Blocked by Sophos (at work) because “ParkedDomain”. I fucking love this timeline.
It also reaches out to two tracking sites, including a server in China, because of course it does.
Half the time I see something advertised here (or anywhere else for that matter) the code is more tracking than content by weight, nothing works, and the whole thing is shockingly slow.
How did we get to "this timeline" that not only is this normal, but it's starting to feel weird even commenting about it?
Should I just give up and accept loading spinners on static content?
My recent grumpy old man moment is asynchronous loading of menu items one-at-a-time, something my PC from 1994 could do instantaneously. I've seen desktop applications show me fragments of a UI, slowly expanding with more and more items in random order as the fans of my 5 GHz CPU spin up to handle the enormous load of... a few hundred characters of text per second. The same speed as my first 300 baud modem, something so old and slow that I threw it the trash in 1989.
There's a comment here[1] saying "nice interface". What's nice about it!? It's broken, slow, and tracks you!
This is where we are in 2024: Shipping broken stuff and getting patted on the back for getting an MVP out "fast"... while users wait.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180615000000*/ip.network
The domain had a former life (pre-2024) where it bounced to a domain broker sales page, which may well be the trigger.
Aside: I worked at Sophos from '98 to '06, some of the best & worst years of my life.