days they will charge me $14.95 a month or some such amount forever. Unless I can figure out how to cancel it in time.
The hope here is that I’m dumb, drugged or drunk a lot, or old and senile and will forget to cancel in time.
It’s not a bad bet.
In my Boomer cohort circle, two of my friends have age related neurological problems and would undoubtedly fail to cancel. They forget a lot of things these days.
That was it for Amazon. Bye bye.
This is just plain old predatory and unethical business practices and I’m not going to play their game any more.
PZ’s experience is important for people to know. However, there are causes below the stickers and pre-installed crapware! He was given (and many get) a crapitallist corporate computer. windows, android, chrome are all junk filled with spyware and often marginally functional. They are increasingly iron boxes (as is apple for the most part) that don’t allow for the (was owner, now renter) to tinker with or improve or customize to make more useful for the (was user, now victim).
In responsible tech journals, there are more and more horror stories about the increase of 1)spyware, 2)win11 nightmares, 3)lack of substantive info on social media 4)the bungled waste of electricity that is AI 5)the coming disaster from killing net neutrality, etc.
We love puppies, penguins and practical antiquated tech. We are safely and efficiently on the internet using a 12 year old rebuilt dell from the landfill with no hard-drive and puppy linux. (total cost $60 for a used keyboard, mouse and monitor)
Social media is a brain worm that is infecting the sheople with mis/dis-information at an alarming rate and they don’t even think about it.
I’ve avoided this on the PC front for the last 20 odd years. I replace my computer on average every five to six years. The first thing I do is wipe the hard drive and install Linux (for the last 10 years, Linux Mint). Faster. More reliable. No malware (so far). I’ve found open source substitutes for all the Windows software I used to use, in most cases better. Every time I plug in a new device it just works. Best of all, no Microsoft tax.
Granted, there’s a learning curve but it’s not that steep. Say, on a par with upgrading (?) from Windows 10 to Windows 11. And if there’s software that that you absolutely, positively have to use from Windows, virtual machines are easy to install and use.
Phones? Android from one of the less well-known companies. At least you avoid most of the bloatware. It helps to create a new gmail account that you don’t use for anything that you don’t want to share with Google. FWIW my last two phones have been rugged devices from Ulefone. I’ll stick with that brand for the time being.
This has been already mentioned several times above.
It’s the first headline in my news feed this morning.
Facebook and Zuckerberg are evil.
I’ve been off Facebook for a decade or so.
I never found it interesting or useful. More or less none of my Boomer friends, family, or colleagues are even on Facebook and never were.
Facebook is also a predatory unethical company. They never hide that you are their actual product. They want to vacuum up all your personal information and sell it as many times as they can.
What Zuckerberg is doing is copying Musk’s X.
Which has lost a significant fraction of its user base already.
Not smart.
@7 raven pointed out the increasingly coercive, dishonest behavior of the corrupt, crapitallist mega-corporations. Thinking people are seeing more and more dishonesty: healthcare insurance kills, industrial food is killing us, the main slime media is not reporting on the looming danger of covid increasing or rfkJr’s ignorance that will likely kill thousands (bird flu without any vaccine, anyone?). Hold onto your hats, we’re facing a dangerous ride.
yes, I’m going to say it: Welcome to the New Dark Ages</>
I think the term I’d use is “active embrace”. They are very, very upset that the FTC under Lina Khan has rediscovered the concept of antitrust enforcement, plus the crypto lobby (which outspent both Wall St and big pharma in the election) is furious about the SEC, the FDIC, and the CFPB. They don’t give a shit about anything else. Maybe some more tax breaks would be nice, but the primary goal here is to turn the US Government into a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Big Tech complex monopoly. They see Trump as a tool to do that.
This is a problem I’ve been working on… https://wooz.dev/Software_Uprising
Even if you remember, they’ve made sure to make cancelling Amazon Prime as difficult as they could get away with, to the point the the EU took enforcement action to force them to simplify it.
Dunc @ #12, and so far they’ve managed to convince many people that hamstringing or outright destroying those agencies is populist and empowering. So many lies.
raven @ #10 and Dunc @ #14, I add the day before the 30 days are up to my calendar so I get a reminder to cancel before the time is up, but even then it can be confusing. I’ve warned people to make sure they’ve completed the process and received a notification that it’s been canceled, because they make it look like you’ve canceled it when in fact you still have to like scroll down in another screen and click on a small non-default button to finalize it, IIRC.
I’ve never had all those horrible experiences, probably because I’ve never been lured into “social media” except for blogs, principally FreethoughtBlogs and ScienceBlogs before that, but others as well. Far from leading me astray with ads that try to trick me, these blogs have helped me to refine my critical thinking skills (far too late in life, though). Maybe I’m just lucky.
I avoid Apple products because of the vendor lock-in anti-pattern. My only home computer is a laptop on which I usually run Windows 10; although I can also boot up Ubuntu Linux on which I can mount the Windows filesystem (but read-only). My VPS, which I rent from a company in England, runs Debian Linux; and I can SFTP files between that and the Windows partition on my home box.
As for the AI-generated text that has recently been showing up in Google search results, I have occasionally found it useful; but I wouldn’t trust it on any subject that’s controversial.
The last president to deregulate the banks and financial industry was George W. Bush.
