The web today, without an ad blocker, is just as land-mined as it’s always been. And getting your spam code installed is super easy, barely an inconvenience.
No dude. From this comment I would say that you're either too young to have living the toolbars that parents is mentioning, or too in your own bubble to know the kind of people who would fall for it.
I made a good chunk of money in my small town being the computer repair guy (well, kid).
Just you referring to that blight brought up memories of my entire digital youth. Having my parents shepherd my and my PC to friends so we could LAN, Hamachi (virtual LAN), Kazaa, Limewire / Frostwire, Azareus / uTorrent, uHARC compressed games, jailbreaking iPhones, writing my own hooks for d3dx9.dll for cheating on games.. good times.
Specifically with Azareus vs. uTorrent I remember being amazed how a program that was a few hundred kilobytes could principally do the same thing as one that was a few hundred megabytes big, and with 1/10th of the RAM consumption to boot. It’s given me a lifelong impression of Java being a sluggish crappy language, which isn’t factually correct.. but first impressions last.
Strangely enough I have a feeling we (‘90s kids) were the last generation where every kid had to learn at least some digital nimbleness. These days even the cracks and jailbreaks are one-click and work without a fault.
I'm going to guess you're in your early- to mid-30's.
true hardmode
I knew a guy that had a free trial of AOL for 5 plus years because he's call and threaten to cancel his service - which eventually turned into "listen, Ive been with you folks for 3 plus years now, and I'd really hate to cancel my service now but..."
Bam, another free 6 month window. I still find it hilarious.
Who else rocked qlink ? We're getting there now...
If I look at just the experience I've had these last 20 years I'd say nothing has changed overall.
Because my mom got her Samsung phone infected from official Google ads. And who do you report that to? They don't care. If she didn't have someone who could identify she had a malicious program and reset her phone she'd just live her life with constant ads popping up randomly.
Flashy != dangerous.
Heck today viruses don’t even limit themselves to restarting your computer, they encrypt your files and blackmail entire hospitals.
So yeah no, things did not get better at all.
Back in those days, nothing (except java) in the browser is sandboxed.
the other thing to note is just how spoiled we are with monitors these days. $400 for a giant fat pile of screen real estate, on something the thickness of a book (adjust the kind of book for the kind of monitor you have). Back in days of yore, monitors were CRTs. Deep and heavy, and with poor resolution. it's only recently we've been able to get exquisite 4k (or higher!) monitors, which meant that losing any screen real estate hurt plenty.
Wow wow wow wow wow wow. I see we have another Ryan George fan here.