When I took my first networking class a billion years ago (the 1990s) the kindly professor who had written most of the networking textbooks in use at the time started the first week off by teaching us how to use the ping command.

But first he warned us: make sure you always use the -c flag if you're pinging something on the internet. This is to specify the count of pings sent out. If you didn't it would ping forever and generate too much traffic, and this useless noise would make you a "bad netizen". He explained this and everything to us so kindly and with such sincerity it was like watching Fred Rodgers speak.

Now we have to randomly barf noise onto the network to maybe have a better chance at some privacy. And that's on top of the half dozen browser extensions and the vpn and whatever other tools you need to have a moderately good experience on the network.

How did we let the internet become this awful?