It was a complete and total disaster!!!
George Bush ended up being regarded as a major failure.
The Great Recession of 2008. Remember.
A huge number of banks and Wall Street firms went bankrupt in a hurry.
Lehman brothers, Washington Mutual, AIG, etc..
The US government spent trillions of dollars bailing out the banks and Wall Street to keep the Great Recession from becoming the Second Great Depression.
More or less no one went to prison although many should have.
You can count on the banks, Wall Street, and the financial industry to implode and wreck themselves if they can. Whenever that happens, many lose a lot of money while a few make a huge amount of money.
It cost me and millions of others a lot. Our 401(k)s just died.
They were resurrected by Obama, much to my surprise. Thanks Obama.
There is a good reason why our financial markets are heavily regulated by the SEC, FDIC, Federal Reserve Bank, etc..
Without that regulation, the financial markets always end up failing.
Hmmm. I use Linux Mint, Thunderbird and Firefox mostly. I avoid social Media. Just don’t go commercial.
Yeah, we had a PC laptop recently that I instantly wiped to replace Windows with Linux. I don’t understand how anyone can live with Windows, but OK, they can suffer with it if they want.
Apple is obnoxiously anti-third-party software and insists on total control of the Apple store, but I can live with it since their products do operate smoothly so far, and I’m well past the age where I want to tinker. In my youth I had an Apple II that I happily ripped open and took a soldering iron to the motherboard, but no, no time for that anymore.
I had a Mac once; and I agree that the GUI is much better than Windows’; but Windows 10 is still OK for reading blogs and e-mail, doing Google searches, and looking at YouTube videos. Anything else I generally do from a command prompt (like a shell in Linux but not as powerful).
When I write C++ code, I compile and test it on both Windows and Linux to make sure it’s portable.
Funny, “how does anybody put up with this?” was exactly my thought the last time I tried to use a Mac… It’s basically just a question of what you’re used to. I work in Windows-land (what can I say, I quite like money), have done for over 30 years, so I know it and its foibles inside out and back to front, and I know how to get it set up more or less how I like it, or at least am used to. Like you I’m basically past wanting to tinker, and I’ve already forgotten more about Windows than I am ever likely to know about any other OS… I do have a Linux machine kicking around, but my current main non-work machine in an ex-work Surface Pro 3, which is still a pretty handy little thing and does most of what I need it to do, but last I looked, getting Linux running on that might not be entirely straightforward.
But neepery aside, the important thing in all of this is that you should not have to be a geek in order to have a passable computing experience. Most people just want to buy an appliance that works for them, out of the box, with as little setup required as humanly possible. They don’t even want to know what an OS is. “Mac, Windows, or Linux?” is not a choice they want to be faced with.
it’s either harmful or difficult for the average person to exist online.
I know I can control the thigs they present by what I click on. For instance, I clicked on a few baby boomer articles like 10 things baby boomers did that are banned. Then every other article I got on my random feeds were baby boomer related. I have found the will to not click on anything baby boomer and after several weeks, things have slowed down. If my wife shops for something online (bras) then I start getting ads for them on my desktop, laptop and phone. And the other way around, if I shop, my gets the same ads. I consider myself semi-savvy with surfing the net, but the poor bloke who isn’t is in deep doo-doo.
I’m likely going to need a new computer in the near future. I’m pondering getting Linux instruction from my brother if the crap’s piling up this much.
My resolution for 2025 is to respond to anyone who asks me for my Facebook contact with the same expression I’d reserve for someone asking me to lick the floor of a public bathroom.
And I will look more aggressively into ways to make myself more independent from Google.
I have a gaming laptop with Windows because I wanted videogames to “just work”, but then they actually don’t, framerate keeps dropping so might as well go back to Linux for that too, perhaps Elementary OS.
Like, I live a blissfully ad-free online life, the only thing ever serving me LLM junk is Pinterest and anything else should just be a call to have more in-person social contact.
I understand that everyone is in a different place and has different resources, but to the extent possibly I highly recommend getting away as much as possible from all this controlling, exploitative bullshit, it’s good for the soul.
OH, raven, look at the wonderful ‘content’ you will get for ‘free’:
Amazon Prime viewers will get a full length documentary celebrating Melania Trump!
Melania-BW
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/7/2295523/-Amazon-Prime-viewers-will-get-a-full-length-documentary-celebrating-Melania-Trump/
(can I get any more sarcastic than that? Seriously, raven, I’m sorry you got trapped in that amazon cesspool)
The phishing emails are getting scary, one must be super attentive to their content, example below. Anyone who gets this email has an instantaneous urge to respond. On any emails that are not from a known source, I always wait hours and read the email 2 or 3 times before making a decision.
Overpayment Refund Notification
Issued: January 1, 2025
Dear User,
Our records indicate that during a recent review of transactions from the past fiscal year, we identified an overpayment made on your account. This overpayment has been flagged for immediate refund processing.
To proceed with the refund and review the detailed statement associated with your account, we require you to download and confirm the attached summary document. This document outlines the overpayment details and instructions for securing your refund.
Click the secure link below to access your refund statement:
View Refund Statement
Please note that action is required within 48 hours to avoid delays in processing your refund.
