A while ago I was like, 'What's Windows?' but there's nothing but bad news in developments on the internet, which in quality also is just declining for reasons that people are limited by privacy and other violations from putting anything good up, while being only allowed to put up garbage. Hacks are in the news every week, and the biggest tech companies can't prevent them. Governments continue to put personal data on their systems, like health systems, which get hacked, and financial info sites like Equifax get hacked. Google has widespread service outages today, affecting gmail, Drive, etc. The US Treasury and another department was hacked today (official news party line is pointing at Russia). A couple days later the US Treasury named for the first time Vietnam (5% of their GDP) and Switzerland (14% of their GDP) as currency manipulators in the Treasury's new foreign exchange report, but not China, which news sites saw as a notable exclusion. China completed it's quantum computer, billions of times faster than the second-faster computer, reportedly, this week.

I'm not sure why governments and organizations that have private or sensitive information don't just build a second set of pipes and a closed internet, or move back to paper, or at least machines that don't have USB or other pluggable drives and no internet connection. Besides actually protecting information of US and other people who use these companies and services, it would also make technicians and workers more accountable, because whereas now you can't really track a data leak or hack, with paper it's sort of a different story. Most ridiculous in this is that the US and those big companies violate human and citizen rights as their basic process, which they ask to be allowed to do because they're protecting these people on a higher level. Although no one really believes this except the most gullible, this argument can't even be made when the organizations are so careless and weak they're responsible for creating huge risks to Americans and others.

We might just come to the conclusion the internet is not a place for anything private, and shut our lives off from it, except our public profiles, companies, etc. Additionally, we might adopt Europe-style right-to-be-removed procedure to keep ourselves off a pernicious tool such as the internet has become.

I remember a home PC before internet. We used it for composing pictures in Paint, writing letters to print and send, doing accounting on a spreadsheet program, and playing games, some on disks and other simple ones on early Windows. We just enjoyed it and never thought about negative things with it, except the difficulty of installing or running things because there was no computer scientist in the family.

Today I tried to go back on the internet, to revisit some of the projects I used to work on, and look at making some new ones. Everything was impossible. Godaddy is the worst company on the internet, incredibly stupid, keeps updating their website and it seems they're using $2 an hour Indian coders who every site edit make it worse. Nothing works. It doesn't even work with most browsers anymore. It doesn't load from some countries. I couldn't make payments. They also run a scam where if you search the domain you want and then don't buy it, they'll take it off the market and if you search a few days later you get 'it's not available but maybe we can still get it for you for $200.' They've been doing it for years and years, and I and associates have lost a lot of domains that were perfect for our project this way. Search an incredibly esoteric combination of words, find the .com is obviously available, go back 2 days later and find it taken. I try to remember to search a fake domain like godaddysucks to test their often-nonfunctioning website first, but forgot this time, so I've lost the domain that matches the rare name company I was going to develop a website for. Similar things at every step. Nothing works on the internet anymore. The only thing that works well is the 5 or 10 tech giant apps that track and monitor you.

Hardware is also made like garbage now. The new Lenovo Thinkpad L380 I got a few months ago already is showing it's low quality as the cord can't connect, something I suspected on day one because of the weird, weak power connector socket, and it flickers like a 90's modem, unable to really charge. I continue to buy 10 year old machines because the quality was better.