Find where the "lockdown" feature is on your device and enable that in any potentially sketchy situation.
My Pixel has a "lockdown" mode option on the same window as "shutdown" and "reboot", which can be accessed at any time by briefly holding the power button.
My dad worked at Novell, so we had the internet in our house well before most people had it. I remember my mom telling my dad "this internet thing is just a fad". We laugh about it now, but I was exposed to it very early on.
Ads and popups and shitware were absolutely present then, too. Maybe not as common as they got in the late 90s, but they were there.
The "L" is very subtle in most American accents and is typically pronounced using the back of the tongue, so it really does sound like "cock" if you're not paying attention to the conversation.
If you're in a construction crew and accentuate the "L" sound specifically to avoid the implication of penis, you can pretty much guarantee the rest of the crew will catch on immediately and flood the conversation with dick jokes just to troll you.
Small cars can do way more than people think. If you put the rear seats down to open the trunk area to the passenger compartment, you can fit a lot of 2X4s and other long items. Having a roof rack helps, too.
Even more so if the small car happens to be a wagon. Like a Kia Soul, Honda Fit, or Subaru Impreza. I had a Kia Soul years ago when I was slinging tires, I could load up a set of big 265s and a set of 215s, with room to spare.
Oh yes there was. Flashing banners "ONE MILLIONTH VISITOR!!!11!!1!!" that launched 1,000 popups simultaneously and installed malware if you even dared to hover your mouse over it.
I’d give anything for the internet to go back to how it was in the early/mid 90s.
No you won't. You wouldn't survive a day.
I grew up with that internet as well, and despite the corporatization, I vastly prefer the internet with the technological advancements made over the last 3 decades. Using an adblocker is trivial, even certain mobile browsers support uBlock Origin.
You probably don't remember, but the early internet was filled with shitware as well. Popups would fill your screen by themselves and eat up all your memory to the point of crashing the whole PC, malware hosted on any particular shady server would straight up install itself in the background without any user input needed, dialup was hot garbage and hogged the phone line (unless your family was rich and had a dedicated line, or even D$L), and GOD FORBID your parents were technologically inept and blamed you for their PC mishaps.
Fun fact: Sneakernet has far higher bandwidth than any physical network connection. Latency suffers horrendously, but it's not important in most cases involving such.
PS: Funny story last week I was at CERN at the CIXP, the CERN Internet Exchange Point, to upgrade a connection to 400Gb/s, and in the lobby of the building they hung up the cover pages of Tim Berners-Lee’s original Hypertext and HTTP papers. And further in the have his original NeXTStation displayed
Where did I say it was useless. You’re trying hard to be offended.
Well, your intentionally inflammatory comment certainly doesn't help your case:
You mean spam trap? Outside of 2FA or a few other small things, which even those are using it less. Who actively engages with it on a regular basis. I can DM friends and family easier, with less spam and restrictions on multiple other platforms. And those that do actively engage with it are often using HTML hypertext interfaces. (Proton Gmail etc) I didn’t mention Usenet either. Or ssh that I use daily.
Most people don’t have a pop or SMTP app installed anymore. Not outlook, not Thunderbird, etc etc etc. It’s easy to imagine a world without email. So many other apps and services easily slot in to replace it. And already have in many places. Now, try to imagine a world without HTML or HTTP servers. What would that even look like?
I use Thunderbird on my personal phone, and Outlook on my work phone (configured via MDM). The Gmail app that so many people use can also download emails.
Web portal, web portal, web portal, oh and web portal. Web portals are what people use.
That just sounds like "there's an app for that" with extra steps. Why use this when you can just get the app? Why use that when you can just get the app?
That's part of what put us into this "everything is tracking you" predicament today.
Apps, too. Email, you mean GMail and Outlook?
I use Thunderbird on my phone and Outlook on my work phone. Also, email accessed through a web portal vs locally doesn't mean anything when SMTP is used for both on the backend.
That said, I hate web portals for everything. Many are poorly optimized for mobile, I don't want to be stuck on desktop just to get a PDF of an invoice, and none of them actually notify me about anything. Email is already on my phone - it's one of the definitive features that created the "smart" phone segment in the first place.
Yes, it requires some proactive forethought.