PS, notice this email was sent right after the big online shopping season when most people can’t keep track of what the hell the bought. The internet is a dangerous place. I have bogus YAHOO and Gmail accounts where most of the spam goes, only give out my private email to people and companies that I feel I can trust. Well, companies you can’t trust but sometimes you have to provide an email.
Yes, I remember. Bill Clinton is not entirely blameless. He is the one who signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999. Glass-Steagall was regulation that kept commercial banking and investment banking separate. I.e. it would have kept the banks from doing to themselves the things that led to 2008.
However, Bush did embrace and accelerate deregulation. I like to remind people the George W. Bush was so bad that Barack Obama was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize just for not being George W. Bush.
Microsoft declares 2025 ‘the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh’
Microsoft, a software company, wants you to shell out money for a new PC. Why? So they can sell you a software upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11. And also, you should make sure the hardware is good enough to run the AI crapware they also intend to sell you.
And now all these rich assholes have a new recreational drug of choice:
https://www.vox.com/culture/393248/aaron-rodgers-nfl-ayahusca-industry-bravo-queer?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Yet another way for already-pretending-to-be-Enlightened idiots to pretend to be even more Enlightened.
SC@6,
I’ve been substituting “spy” (rather than “surveillance”) for “smart” for some time!
“I don’t understand how anyone can live with Windows, but OK, they can suffer with it if they want.”
A computer is a computer, an operating system is an operating system, applications are applications.
Simple, really. Learn and adapt.
This whole thing seems to me an old man’s rant about how things were so much simpler back when, and how this newfangled technology is frustrating and hard to use.
But what next.
Build a better search (or social media site)? Pay AWS/Google/MS to host and need VC funding to operate at any level of scale
Contribute to open source ? watch all successful products get included as part of AWS’s offering
Become them to beat them ? (Matt Mullenweg , WordPress, all the open source orgs that flipped to commercial licenses)
and so on.
Read Ed Zitron/Molly White/Pluralistic/Pivot to Ai/ludic.matarpoa.blog/Blood in the machine/Paris Marx/ : Blood pressure go up(to the moon!)
I lament the loss of RSS – it may have been able to pervent from search becoming the dominant force it became
@#34: What loss of RSS? It’s still there, i read most of the blogs you’ve just mentioned through it.
Seriously, John! Saying there’s no important difference between computers, OSs or apps is taking contrarianism to ridiculous extremes. And insisting that we, the customers, should just accept and adapt to the immoral rent-seeking gougings of tech megaliths is even sillier.
The worst thing you implied, though, was that complaining about decline is just old people ranting. I was around when Google entered the world and it was much better to use then than it is now, not because I am unwilling to learn as technology changes, but because the changes Google made were driven solely to maximise ad revenue rather than improve user experience, even to the point of distorting search results…which undermines the core purpose of search engines. The word “enshittification” to describe the decay of online platforms for profit-seeking was invented by Cory Doctorow, who is younger than I am, and embraced by even younger generations — because anyone with more than a few years’ experience online will be well aware of it.
Deepak Shetty@34–
Much as I lament RSS, it never served the function of a search engine. It was excellent for aggregating sources you already knew about. It was even good for finding new sources that filtered through from your existing sources. It was not good at answering specific queries.
“Saying there’s no important difference between computers, OSs or apps is taking contrarianism to ridiculous extremes.”
I did not say that, did I?
“And insisting that we, the customers, should just accept and adapt to the immoral rent-seeking gougings of tech megaliths is even sillier.”
I did not insist on that, did I?
(I do wish people would respond to what I write, instead to whatever their cartoon version of me is supposedly saying)
—
Well, don’t use shitty platforms. Simple, really.
It’s not some sort of rule as to the usefulness of computers or of the internet over time.
Put it this way: how long has Wikipedia been around, and how enshittified is it?
John, you did say that @33.
And Wikipedia is a non-profit.
@Dunc @33
It never took off Sort of peaked during the RSS /ATOM conflict and then gradually more or less died- was how I remember it.Its probably still around because of wordpress.
@chrislawson @34
Im not saying search wouldnt exist – more that it became the dominant way and for awhile the only way and maybe it would have been less dominant ? Though once people realized other people were making money , it was inevitable (see old recipe sites v/s the current seo optimized sites )
John @33
Not really. An OS is what makes your computer go. Windows 11 bakes in a lot of intrusive stuff not required to make your computer go, but to push products at you. It takes up extra memory and compute resources, requiring you to have a bigger, better PC to do what you already do with less.
I have W10 and the OS is getting very belligerent about the need for me to upgrade. There is no option to make it shut up.
“A computer is a computer, an operating system is an operating system, applications are applications.”
is not
“there’s no important difference between computers, OSs or apps is taking contrarianism to ridiculous extremes.”
nor is it
“insisting that we, the customers, should just accept and adapt to the immoral rent-seeking gougings of tech megaliths”.
“The word “enshittification” to describe the decay of online platforms for profit-seeking” is what you wrote, and it you seriously don’t consider Wikipedia to be an online platform, your ontology is weak.
(It only happens to for-profit online platforms, eh?)
DanDare:
“Windows 11 bakes in a lot of intrusive stuff not required to make your computer go, but to push products at you.”
So don’t run W11.
Bah. Different people have different experiences.
