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The reality of modern tech
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this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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In what fucking universe is this even remotely true? I don't know about you guys, but around those places, in early 2000's, internet access was extremely fucking expensive, so most software was peer-to-peer shared, not even by torrent, but on CD's or floppys, or local neighborhood ad-hoc and internal ISP networks. And the way it got there was mostly from shady CD stores around the corner, where owners paid fortune to download shit and made it back selling it, or PC journals with CDs where they were just filled it up to a brim with whatever garbage they had to boost value.
And there was no access control whatsoever. A literal spyware with full access to your system, that only puts a purple fucking gorilla on your screen, that runs around and does absolutely fucking nothing? Sign me the fuck in. If your virus did something even something remotely useful, like show weather and currency rates, then you could rest assured that it would infect every single computer in the country.
If you were savvy, though, what you'd do is forever sacrifice 50% of your CPU and RAM to the anti-virus and pray to fucking gods you don't touch anything newer than the last version of it you have. Because anything uncaught can and will infect absolutely everything and anything the computer has access to. And your only option would be to just nuke the entire system with all of your data because because any backups you make would also get infected.
Even later, when broadband got cheap and widely available, the internet was for a long time a complete shit show. Remember Flash? Every single ad and every other site used Flash. That shit, along with java applets, was equivalent to automatically downloading and executing any app you see, before you actually even see it. It was also filled with shit like rapidshare and depositfiles, with questionable content and ads on ads over ads, as there was a financial incentive to spam that garbage everywhere and bury anything half-legit under it.
Kids these days really got it easy. See an app requesting something you don't think it needs? Just say no. Us, boomers, didn't have such a luxury. By the time you suspect anything shady going on, it was already too late. There is a downside, though, that manufacturers control what you can and cannot do. It took, like, almost a decade for trivial things like screen recording to even be possible on Android, and things like CheatEngine are straight up impossible. But hey, I'd say that's a reasonable price to pay for not being completely paranoid.
Uh no. I was there. In 1995 or 1996, I may have still used a shareware CD-ROM, or some less-legal compilation CD-ROM, but in the 2000s the most common way to install software by far was to download it over the internet.
I think the point of the post is that back then people were warned against installing bonzi buddy and such, and we were told to install software only from trustworthy sources. Spyware software rightfully flagged such software as malware too. Nowadays, there are appstores full of banal apps which harvest much more personal information about you than bonzi buddy ever did and we're not batting an eye about it, and even though we have "Access control" we just happily click accept when our calculator wants to read our emails, and we've accepted it as a normal way of doing things.
I've pulled up some historic data and it looks you're right and I've underestimated how much "my place" lagged behind the world at a time. Of course, if you've had unlimited access in 1996 that makes sense. For me, I have an artifact from the past right in front of me - a router manufactured in 2008, still chugging along, which I've bought when the first truly unlimited plans hit the market, so it made sense to share a connection rather than having a separate account with ISP for every family member. It was only 64k, though, so not downloading a ~~car~~ movie or a game at those speeds. The gray networks persisted all the way into mid 2010s as far as I know.
Might be another cultural difference, but this is not at all the experience I've had. In fact, just the other day I myself had to spin up a VM to launch a some random-ass app from, of all things, a CD that was handed to me, though this is quite a bit out of the ordinary. But I'd say the attitude didn't change, people are still just as likely and to launch random shit from a USB drive as they were to insert random CD's. And while AV software has improved, people are now less likely to use it. Defaulting to windows defender, which, in personal experience, is only good at catching pirated copies of microsoft software and nothing more. Or relying on google/apple, which is also problematic.
Just out of curiosity, by the way, how many people from your circle do you think have the "Allow app installs from Unknown Sources" checked? For me, that'd be at least a third of them.
To me it sounded like the initial post was glorifying how good it was then versus how bad it is now, while missing on all of the technical progress that happened. Sure, apps collect much more data than they ever did. But on the other hand, bonzi buddy was more than capable of stealing all of your money and nuking your device. In my eyes, it is more important than people giving away their personal info by being careless.
As for the carelessness, though, I don't think that's a tech nor a new problem. People just never ask "why?" and "what for?" nearly as often as they should. Even if sometimes this is literally a question of life and death, most people don't even care to ask...