I myself am <checks> running W10 22H2 19045.5247.
No probs whatsoever, 12 days+ uptime so far.
Um, these are the days of terabyte drives and SSDs.
And fast CPUs.
Shit, I’m running an old box and it has <checks> a Core i5 10600KF (Comet Lake) currently running at 4688.53MHz.
Nothing is slow, I have shitloads of storage, and never any hassles.
I mean, if I use 22% instead of 16% of my resources and notice no probs at all, what is the prob?
Oh, and 12+ days of uptime so far. I only reboot (which means ‘restart’, since ‘shutdown’ just stores a state) when I need to update something.
(I seriously can’t remember when I last got a BSOD)
@SC (Salty Current) #16
Be careful with this. It’s not unknown for companies to make the cancellation process a bit slow specifically to trick people into paying for an (extra) subscription period. (Note that I am not accusing any particular companies of currently engaging in this, just that you should keep your eyes open for it.)
One extreme case I came across was a gym that offered a 30-day free trial. However, they did annual billing and cancellation required four weeks notice. So, unless you decided to cancel within 48 hours that ‘free trial’ would become a one year membership.
@F.O.:
Do you, or does anyone here, know of any free blogging host, other than Blogger, that offers decent storage and LaTeX support without moving to a pay tier?
Ditto a better search. The closest I know of is DDG, which can be better for text results but has no image search. All of the image searches seem to be particularly trending toward enshittification lately — now even TinEye keeps pushing sponsored Shutterstock etc. stuff at you, prioritizing results that might lead to a sale somewhere over results than might, you know, answer your question. Not that TinEye was ever the best — sometimes it finds stuff Google misses, especially older or more obscure stuff, but it also is like 80% dead links, so if the information you needed wasn’t in the filename, headline, or the result of clicking “compare”, it was time to scroll on down or go to Google.
@Raging Bee:
That’s not “enlightened”, that’s “lit up”. But I can see how they got confused. :)
@stuffin:
My solution to that is exceedingly simple: Do not ever pay for anything over the internet. In fact do not even have a credit card, or at least certainly never let any machine more sophisticated than a PIN pad terminal at a store have its number.
One can avoid both the illegal (phishing, etc.) scams and the legal (Amazon Prime, etc.) scams that way. On the other hand one must get everything by physically going to a store that way … where you can be sure the price tag you’re seeing is the same as the price tag the guy next to you is seeing, and you can heft the box to make sure it isn’t empty before you fork over the cash. :)
I’m also not much of a materialist, for a materialist. I don’t tend toward wanting lots of stuff, as opposed to knowledge and information and things like that. The only thing I really ever amassed a lot of was books.
But seriously, if you avoid doing any kind of banking or buying over the internet, then you can be sure any email you get like the one you described is bogus — either an outright scam or else missent due to a typo or something — and can safely be ignored.
And on the root topic: I have definitely noticed an accelerating trend to enshittification with Windoze. The amount of reconfiguring needed to make the OS hospitable has crept up with each major version increase through 7. Then it started galloping. 8 and especially 10 are increasingly difficult to tame, and AFAICT 10 cannot quite be fully tamed. This started with XP’s “activation”, but at least for most users in practice that got out of the way and could be ignored forever once you had it up and running.
The sins of W10 are innumerable and started before it was even available, with a bogus “security” update for W7 and W8 that didn’t actually patch any security hole (but was lumped with the security updates rather than the non-security updates, deceptively) but instead installed an app to nag you and nag you and nag you, and which some people reported actually involuntarily downloaded and installed W10 on them when it did become available, without consent. Of course every tech-savvy site soon had info on how to yank that thing’s plug.
W10, which I was forced to eventually by hardware failure and 7 no longer being available preinstalled on new machines, has been a nightmare. Of course I disabled the surveillance and advertising crap right away, and deactivated OneDrive (which otherwise will try to sync the files you put in Documents — potentially leaking sensitive private stuff to M$, the NSA, and whomever else has access to M$ cloud facilities — as well as upsell you to a paid tier of OneDrive of course; OneDrive also increases the attack surface of Explorer, both vs. bugs and vs. hypothetical attackers — more that I don’t need that something might go wrong with and domino into affecting the stuff I do use).
That was the obvious stuff, and even that I haven’t quite fully tamed — for some reason I regularly catch one OneDrive component, FileCoAuth, running in my task manager despite having no OneDrive account, despite OneDrive being turned off in the settings, despite everything. I’ve no idea where it’s being launched from or why, though presumably without OneDrive being active the most it can do is a) waste memory and CPU and b) possibly disrupt the functioning of other apps (Explorer?) in the event that it crashes.
This brings me to one of my biggest complaints with W10, after you’ve defanged everything that’s shitty on purpose to try to sell you things or harvest saleable data about you. It is constantly bubbling with background task activity, at a way higher rate than W7 and earlier ever did. There’s a never-ending parade of BackgroundTaskHost, RuntimeBroker, HxTsr, OfficeClickToRun, and miscellaneous other tasks spawning and dying in the background, some of which consume noticeable RAM and/or CPU and at least one (HxTsr) also causing noticeable UI stutters and pauses in responsiveness when it fires up. Accompanying this is a veritable explosion in the number of svchost.exe processes and other, less frequent, opaque critters like rundll32 and dllhost that at least are not actually wholly new. Inspection of executables revealed HxTsr to be an Outlook component — I never used it, never even configured it even if it might have been preinstalled, and use Thunderbird for email exclusively, yet there it is in my task manager wasting resources, as if someone in Redmond just blithely assumed that no one would ever pass over Microsoft’s most excellent mail client (so excellent it earned the nickname “Outhouse Distress” when it was first introduced, back in the XP days, so you know it must be good!), so no one would ever have HxTsr just spinning its wheels wasting their resources instead of actually doing … something useful, I assume. Checking for new mail I suppose. That’s the only thing a mail client should be doing unattended as a periodic background activity, right?
In any event, of course I went into services.msc and turned off stuff I saw that was obviously of no use to me (notably, MS Office related stuff), and into task scheduler to do likewise, plus pruning the good old-fashioned startup folder and its younger siblings, the half dozen or so Run/RunOnce registry keys (why not just one of each, Redmond? <sigh>), of cruft.
That brought the level of background activity down to a dull roar; on W7 and earlier it brought it to zero, or very near to it, leaving only genuinely useful stuff (e.g. Windoze Update and the antivirus). Turns out that W10 added a whole separate system of scheduled tasks that operates independently of the preexisting task scheduler and services components! There’s an obscure toggle buried deep in settings to turn off “background apps”. You have to go into the settings for the “Microsoft Store” to do this — you know, the part of the system settings that you’d expect you could ignore if you were on a PC and had no intention of for some reason downloading and installing smartphone apps onto it that would be inferior to native PC apps and would be constantly trying to monetize you. But apparently the setting to make HxTsr, OfficeHub, and a number of other noisy, resource-gobbling, UI-stutter-inducing, unnecessary-if-you-don’t-use-Office-and-Outlook background tasks is hidden there instead of somewhere obvious (like task scheduler) or even more obvious (like task manager’s list of startup items and services).
Does the badness with W10 end there? Oh no, of course it doesn’t. They’ve also replaced about half the stock Windoze utilities (calculator, notepad, and their ilk) with much more bloated “up”grades. The replacement photo viewer at least animates animated gifs and supports webp, which W7’s did not. While also taking a whole order of magnitude more RAM, to view a photo of the same dimensions and file size, as well as a correspondingly slower startup and a tendency to linger after you’ve “closed” it and leak memory. Notepad is unscathed but calc.exe was replaced with another of these bloated monstrosities that looks like a bigger, more touch-screen friendly version of the familiar old calc.exe, starts up noticeably slower (though not nearly as badly as the photo viewer), and has a splash screen. The control panel also has a splash screen. Both just show the icon of the application on a blue field for a few seconds, with no progress meter or anything, on apps that (still) start up fast enough that splash screens are not necessary. More unneeded bloat, in other words.
Oh, and the new calc.exe can shit the bed and become permanently unusable, at least up to needing to be uninstalled and reinstalled. That never happened with the old one, whose only persistent state was whether you’d last had it open in regular or scientific mode. The new one persists state somewhere that can get corrupted (maybe by happening to have an instance open when the power went out?) after which it will crash promptly on startup, forever. There’s no ini file in the Windows directory nor obvious associated registry key to try deleting. The only advice offered via google search is to reinstall either it or the entire fucking operating system.
What a piece of junk.
The same pattern extends elsewhere: not only bloat, but over-complication, to the point (in at least calculator and photo-viewer’s cases) of creating new failure modes to which their predecessors were immune. The more you overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain. The old photo viewer, when launched, resulted in precisely 1 new task in task manager: windows photos.exe. This was true from XP clear through W7, and maybe 8. The W10 photoviewer launches the following:
Photos.exe itself
RuntimeBroker.exe (with “Microsoft Photos” mentioned in a tooltip if hovered over in Process Explorer)
PhotosService.exe (anywhere between 1 and 4 instances; the others just one each)
svchost.exe (with “ClipSvc” on hover)
svchost.exe (with “CamSvc” on hover)
and the aforementioned FileCoAuth.exe (even with no OneDrive account setup done, OneDrive deactivated in the control panel, and in a folder that was never synced to OneDrive even just by being included in the default set of such folders, like Documents).
And the photo viewer will fail if any of these is killed, including FileCoAuth. It will also fail randomly from time to time, with either a scary “file system error” (sounds like the disk’s gone bad! Nope, it’s just the photo viewer being flaky, as chkdsk will happily waste several hours to confirm the first time this scares the crap out of you) or “The app failed to launch in the required time” (actually, it launched just fine, according to a) its window appearing promptly and b) task manager, but then it just sat on its hands for two or three whole minutes instead of loading the image file I’d double clicked, so it really should say “The app failed to actually get around to opening the document it was supposed to open in the required time” instead).
They clearly overthought the plumbing, and it leaks memory like a sieve as well as backing up all over my nice clean folder windows at least a few times a week and sometimes several times a day.
It is not even possible to explain this as simple bloat, incompetence, or feature creep, nor intentional but understandably-motivated user-hostile nonsense like ads (it has none) or DRM (it comes free with the OS, why would they bother?), or any of the “usual suspects” in bad software design. The photo viewer added exactly two new capabilities I’ve discerned, animating animated gifs and expanded file format support. Neither of these seems to require adding literally a half-dozen ancillary background helper processes and enough complicated IPC plumbing among these that it becomes so gol-darn fragile (let alone then making the error messages when that plumbing fails be actively misleading, but not in a way that would make M$ any extra money). Even simple incompetence wouldn’t result in this explosion of complexity. It’s more like they let a six-year-old who showed up for Bring Your Kids To Work Day design it who decided it would be fun to make it do its simple job by the most convoluted path possible, playing the programming version of “the floor is lava” just for the sake of amusement and going out of their way to Rube Goldberg it to the max, and then the “adults” in the room took the result, saw that it worked well enough to actually open 1 photo they double-clicked on, and said “It works! Cut, print it, that’s a wrap.”
Then there are two seemingly intentional and user hostile misfeatures to consider. The first is Windoze Update, which as of W10 was shifted to a “bondage and discipline” model, where the OS will update (and reboot!) itself on the schedule M$ deems expedient, not the machine’s owner. It takes third party tools to completely tame W10 Update. You can “pause updates” from the update control panel screen — but merely going to that screen can trigger it to start downloading and installing one or more pending updates, including sometimes supposedly “optional” or “preview” updates, without any evident means of canceling these. It has “Redmond knows best” user-hostile “features” like deliberate restrictions on the maximum pause period (35 days) and the “active hours” setting (at most 3/4 of the day, so no marking the whole day as “active hours” so it will politely wait until YOU give it permission before rebooting, indefinitely, like every other desktop/laptop OS in world history). Oh, and the pause updates setting seems to be treated as more of a guideline than a rule by the update components, which will sometimes sneakily download and install a patch even in the middle of the pause period.
You can disable the Windoze Update services in services.msc, but there are entries in task scheduler that will turn them back on again from time to time, and task scheduler won’t let you disable those EVEN IF YOU RUN IT AS ADMINISTRATOR. That last is super-galling. The admin, or root, account should grant you utter and total control over YOUR machine. Full stop. To have your own machine spit “access denied!” messages at you when you go to edit or delete or switch on or off some things even when logged in as root is … unbelievable. And a bridge too far for me. I will not be going to W11, not after this.
There are hoops you can jump through (requiring command line savvy, and especially the “takeown” command) to wrench control away from Redmond over these things and manually disable those scheduled tasks. Even then I would regularly catch DoSvc running, or another update component, without permission … somehow. As I noted above, M$ has hidden in W10 at least one, and probably many, additional sites where tasks may auto-launch from besides the traditional services, task scheduler, Run/RunOnce keys, and startup folder, and made these new ones significantly more opaque to even an administrator armed with some tech savvy. I still haven’t actually found it/them, though I found ways to toggle some of them on or off. I still don’t know, for example, where the scheduling of HxTsr activity was actually being controlled from, where (analogous to task scheduler) I could have found that specific single thing and turned it off, changed its schedule/triggers, or what-have-you. I found a master switch to turn it and a whole bunch of other stuff all at once, which is kind of like pulling the main breaker to turn off your stove because it keeps turning itself on at odd hours, running up your electric bill and unnecessarily risking a house fire if something goes wrong and you’re sleeping or away when it happens, and this even though all of the automatic timer knobs and widgets on the front panel are definitely set to “don’t turn on, other than manually”. The same applies to whatever was triggering delivery optimization and other update components even when update otherwise seemed to be sleeping. Eventually I — I, a person with a degree in CS and several times 10,000 hours of experience tinkering with computers — caved and got a third-party app, StopUpdates10, to give me simple push-button control of the goddamned thing. I haven’t seen a rogue DoSvc instance since, but the stupid app keeps trying to upsell me to a “premium” version of itself.
Every fucking thing is reaching a hand into your wallet these days. It’s just as Ed Zitron said. Being tech savvy lets you dodge the worst of it, but with M$ products that is getting harder and harder. It took me one hour to tame WXP. Less than a day to tame Vista and, later, 7. I still have not fully tamed W10. My calc.exe no longer works, there’s the one nag I can’t avoid (in StopUpdates10, the alternative to which is way worse), and the photo viewer is failure prone and leaks like a sieve, with the only alternatives available to me (the copy of the W7 one that ships with 10 but is no longer the default app for image filetypes, and Irfanview) don’t support webp files, which are increasingly difficult to avoid if you ever download images from the web.
And there’s one more thing. You know the familiar old dialog that would sometimes pop up and say “<Application> is not responding. If you wait, it may start responding again.” or words to that effect with options to “Close” and “Wait”? On W10, no matter what you choose it will act like you chose “Close”, and also do so if you simply wait without clicking either button after a short time. In the latter case the app can even have recovered and begun working again and the OS will crash it after a minute or so.
I can’t find anywhere to turn off this exceptionally hostile “feature”, which overtly disrespects the expressed (in case “Wait” was clicked) wishes of the user (even if logged in as root — again). I’ve tried deactivating several resource policy things in Group Policy, turning off Diagnostic Policy Service and System Maintenance in services.msc, and numerous other things, to no avail. Google turns up almost no discussion of this phenomenon, and no actually working fixes. What I do find is a suggestion to set several registry keys under HKLM/Users/Desktop or somewhere like that (tried that, didn’t work); a reddit thread that suggested the GP and services hacks (ditto); and one single post on an MS support forum that was closed with no resolution other than “get better apps and/or more powerful hardware” suggested, as if the fault did not lie with the operating system. The OP in that thread explicitly responded by asking for more control over this “feature” as they preferred to wait for their app to respond again than switch to a different app (complete with learning curve) or spend thousands of dollars on new hardware. The M$ person in the thread just gave them the brush-off instead of answering.
I will probably have to make the leap to Linux with the next machine I get, as this is just getting intolerable and there’s every reason to believe that W11 will be even worse and more locked down against even tech-savvy owners taking full control of their machines. There’s long been a pattern that the philosophy behind Apple machines was that Apple is in charge, that behind Android devices that the application vendor is the boss, and that behind PCs was that YOU made the decisions (even if some of them might wipe the drive or brick the hardware or cause a boot loop, etc., potentially leaving you up the creek without a rescue disk, if you hadn’t made one). M$ seems to have gotten envious of the control (and with it, extra monetization “opportunities”) that the mobile OS vendors enjoy, and when their own foray into the mobile OS space flopped predictably (hint: to break in as the third mover in a market your product has to be BETTER. For the USERS, not your advertising partners or subscription-revenue collections department) they started moving toward locking the (desktop!) Windoze OS down to make it more like iOS and/or Android. So now we have apps that hide their stored data and configuration from the sysadmin (like Android) and thus can’t easily be repaired when they shit the bed (like W10’s calc.exe) and are prone to leak memory; we have updates forced on the user and insulting “you can only defer for so many days” and similarly; and every avenue power users find to circumvent these power grabs seems to be narrowed and eventually choked off by “security” updates that are impossible to avoid without also avoiding the actual security updates.
I fear I’m soon going to have to learn a whole bunch of new stuff I’ve mostly avoided until now, mainly because of the extreme risks incurred in the event of getting those particular things wrong. Repartitioning hard drives, for example. And getting stuff to run under WINE. Things like that.
But once I’ve figured those things out, I’ll be able to tell M$ they can go straight to hell.
BB:
My wife uses an Asus W11 15″ laptop, no worries.
(And she’s pretty much illiterate, computer-wise)
—
Look: that you can’t use what ordinary people can use with ease is not a problem with the product.
“I fear I’m soon going to have to learn a whole bunch of new stuff I’ve mostly avoided until now […]”
Yeah. Such fear!
The above is, by the way, leaving aside numerous more minor degradations in quality since W7. For example:
W10’s alt-tab does not behave consistently. In W7 I could switch from app A to app B, and if I found B was being balky or slow one alt-tab would put me back on app A to work in that for a bit longer while waiting for B to page in (or whatever it needed to do). On W10, the alt-tab from app B will often switch to some third app instead of the immediately-precedingly-active one. Picking a window from far down the alt-tab list also does not always move it to the top row of said list. If I need it again a short time later it might still be way down on the list rather than on the top row.
When you clicked W7’s start button, the start menu opened. When you click W10’s, it takes a message and gets back to you. Eventually. Sometimes. And then it might come up as a blank charcoal-grey rectangle with no, y’know, menu items in it. Maybe some users don’t click the start button to actually start something but merely to cover 10% of what they were working on to play peek-a-boo with it? <smh>
(Actually, that last is clearly attributable to the excessive bloat and complexity. Seems they moved the start menu functionality out of explorer.exe into a separate StartMenuExperienceHost (how pretentious!) that needs to launch, allocate its own memory, and etc. etc. etc. before it can display a UI. I suppose W11 will add a fucking splash screen to that instead of making it as fast as W7’s was … Oh, and they also stopped up the drain again. In W7 if I somehow misplaced a start menu item I could restore it just by moving, or creating anew, a suitable shortcut into the start menu folder. On W10 user-made changes to that folder don’t seem to be picked up by the start menu, not even after restarting Explorer and/or StartMenuExperienceHost, or even after a full reboot. Apparently there’s some additional step now needed to “register” things before they show up thee, and of course there’s no user-visible mechanism for doing this. It’s possible to add items by other means, but with less control over where it ends up in the menu or in which subfolder.)
Lately I’ve been having problems with ejecting removable media, with everything from thumbdrives to spinning platter USB drives supposedly being “not removable”, eject either not showing up in the right click menu or doing nothing, and the menu on the USB icon in the systray no longer opening. The only workaround I’ve found short of a reboot involves the command line and diskpart, of all the godawful things (one wrong move with that and your system is a brick and you’re thinking with dread about each and every important thing you saved after your most recent backup). Fortunately with the platter drives configured for “quick removal” the latter can safely be unplugged without formally ejecting them — just so long as no app is still actively writing to it, of course. If it’s been idle so long it has spun down it is safe. I’m not so sure about the little thumbdrives. During a reboot they’re all safe to remove when the mobo manufacturer’s logo is still up and the OS isn’t booting yet, and usually the eject/safely remove stuff works immediately after a reboot anyway, even if not for a drive you plugged in after the last reboot. For some damn reason.
Then there’s all the leaks. Explorer does it. A new thingy calling itself “sihost.exe” does it. The antimalware does it (I’ve caught it gobbling up as much as three hundred megabytes while just sitting there idle).
Some apps start up ridiculously slow, and there seems to be a correlation with “is downloadable free third-party software and not Micro$oft or at least corporate”. They don’t even show up in task manager for a minute post-double-click, sometimes, and take forever to present a UI, during which time they show as idle: no change in RAM use, no CPU use, no GPU, no I/O. It looks suspiciously like if it’s not making a billionaire somewhere more money, and worse might be competing with a product that would, W10 intentionally pauses execution for a variable amount of time before reluctantly allowing it to proceed. Call me paranoid, but M$ has been adjudicated in various courts as having perpetrated very similar anticompetitive dirty tricks in the past. Like sabotaging early versions of Windoze itself to perform artificially poorly if launched atop DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS. Or undermining the performance of Firefox and other third-party browsers if you dared to change the default browser setting away from IE.
Speaking of which, as with “pause updates” and a number of other settings, W10 treats “default browser” more as a guideline than a rule. Sometimes I’ll catch it launching Edge instead of Firefox in response to some user action that renders HTML, particularly if that link is embedded in an M$ software component, such as if an M$ app uses HTML Help instead of the old .hlp file format or if it has actual web links in it (such as active weather tiles in the start menu and suchlike).
W7 was also the stablest Windoze. XP was … better than what came before it. Vista was a mess. Then 7 was almost completely crash-proof and rock stable against screwing up its own boot sequence, getting an update stuck in a limbo with no easy way to either abort or complete it, or any similar such “you’re prolly gonna have to reinstall” level bed-shitting. Well, as long as your hardware was good and you stayed away from the flakier third-party device drivers. Same with Explorer under 7: the only times it crashed on me were attributable to third party shell extensions, the disabling of which ended the crashes promptly. W10’s explorer crashes on the regular (for a while, doing a search, scrolling to the bottom of the results, and then scrolling any distance back up sufficed to set it off, until one update or another fixed it) and I’ve had more problems with updates than with every previous version combined (and the first I used was W3.1, back in 1993 or so). Even Vista. The frequency with which I need to restart either a) Explorer or b) the whole system reached its low water mark with W7 and climbed back up with W10, even with full control (finally!) over the timing of update-associated reboots.
Explorer also still lacks a manual way to exit/restart it while saving and restoring the session state (open folder windows, mainly), and when one gets the opportunity to do a graceful reboot (i.e., not due to a BSOD or power outage etc.) its restoration is far spottier than W7s. Instead of every single window being restored, if there’s more than a handful it’s very likely to fumble some of them, sometimes even a lot of them. It’s at a point where I keep a .bat file on my desktop that will automate reopening my most frequently needed ones (though they come up at random positions instead of where I had them last, dammit). Well, in truth, I wrote that during an interval when Hydro One was being very unreliable for some reason, with sub-minute outages weekly or more often as well as the occasional longer blackout. It’s been somewhat better behaved the last couple of years, and the sub-minute outages are all but gone in particular, but those have been the Years of Windoze 10, so I kept the batch file.
Is that all? No, not quite. W10 kept the W7 backup app, but added another, separate one of its own that seems to be designed only to back up to OneDrive rather than, say, an external drive you control that you can put in, say, a bank safe-deposit box or a fireproof safe or something to which you will have the only key, or which you can entrust to a friend or whomever. One more attempt to get your data and pick your pocket: force you to buy storage from them and not, say, Seagate or Western Digital at pennies-on-the-dollar per terabyte, and to give up your privacy to M$ (and anyone they partner with, including law enforcement — American women and trans people with personal medical files or period tracking apps, take note).
So I kept using the W7 backup tool, which of course was buried in an obscure submenu now to push people toward using the monetizable one instead. Unfortunately M$ wasn’t satisfied with that and evidently broke something, probably on purpose. It worked for a while, then started failing with an error supposedly relating to BitLocker permissions.
Except I don’t have BitLocker. The widget for turning it on is greyed out because I don’t even have the needed hardware support to switch on BitLocker. I cannot possibly have activated it, or encrypted any of the involved drives, even inadvertently and unknowingly, any more than I can have sleepwalked from here to Paris without a boat, even inadvertently and unknowingly. There’s no obvious fix — as with a number of other W10 annoyances and failure modes (with the notable exception of “how to stop auto update”) there is very little googlable information on this issue at all. The problem survived dis/reconnecting the external drive destination, survived a reboot, survived a systemwide purge of all volume shadow copies, the works. Just like calc.exe, it can apparently shit its bed and render itself permanently unusable, short of an OS reinstall. So I had to switch to a third-party tool for that as well, and to do a full, non-incremental backup ahead of schedule since the new tool has its own format for things. What a pain in the neck.
W10 gets a solid -2147483648/5 Would Not Recommend from me. Wait, what? Integer underflow? Well, shit.
“W10 gets a solid -2147483648/5 Would Not Recommend from me.”
↓
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_bad_workman_always_blames_his_tools
(Not like Apple is somehow less technocratic!)
The last Windows that I voluntarily used was 2000, the last Mac OS was 10.5. The only Intel CPU in my hardware zoo is an XScale 321 in an Iyonix. I can do everything I need to do on a bunch of PowerPC, ARM, and SPARC boxes. There are open source replacements for pretty much everything.